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One of the more impressive things about the Echo is its far-field mic. I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, but Echo blows everything el

One of the more impressive things about the Echo is its far-field mic. I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, but Echo blows everything else away in terms of being able to speak in a normal voice from the other side of the room and have it still understand you. The actual intelligence behind the service may be lacking (or at least behind some of the competition), but for a general-purpose home application, the mic (in my opinion) is a significant part of Echo's reliability and success.

jrkelly 11y ago
This is what is going to make Echo the next big computing platform. The voice recognition just works. It's like being on the Enterprise.
- bitJericho 11y ago
  That's how I felt when using Siri and Cortana the first time. "Wow! Voice recognition actually works now??"
  - balls187 11y ago
    If you haven't tried the latest rev of Echo software, it blows Siri out of the water. Very specifically, you can speak in a conversational tone with Echo, vs barking commands at Siri. I don't have experience with Cortana, but the Voice Recognition capabilities in the XboxOne is garbage.
    - bitJericho 11y ago
      I've used Siri on the iphone and Cortana on a Nokia Lumia 939 and they seem about equal. I'm sure the echo is better due to the superior mic.
frik 11y ago
> Normal voice from the other side of the room. High end smartphones have a similar high quality mic. It's no problem at all talking or using e.g. GoogleNow.
- Igglyboo 11y ago
  How often are you talking to your smartphone from the other side of the room? Usually it's a few inches from your face.
  - frik 11y ago
    In my kitchen and in my office, it lies on the table. It very practical to just speak, I can walk around and do other things at the same time.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Not to mention smartphones seem to be explicitly designed to not provide this use case. Where is my always listening Google Now? If I have to take my phone out of my pocket and unlock it, I may as well type the question myself.
    - frik 11y ago
      It's called loudspeaker or speakerphone mode. Of course it's not the default mode if you speak next to your ear.
    - polymathist 11y ago
      The Moto X and its successors have had this feature for a while. Your phone can be sitting on the other side of the room, completely off, and you can say a certain catch phrase to activate Google Now.
      - jim_h 11y ago
        I can usually activate Google Now from a few feet away on my Moto X (2013) but it can't understand what I'm asking after that. I have to get much closer for it to work.
Bjartr 11y ago
In my limited experience using Echo at my parents house over the holidays I was distinctly not impressed by the Echo's abilities to understand voice from across the room. We often had to repeat ourselves, only louder and slower to get the Echo to understand us. We do not have strong accents.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cs2818 11y ago
  Exact opposite for me, does a great job at recognizing speech but a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions.
  - freyr 11y ago
    > a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions. If you think of it as a device that performs specific actions (i.e., plays audio, gives a weather forecast, sets a timer, etc.) via an voice interface, rather than a general intelligence that can answer random questions, you're going to have a better time.
    - Daneel_ 11y ago
      THIS. It baffles me how people expect devices such as the Echo to understand every nuance of human language, then get annoyed when it can't answer your overly-complex or vague question. Voice interfaces for me are always reduced to clearly enunciated and simple commands such as "set timer 10 minutes" or "play album Anjunadeep 4". You'll have a much better time than saying "alexaplaymesomealbumsbyaboveandbyond"
      - lsaferite 11y ago
        Well, in fairness, Google does a much better job than Alexa at 'doing what I want'
  - balls187 11y ago
johnhattan 11y ago
Yeah, Echo is a good listener. In fact, when I ran the video on the OP's site and he said "Alexa, what time is it?" my Echo in the other room woke up and told me the time :)
- mintplant 11y ago
  That's actually one of my concerns about voice-driven interfaces, absent some sort of voice print authentication or tactile confirmation button. Imagine standing up in a crowded room and shouting "OK Google, delete everything!", or "OK Google, recite the first thouand digits of pi!"
  - petercooper 11y ago
    We used to do this at work. "Hey Siri! Call [person's partner]". Everyone turned their voice activated stuff off quite quickly after that.
  - detaro 11y ago
    There was a demo a while back where some researches created radio interference in headset cables to trigger Siri remotely. It would also be interesting if you could create sounds that sound like commands to the algorithms, but are not easily recognizable for the user.
    - ntumlin 11y ago
      Something similar to your idea was done for images recognized by neural nets and posted to HN recently. https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/why-do-neural-networks-think-a-panda-is-a-vulture https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/why-do-neural-netw...
  - Twirrim 11y ago
    That could be a fun programming exercise for one of these devices you can hook into Alexa, see if you can catch unauthorised voices quickly and effectively without badly impacting response times. e.g. you could do it by buffering the request, checking and submitting once you're confident about authenticity, but then you'd be delaying submission and response, depending on how much you'd need to buffer to gain sufficient confidence that the individual is authorised.
shas3 11y ago
> I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, You've probably not used the Kinect controller? It has a very sophisticated distant speech system.
- IshKebab 11y ago
  I believe the Kinect has a 4-element microphone array. Not quite as good as the Echo's 7-element array but it uses the same idea.
  - shas3 11y ago
    I don't know about the specifics of characterizing beam-pattern, etc. I am pretty sure, Kinect 1.0 can be more directional in spite of having fewer microphones because the microphones are cardioid, as opposed to the uni/omni-directional ones used in the Echo. Also, some parts of the design of the Kinect speech processing pipeline is public. You can read about in Ivan Tashev's (of MSR) book [1], IEEE Signal Processing Magazine article [2], and some presentation videos he has online [3]. Also, see his publication list, a lot of papers are relevant to the Kinect speech pipeline http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/ivantash/publications.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/ivantash/publicat... Also obligatory, why the downvotes? [1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=102203 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1022... [2] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=201229 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=2012... [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=tashev+video+lectures&oq=tashev+video+lectures&aqs=chrome..69i57.4252j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8#q=tashev+video+lectures&safe=off&tbm=vid https://www.google.com/search?q=tashev+video+lectures&oq=tas...
dharma1 11y ago
Agreed. It's an array with 7 MEMS mics, which allows the Echo to do beamforming so they can essentially focus on the speaker while rejecting most of the other sound. There have been advances in deep learning based speech recognition to reject noise - http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/ http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/ for instance, but clean audio source helps massively, especially if you are trying to talk from any distance instead of being right next to the mic. I haven't seen open source libraries for state of the art RNN/LSTM based speech recognition, anyone know if they exist? MEMS mics have been taking over electret mics recently, they are way smaller and have better SNR (at equivalent size). I'm building a 4 mic array at the moment, tetrahedral/ambisonics mic for VR use, the mics themselves are very cheap. Mouser and Digikey stock them - http://eu.mouser.com/Sensors/Audio-Sensors/MEMS-Microphones/_/N-98yda http://eu.mouser.com/Sensors/Audio-Sensors/MEMS-Microphones/... Haven't looked into the software/beamforming part yet - does anyone know if there are open source libraries for that? Some MEMS mics can also do ultrasound range, opening up pretty interesting possibilities for cheapo LIDAR type echolocation with a mic array - but that's for the next project :)
- jononor 11y ago
  One of the simplest beamforming algorithms are delay-and-sum. This explanation has example code in C: http://www.labbookpages.co.uk/audio/beamforming/delaySum.html http://www.labbookpages.co.uk/audio/beamforming/delaySum.htm... PS: interested in your project, anywhere I can follow it?

