Is this "an AI", or "a voice control system preloaded with a bunch of sentence command templates"?
I mean this as a neutral question, because it's cool either way, and does seem like a bizarre little hole in the current "voice control" ecosystem, but there's a difference in what I, at least as an HN reader, expect between the two things, and I wanted to give you that feedback.
We're very much an AI company, and that's the focus, but the product will roll out in stages. The foundation is built on a home-made NLP engine that's pretty flexible. That said, NNs are only used for speech recognition currently. With a relatively stable NLP engine we're focused now on device integration to control the majority of IoT products our customers might have. We're implementing some learning and pattern recognition models but it will take some time before those come close to resembling any true "intelligence".
Incidentally, I just complained in another post about the way that needing to "invoke" voice mode makes it much less fluent. You may at least want to pop that one on to the mental back burner to see if there's a solution you can think of for it. I don't know what, but something that makes the friction of invoking a voice app less would help a lot. (I assume this is where Amazon Echo idea comes from.)
1. A number of early customers we've spoken with don't like the idea of an always listening device. The perception is an invasion of privacy.
2. There's a fear that someone outside the home could simply yell a command like "unlock the doors" to gain access. There are a number of ways one could solve this, but it's a fear we've heard about.
So the extra friction of taking out your phone and pressing a button so far seems worth the added layer of privacy and security, but we're definitely thinking hard about this one.
Comments
Is this "an AI", or "a voice control system preloaded with a bunch of sentence command templates"?
I mean this as a neutral question, because it's cool either way, and does seem like a bizarre little hole in the current "voice control" ecosystem, but there's a difference in what I, at least as an HN reader, expect between the two things, and I wanted to give you that feedback.
We're very much an AI company, and that's the focus, but the product will roll out in stages. The foundation is built on a home-made NLP engine that's pretty flexible. That said, NNs are only used for speech recognition currently. With a relatively stable NLP engine we're focused now on device integration to control the majority of IoT products our customers might have. We're implementing some learning and pattern recognition models but it will take some time before those come close to resembling any true "intelligence".
Thank you for the detailed answer. Best of luck!
Incidentally, I just complained in another post about the way that needing to "invoke" voice mode makes it much less fluent. You may at least want to pop that one on to the mental back burner to see if there's a solution you can think of for it. I don't know what, but something that makes the friction of invoking a voice app less would help a lot. (I assume this is where Amazon Echo idea comes from.)
It's a double-edged sword for privacy reasons.
1. A number of early customers we've spoken with don't like the idea of an always listening device. The perception is an invasion of privacy.
2. There's a fear that someone outside the home could simply yell a command like "unlock the doors" to gain access. There are a number of ways one could solve this, but it's a fear we've heard about.
So the extra friction of taking out your phone and pressing a button so far seems worth the added layer of privacy and security, but we're definitely thinking hard about this one.