Talking to Google....

Now that we can conduct google searches by voice, it seems clear that we'll soon be able to access other google services by voice as well.

Need to update your calendar? Pick up your cell phone, access your google app or call an 800 number, and speak to add items to your google calander or have it read you your daily schedule.

Need to send that pdf report to your boss? Talk to gmail, have it grab the report from your google docs account, and then dictate a short message before having it send off the email.

Want to know what news is breaking in the technology sector? Talk to google reader and google news, and have them read you the day's headlines.

Want to see how your portfolio is doing, or see what NASDAQ is doing today? Talk to google finance. Want to find out where the nearest Sushi place is? Talk to google maps, and then have it guide you there.

None of these things on their own is truly earth shattering, indeed none of these things would be a huge leap beyond the existing voice search they've already implemented. But when you combine all these capabilities together an exciting picture begins to emerge. In essence, google will have become an extremely powerful software agent. A personal digital assistant that knows your schedule, knows your reading habits, knows your interests, etc. What was once a number of useful but distinct web based applications, will suddenly have become a free personal assistant residing in your cell phone.

And it doesn't stop there. We'll soon be talking to facebook and yahoo and amazon and others, and they'll all be talking to each other. Could this be what web 3.0 will look like?

And now, google does voice recognition...

You've probably heard by now that google is releasing a new version of their mobile search application that integrates voice recognition. Its all over the internet, but if anything I would say this development is being under-estimated by most. I mean, yes, it will be nice to be able to do voice searching on mobile apps where typing in keywords can be a pain. That is a cool new feature and brings forward mobile computing by leaps and bounds.

However, to me the really big deal here is that this represents a major step forward in the field of voice recognition, and ultimately the field of AI in general. We're now in the era of working, reliable, voice recognition systems that don't require any training. If google is releasing this, then its fair to assume that we'll soon be able to talk to amazon, yahoo, microsoft, and other major web players as well. And all of these competing voice recognition engines will improve over time as the vast data centers collect more and more voice data to improve their statistical models.

And so, very shortly, we'll be able to "speak" to any device with an internet connection or to any web service, and they will understand the words and their underlying meaning. We're right on the cusp of a major change in the way we interact with technology and the Internet.

Where smartphones are headed....(update)

And now, this project is demonstrating a working prototype of a very early augmented reality system, using the Google Android platform....



Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.

Where smartphones are headed....

For the near-term future, various sorts of display glasses will be how augmented reality and virtual reality are delivered, with smart phones as the computing platform. This is close, so close I can taste it. A pair of led/oled display glasses, that look close enough to regular sunglasses to avoid the nerd factor, are probably two years away from the mass market. That is when a lot of cool stuff will come to bear. Augmented reality, with different overlays available where different sorts of data are overlaid over your normal vision. Widgets and RSS feeds available any time, accessible via voice command or a flick of a finger on your phone's touch screen and visible as a translucent box in your vision. Reality tagging, life blogging, smart alerts, always-on GPS, real time instructional guides, tours, etc, its all coming and soon. In fact, the iphone and other advanced smart phones as they exist right now could deliver virtually all of this, its just waiting for the next firmware patch that will allow third party software development on the platform and for the eyeglass displays themselves to deliver all this via hud.
Smart phones are poised about where PC's were in 1980, right at the beginning of an explosive couple of decades of growth and innovation.

Sub-vocal communications, computer interaction...

In this video, a prototype voiceless communication system is demonstrated...




Even more exciting than the obvious uses for this technology in voiceless communication, is the implications the demonstrator mentions regarding how this could enhance augmented reality systems. You sub-vocalize a question or key word search phrase and get data back from the Internet. The power of this for enhancing intelligence is stunning.

Imagine this scenario. The year is 2018 and you are sitting in one of those mind- numbingly boring meetings. The data overlays in your eyeglass displays are showing reports and graphs prepared by the presenter as well as personal and business information about each of the attendees. Suddenly, an idea occurs to you. You spend a few seconds sub-vocalizing commands to your smart phone(5th gen iphone?, 3rd gen android platform?) to search for a series of documents and related blog postings, while also chatting voicelessly with colleagues in a different department to bounce your idea off them. By the time you open your mouth 30 seconds later to voice your brilliant idea you have done the background research and networking that might have taken 30 minutes(after the meeting) to do a decade earlier. This is just one small example of the type of Intelligence Enhancement we're talking about here.

Towards nanobots...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7288426.stm

This looks like the first big step towards moving from nanoparticles to true nanobots.

"A tiny chemical "brain" which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.

The molecular device - just two billionths of a metre across - was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously in a test."

"The machine is made from 17 molecules of the chemical duroquinone. Each one is known as a "logic device".

Mind Reading

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/06/medicalresearch

"The software matched their observed brain activity with the predicted activity from the decoder. When using a set of 120 images, the software got it right nine out of 10 times. With 1,000 images, the accuracy was eight out of 10. For 120 images, if the software were to simply make random predictions, its success rate would be just 0.8%.

The team estimate that if they used 1bn images (roughly the number on Google) it would have a success rate of 20%. With that many images, Gallant said, the software is close to doing true image reconstruction - working out what you are seeing from scratch. "There is no reason we shouldn't be able to solve this problem ... That's what we are working on now."

Gallant said it might be possible in future to apply the technology to visual memories or dreams"

These researchers are talking about a practical, realistic, path towards actual reading of minds via technology. In fact they have demonstrated an early version of that already. In another part of the article the scientists make an estimate of 30 to 50 years for how they expect it to take this technology to mature. Want to bet their estimate is too conservative? I'd guess the real time is half their estimate, if not less.

Towards practical augmented reality...

Hmm, lets take this technology...

Showcased at CeBIT, the Otello search engine simply uses images as input; in other words, handset owners just snap a picture of anything -- a landmark, DVD case, unidentified flying object, etc. -- and Otello then "returns information relevant to the picture to the mobile phone."

...and let it mature for another five years, now combine it with a similarly refined and expanded version of this sort of technology...

Apparently consisting of a "a single-chip computer and a couple of infrared sensors," the system, dubbed the Kome Kami Switch (or Temple Switch), lets you perform basic tasks like skipping tracks on an iPod with the blink of an eye, and is supposedly fine-tuned enough to be able to distinguish natural blinking from a deliberate wink

...mount both into a refined, and less dorky looking, set of video display glasses

...and you get the ability to look at an object, blink, and have data about it streaming into your display glasses. Combine this with some data overlaid from google maps, widgets, RSS feeds, access to the computing cloud and natural language search...and we've got true mobile computing, true augmented reality, true intelligence enhancement. Throw on a microphone and a video camera and this thing would be a lifelogging device and memory aid as well. I first imagined such a system about 8 years ago and it felt a long ways away back then. Now it feels like it is coming within the next 5 years, perhaps more like 2 or 3 years. I can't wait to get my hands on this when its commercially available.

edit : About an hour after this post I came across this article describing a prototype "smart goggles" system being demonstrated. Interesting times we're headed for.

Virtual Actors coming soon....

So, we're now to the point where a consumer-grade graphics card for under $500 can render a virtually photo-realistic moving 3d model of a human in realtime.




Can we be that far from virtual actors appearing in live action movies? You can start to imagine "live action" movies being made entirely on computer as this "virtual model" technology improves and is integrated with improving AI. The implications of this for gaming are obvious as well, which I posted about in my other blog.