jrkelly 11y ago

This is what is going to make Echo the next big computing platform. The voice recognition just works. It's like being on the Enterprise.

bitJericho 11y ago
That's how I felt when using Siri and Cortana the first time. "Wow! Voice recognition actually works now??"
- balls187 11y ago
  If you haven't tried the latest rev of Echo software, it blows Siri out of the water. Very specifically, you can speak in a conversational tone with Echo, vs barking commands at Siri. I don't have experience with Cortana, but the Voice Recognition capabilities in the XboxOne is garbage.
  - bitJericho 11y ago
    I've used Siri on the iphone and Cortana on a Nokia Lumia 939 and they seem about equal. I'm sure the echo is better due to the superior mic.

frik 11y ago

> Normal voice from the other side of the room. High end smartphones have a similar high quality mic. It's no problem at all talking or using e.g. GoogleNow.

Igglyboo 11y ago
How often are you talking to your smartphone from the other side of the room? Usually it's a few inches from your face.
- frik 11y ago
  In my kitchen and in my office, it lies on the table. It very practical to just speak, I can walk around and do other things at the same time.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Not to mention smartphones seem to be explicitly designed to not provide this use case. Where is my always listening Google Now? If I have to take my phone out of my pocket and unlock it, I may as well type the question myself.
  - frik 11y ago
    It's called loudspeaker or speakerphone mode. Of course it's not the default mode if you speak next to your ear.
  - polymathist 11y ago
    The Moto X and its successors have had this feature for a while. Your phone can be sitting on the other side of the room, completely off, and you can say a certain catch phrase to activate Google Now.
    - jim_h 11y ago
      I can usually activate Google Now from a few feet away on my Moto X (2013) but it can't understand what I'm asking after that. I have to get much closer for it to work.

