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Low tech sometimes succeeds where high tech fails – as one ingenious company is proving.
Chirp sends data over sound, a burst of audio that usually sounds like a bird's tweet. It doesn't transmit much data – 50 bytes – but it turns out you don't need much bandwidth to bridge the gaps between the real world and the digital world.
Chirp has already been put to use, and unusually for a small company, boasts hundreds of millions of users. Spun out of research at UCL, Chirp first stepped into the public eye four years ago with a consumer app. But it recently switched to a B2B model – licensing the technology for use in all kinds of cases via a software development kit.
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Sound has obvious disadvantages. One is that it needs to deal with noise interference, which is everywhere. And in the open, the range is short: 10 to 20 feet. But the big advantage is easy to miss: the audio bursts are a one-to-many, multidirectional transmission. So Chirps can be used as a signal – say a trigger, or a wake up call – for millions of digital devices at once. It can be played at a stadium, for example.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday November 11 2016, @05:44PM
Siri, Alexa and Cortana laugh at your idea that average people will actually have control over their microphones, or care that they are always being listened to.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday November 11 2016, @06:59PM
The disembodied voices may be laughing, but nobody is listening.
Almost nobody uses Siri [businessinsider.com] except for jokes. And even among those that do nobody uses it in public. [fortune.com]
And so many people rushed to shut off Cortana that Microsoft had to hide the ability [howtogeek.com] to do so in their Anniversary update.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 11 2016, @07:09PM
You don't have to use it for it to listen to you.
The always-on was oddly touted as a feature, because people are told they're too lazy to even push a button when they have a question for their toy.
The end goal is to know everything about you, 24/7. It doesn't matter whether you are requesting something in return, ignoring it or fighting it. Like a good Telescreen, it's always listening/watching/aware.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday November 12 2016, @03:09AM
always-on was oddly touted as a feature
Except that you have control over that. [google.com]
You won't mistake it being on or off, because the battery draw is way WAY higher when its on, especially when it is enabled for any screen, and it says the words "Say OK Google" right next to the mic symbol.
Same for "Hey Siri". [osxdaily.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday November 14 2016, @08:14PM
You're posting on SN. You're therefore probably not one of the vast majority who bitches about single-day battery life of modern phones, while leaving all the apps enabled and using defaults, not knowing what's actually running. The microphone listening in doesn't take much power in itself, and speech-processing DSPs are getting better every generation. Courtesy of QWERTY legacy, telling people to always enable voice rather than type on a a designed-for slow keyboard will get us to that happy dystopia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @01:24AM
I heard someone talking with Siri in a public library, once.