The “Hey Siri” feature allows users to invoke Siri hands-free. A very small speech recognizer runs all the time and listens for just those two words. When it detects “Hey Siri”, the rest of Siri parses the following speech as a command or query. The “Hey Siri” detector uses a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to convert the acoustic pattern of your voice at each instant into a probability distribution over speech sounds. It then uses a temporal integration process to compute a confidence score that the phrase you uttered was “Hey Siri”. If the score is high enough, Siri wakes up. This article takes a look at the underlying technology. It is aimed primarily at readers who know something of machine learning but less about speech recognition.
The technology industry is now a playground for giants. Where 10 or 20 years ago we looked to start-ups as a font of future wonders, today the energy and momentum have shifted almost completely to the big guys. In addition to the many platforms they own already, one or more of the Five are on their way to owning artificial intelligence, voice assistants, virtual and augmented reality, robotics, home automation, and every other cool and crazy thing that will rule tomorrow.
Start-ups are still getting funding and still making breakthroughs. But their victory has never been likely (fewer than 1 percent of start-ups end up as $1 billion companies), and recently their chances of breakout success — and especially of knocking the giants off their perches — have diminished considerably.
Apple's quest to make technology more personal involves using design to remove barriers preventing people from getting the most out of technology. Instead of positioning new products as replacements for older ones, Apple is focused on coming up with alternatives. One way to accomplish this goal is to take complicated tasks and break them down into more granular tasks, which can then be handled by smaller and simpler devices.
I rebooted into macOS Recovery, ran the command and rebooted again. After the restart, my Touch ID information had been wiped from the machine.
Whatever happened to quality family time at the dinner table?
Turns out McDonald’s has been thinking the same thing. The segment of the fast food chain located in Singapore has come up with a genius idea to keep families from being glued to their phones — a campaign called “Phone Off, Fun On”. The restaurant has installed clear lockers where diners can store their devices for the duration of their meal. Families are then free to focus on spending time together while they eat … instead of checking their text messages.
Whether or not people will actually use the lockers to keep their phones has been still up for debate. In an Instagram post, a user shared a photo of the nearly empty 100-locker station at the outlet in Singapore. “Will you ever see 1 phone in da box?” he wrote to caption the picture.
Another customer at the outlet posted a photo and said his family made a genuine attempt to lock their mobiles away in the lockers but "failed within five minutes."
Analysts believe that the government was concerned about the fact that it could not track who was using the new Apple Watch due to the use of an eSIM.
Lightroom is no more. Adobe today announced a new cloud-based Lightroom called Lightroom CC. The current desktop-based app you know as Lightroom is being rebranded as Lightroom Classic CC. Lightroom Classic will be desktop-oriented, while Lightroom CC will be cloud and mobile focused.
Interior decorating can be hard — especially if you've got a small apartment in New York City like me. However, you can make this process much easier with Amikasa, an augmented reality room designing app.
There are so many things in my life that, seems like, require a reboot or two occasionally so that they can work right.
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