Updates on voice analysis, etc.

"Stress detector can hear it in your voice"
Normally we have full control over our vocal muscles and change their position to create different intonations, says Yin. "But when stressed, we lose control of the position of the speech muscles," and our speech becomes more monotone, he says.

Yin tested his stress detector in a call centre to identify which interviewees were more relaxed during recruitment tests. The number of new staff that left after three months subsequently fell from 18 per cent to 12 per cent, he claims. The detector was shown at trade show CeBIT Australia in May.

"Innovation: Google may know your desires before you do"
In future, your Google account may be allowed, under some as-yet-unidentified privacy policy, to know a whole lot about your life and the lives of those close to you. It will know birthdays and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences, preferred hobbies and pastimes, even favourite foods. It will also know where you are, and be able to get in touch with your local stores via their websites.

Singhal says that could make life a lot easier. For instance, he imagines his wife's birthday is coming up. If he has signed up to the searching-without-searching algorithm (I'll call it "SWS" for now), it sees the event on the horizon and alerts him – as a calendar function can now. But the software then reads his wife's consumer preferences file and checks the real-time Twitter and Facebook feeds that Google now indexes for the latest buzz products that are likely to appeal to her.

"Roila: a spoken language for robots"
The Netherlands' Eindhoven University of Technology is developing ROILA, a spoken language designed to be easily understandable by robots.

The number of robots in our society is increasing rapidly. The number of service robots that interact with everyday people already outnumbers industrial robots. The easiest way to communicate with these service robots, such as Roomba or Nao, would be natural speech. But current speech recognition technology has not reached a level yet at which it would be easy to use. Often robots misunderstand words or are not able to make sense of them. Some researchers argue that speech recognition will never reach the level of humans.

I talked about this earlier in the post about machine translation: the reason it sucks is because people never speak clearly and use slang, etc. but if it becomes common place, as it learns to understand slang, we'll also understand how to speak in a way that's easy for the machine to understand and/or translate.

"Speech-to-Speech Android App"

"See what Google knows about your social circle"
Google started including "your social circle" in its search results earlier this year. Ever wonder how Google knows who you know? Wonder no more, as the Mountain View firm offers a page explaining exactly how inter-connected your online life really is.

The link below leads you to a page where Google explains the three levels of contact it can trace between you and other people, with the depth depending on whether you've filled out a Google Profile and how busy you are on Google services like Chat and Reader. You'll see your "direct connections" through Chat and other contact-creating apps, direct connections from sites you've linked to in your profile (including those you follow on services like Twitter), and those friends-of-a-friend through your direct connections.

"Google working on voice recognition for all browsers"
In some ways it seemed inevitable, but in other ways, it's still an awesome idea. InfoWorld reports that Google is building speech recognition technologies for browsers, and not just their own Chrome—all browsers, as an "industry standard." Beyond making certain searches easy to fire off with a spoken phrase, voice recognition might also give the web a whole new class of webapps that listen for audio cues. Do you want your browser to understand what you're telling it? Or is the keyboard still your preferred lingua franca for non-mobile browsing? [InfoWorld]

Emotion Detection Through Voice Making Progress

Computer Software Decodes Emotions Over the Phone

from Discovery News by Eric Bland
"THE GIST

• A company called eXaudios has developed software that detects emotions during a phone call.
• The program is currently used by companies to assist customer service agents.
• The versatile software could even soon diagnose Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and even cancer."

As the computer becomes better at recognizing our moods, it becomes better at positively or negatively changing them. From my post about the digital secretary which I think really benefits from being placed in the context of this software:

"But let's go further and a little bit darker. If we improve CGI and voice simulation, there will be no reason not to have this secretary actually appear as a simulated friend- one who knows what will make you happy depending on your mood, one who won't mind giving you perpetually undivided attention. If it's linked to your cellphone, this friend could also fill you in on things and give you advice:

"you know you seem a little down today- why not try calling Robert or Jessica- you haven't seen them in a while, and last time you hung out you all had a great time." (it was listening to the quality of your voices and watching everyone's facial expressions)

you: "I dunno, what about Eryka, she seems pretty cool... what are the chances that she's into me?"

computer: "approximately 3,720 to 1"

you: "damn"

Even further and much darker, what if we allowed our secretaries to communicate with one another, say even temporarily like at a party. They would watch everyone's interactions, occasionally chiming in to suggest mingling (think a futuristic version of facebook suggesting that we help people become more social). Toward the end of the night we could begin some sort of Game Theory algorithm where each of the secretary agents would trade data until coming up with a "greatest possible universal happiness" formula which would pair those of us wanting to go home or to the next party with someone with each other in the most efficient way. And even if we don't agree to trade data, people will each use their own gathered information to see who they might have a shot with as things are winding down. Of course young people will also learn how to fool the system (like learning to pass a lie detector test) which would have certain advantages. As computer-aided social interaction becomes the norm, how will everything change?"