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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: 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.