Bjartr 11y ago

In my limited experience using Echo at my parents house over the holidays I was distinctly not impressed by the Echo's abilities to understand voice from across the room. We often had to repeat ourselves, only louder and slower to get the Echo to understand us. We do not have strong accents.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cs2818 11y ago
Exact opposite for me, does a great job at recognizing speech but a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions.
- freyr 11y ago
  > a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions. If you think of it as a device that performs specific actions (i.e., plays audio, gives a weather forecast, sets a timer, etc.) via an voice interface, rather than a general intelligence that can answer random questions, you're going to have a better time.
  - Daneel_ 11y ago
    THIS. It baffles me how people expect devices such as the Echo to understand every nuance of human language, then get annoyed when it can't answer your overly-complex or vague question. Voice interfaces for me are always reduced to clearly enunciated and simple commands such as "set timer 10 minutes" or "play album Anjunadeep 4". You'll have a much better time than saying "alexaplaymesomealbumsbyaboveandbyond"
    - lsaferite 11y ago
      Well, in fairness, Google does a much better job than Alexa at 'doing what I want'
- balls187 11y ago

johnhattan 11y ago

Yeah, Echo is a good listener. In fact, when I ran the video on the OP's site and he said "Alexa, what time is it?" my Echo in the other room woke up and told me the time :)

mintplant 11y ago
That's actually one of my concerns about voice-driven interfaces, absent some sort of voice print authentication or tactile confirmation button. Imagine standing up in a crowded room and shouting "OK Google, delete everything!", or "OK Google, recite the first thouand digits of pi!"
- petercooper 11y ago
  We used to do this at work. "Hey Siri! Call [person's partner]". Everyone turned their voice activated stuff off quite quickly after that.
- detaro 11y ago
  There was a demo a while back where some researches created radio interference in headset cables to trigger Siri remotely. It would also be interesting if you could create sounds that sound like commands to the algorithms, but are not easily recognizable for the user.
  - ntumlin 11y ago
    Something similar to your idea was done for images recognized by neural nets and posted to HN recently. https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/why-do-neural-networks-think-a-panda-is-a-vulture https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/why-do-neural-netw...
- Twirrim 11y ago
  That could be a fun programming exercise for one of these devices you can hook into Alexa, see if you can catch unauthorised voices quickly and effectively without badly impacting response times. e.g. you could do it by buffering the request, checking and submitting once you're confident about authenticity, but then you'd be delaying submission and response, depending on how much you'd need to buffer to gain sufficient confidence that the individual is authorised.

shas3 11y ago

> I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, You've probably not used the Kinect controller? It has a very sophisticated distant speech system.

IshKebab 11y ago
I believe the Kinect has a 4-element microphone array. Not quite as good as the Echo's 7-element array but it uses the same idea.
- shas3 11y ago
  I don't know about the specifics of characterizing beam-pattern, etc. I am pretty sure, Kinect 1.0 can be more directional in spite of having fewer microphones because the microphones are cardioid, as opposed to the uni/omni-directional ones used in the Echo. Also, some parts of the design of the Kinect speech processing pipeline is public. You can read about in Ivan Tashev's (of MSR) book [1], IEEE Signal Processing Magazine article [2], and some presentation videos he has online [3]. Also, see his publication list, a lot of papers are relevant to the Kinect speech pipeline http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/ivantash/publications.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/ivantash/publicat... Also obligatory, why the downvotes? [1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=102203 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1022... [2] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=201229 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=2012... [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=tashev+video+lectures&oq=tashev+video+lectures&aqs=chrome..69i57.4252j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8#q=tashev+video+lectures&safe=off&tbm=vid https://www.google.com/search?q=tashev+video+lectures&oq=tas...

dharma1 11y ago

Agreed. It's an array with 7 MEMS mics, which allows the Echo to do beamforming so they can essentially focus on the speaker while rejecting most of the other sound. There have been advances in deep learning based speech recognition to reject noise - http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/ http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/ for instance, but clean audio source helps massively, especially if you are trying to talk from any distance instead of being right next to the mic. I haven't seen open source libraries for state of the art RNN/LSTM based speech recognition, anyone know if they exist? MEMS mics have been taking over electret mics recently, they are way smaller and have better SNR (at equivalent size). I'm building a 4 mic array at the moment, tetrahedral/ambisonics mic for VR use, the mics themselves are very cheap. Mouser and Digikey stock them - http://eu.mouser.com/Sensors/Audio-Sensors/MEMS-Microphones/_/N-98yda http://eu.mouser.com/Sensors/Audio-Sensors/MEMS-Microphones/... Haven't looked into the software/beamforming part yet - does anyone know if there are open source libraries for that? Some MEMS mics can also do ultrasound range, opening up pretty interesting possibilities for cheapo LIDAR type echolocation with a mic array - but that's for the next project :)

jononor 11y ago
One of the simplest beamforming algorithms are delay-and-sum. This explanation has example code in C: http://www.labbookpages.co.uk/audio/beamforming/delaySum.html http://www.labbookpages.co.uk/audio/beamforming/delaySum.htm... PS: interested in your project, anywhere I can follow it?