4 ms·

It's a cool idea, your phone listening to the world around it and reacting to it. Technology like this is probably inevitable. Someday people might even ask the

It's a cool idea, your phone listening to the world around it and reacting to it. Technology like this is probably inevitable. Someday people might even ask their phone to play back something from awhile ago, or to give them a transcript of a conversation.

josu 12y ago
Every phone call I place or receive on my phone gets recorded. It's been really useful quite a few times. I wouldn't mind having every single real world conversation recorded, as long as nobody steals them.
- return0 12y ago
  My calls too, even though i don't have an app for that
- ansimionescu 12y ago
  Yep, sounds like a safe bet. Random NSA employee reading this, please don't steal my shit. Thank you
andrewflnr 12y ago
That's great, as long as it doesn't get shipped off the device by default, and only to trustworthy places (so, not Facebook).
chroem 12y ago
>As production techniques for hard drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines improve, cost of access has dropped significantly, leading to increased use of these substances in children. Technological progress is inevitable, so we might as well embrace it and accept the fact that children will be using hard drugs from now on. Of course, that's an extreme example of the argument that has been used on HN a lot lately in favor of data collection, but it still gets the point across. Just because there's an industry push towards something doesn't mean that it's right.
- philtar 12y ago
  Yeah except one is supposed to make your life better and the other destroys your life. This is not an extreme example. This is (I hope, for your sake) a joke.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  What I said was that it's a useful application of technology. People will probably like it and it will gradually become a normal part of our society. That's the opposite of your example.
- antihero 12y ago
  Drugs are still pretty expensive though :(
- maaarghk 12y ago
  https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope
bhartzer 12y ago
Just make sure you turn your phone off when you get home from partying. It might make Facebook updates you don't want heard or seen.
larrybolt 12y ago
I've been looking into something similar a while back and here are my findings: Continuous speech recognition will have to improve, there are currently opensource solutions with the best being CMU Sphinx [1], it does however only listen to certain keywords thus isn't capable of understanding everything you say, and it needs training. There is a Google voice Recognition API, but that's not continuous so you'd still need to listen to certain keywords and then upload the bit to google and wait for result, which isn't perfect. Recently I've come across a few sites which seem to do just that using the google voice api [2,3], but likewise far from perfect. When it comes to responding to you there are quite some good opensource projects out there such as Flite [4], MaryTTS [5], Festival [6] and of course e-Speak [7]. They don't sound that natural, and if you're willing to pay you can get much more high quality options [8]. I know you could again use google's text2speech, but don't forget there is going to be a delay you can't get rid of. When it comes to the whole packet together I've seen Jasper, but he has his own problems, to give an example: " -> So Jasper, sup? -< “Today in news... blah blah” (meanwhile me) NO!! STOP! STAHP! " Google now seems to function pretty quickly and accurately on my Moto G, but once switching apps you get stuck. Alyt at indiegogo [10] tries to market itself as what I'd love to see... I'm sure there are more of these projects around, but I haven't seen one yet that is actually capable of learning new things on the fly or even having a little bit of personality (why personality? Because the best GTD-tool is still a whining person reminding you about it, not a monotone computer voice that you'll shut-off anyway). I can imagine though that's going to be tough to build; with a lot of machine learning, virtual neural networks, natural language engines, lisp-alike programming language and whatnot. When I find free time on my hands I'd love to mess around with all these components and try to come up with a solution of my own, or probably after a re-watch of the movie Her (2013) (which was very interesting just for the idea it proposed!). [1]: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ [2]: https://dictation.io/ https://dictation.io/ [3]: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html [4]: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/ http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/ [5]: http://mary.dfki.de/ http://mary.dfki.de/ [6]: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ [7]: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ [8]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4721878/1807383 http://stackoverflow.com/a/4721878/1807383 [9]: http://jasperproject.github.io http://jasperproject.github.io [10]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/alyt-it-s-like-siri-for-your-home-but-better https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/alyt-it-s-like-siri-for-y... Best opensource text2speech results I've had with this blog post so far: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=751169 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=751169 PS: My apologies for the very long, unstructured reply but it intrigued me and I hope someone will find this small writeup useful!

josu 12y ago

Every phone call I place or receive on my phone gets recorded. It's been really useful quite a few times. I wouldn't mind having every single real world conversation recorded, as long as nobody steals them.

return0 12y ago
My calls too, even though i don't have an app for that
ansimionescu 12y ago
Yep, sounds like a safe bet. Random NSA employee reading this, please don't steal my shit. Thank you

andrewflnr 12y ago

That's great, as long as it doesn't get shipped off the device by default, and only to trustworthy places (so, not Facebook).

chroem 12y ago

>As production techniques for hard drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines improve, cost of access has dropped significantly, leading to increased use of these substances in children. Technological progress is inevitable, so we might as well embrace it and accept the fact that children will be using hard drugs from now on. Of course, that's an extreme example of the argument that has been used on HN a lot lately in favor of data collection, but it still gets the point across. Just because there's an industry push towards something doesn't mean that it's right.

philtar 12y ago
Yeah except one is supposed to make your life better and the other destroys your life. This is not an extreme example. This is (I hope, for your sake) a joke.
Houshalter 12y ago
What I said was that it's a useful application of technology. People will probably like it and it will gradually become a normal part of our society. That's the opposite of your example.
antihero 12y ago
Drugs are still pretty expensive though :(
maaarghk 12y ago
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope

bhartzer 12y ago

Just make sure you turn your phone off when you get home from partying. It might make Facebook updates you don't want heard or seen.

larrybolt 12y ago

I've been looking into something similar a while back and here are my findings: Continuous speech recognition will have to improve, there are currently opensource solutions with the best being CMU Sphinx [1], it does however only listen to certain keywords thus isn't capable of understanding everything you say, and it needs training. There is a Google voice Recognition API, but that's not continuous so you'd still need to listen to certain keywords and then upload the bit to google and wait for result, which isn't perfect. Recently I've come across a few sites which seem to do just that using the google voice api [2,3], but likewise far from perfect. When it comes to responding to you there are quite some good opensource projects out there such as Flite [4], MaryTTS [5], Festival [6] and of course e-Speak [7]. They don't sound that natural, and if you're willing to pay you can get much more high quality options [8]. I know you could again use google's text2speech, but don't forget there is going to be a delay you can't get rid of. When it comes to the whole packet together I've seen Jasper, but he has his own problems, to give an example: " -> So Jasper, sup? -< “Today in news... blah blah” (meanwhile me) NO!! STOP! STAHP! " Google now seems to function pretty quickly and accurately on my Moto G, but once switching apps you get stuck. Alyt at indiegogo [10] tries to market itself as what I'd love to see... I'm sure there are more of these projects around, but I haven't seen one yet that is actually capable of learning new things on the fly or even having a little bit of personality (why personality? Because the best GTD-tool is still a whining person reminding you about it, not a monotone computer voice that you'll shut-off anyway). I can imagine though that's going to be tough to build; with a lot of machine learning, virtual neural networks, natural language engines, lisp-alike programming language and whatnot. When I find free time on my hands I'd love to mess around with all these components and try to come up with a solution of my own, or probably after a re-watch of the movie Her (2013) (which was very interesting just for the idea it proposed!). [1]: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ [2]: https://dictation.io/ https://dictation.io/ [3]: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html [4]: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/ http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/ [5]: http://mary.dfki.de/ http://mary.dfki.de/ [6]: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ [7]: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ [8]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4721878/1807383 http://stackoverflow.com/a/4721878/1807383 [9]: http://jasperproject.github.io http://jasperproject.github.io [10]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/alyt-it-s-like-siri-for-your-home-but-better https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/alyt-it-s-like-siri-for-y... Best opensource text2speech results I've had with this blog post so far: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=751169 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=751169 PS: My apologies for the very long, unstructured reply but it intrigued me and I hope someone will find this small writeup useful!