Potential Squeezebox Killer?

[cvj]

Interesting potential competitor to Squeezebox emerging:

http://www.navvo.com/default.aspx

Of course, at this point there is no way of telling whether it will work as advertised or what type of codecs it can decode... time will tell..

cvj

[Pale Blue Ego]

Voice control is going to be a Killer App someday. Imagine if you could just tell your computer what you wanted to do, see, or find and it took care of it for you.

So far most commercial implementations of voice command have been pretty clunky. Some recent Honda cars have a pretty nice voice system that recognizes more than 500 commands and works pretty well.

Voice command for a large media collection would be great, frankly. It would let a lot more non-techies into the party.

[stinkingpig]

On 7/15/06, Pale Blue Ego <
Pale.Blue.Ego.2b01rz1152988201 (AT) ...limdevices.com> wrote:
>
>
> Voice control is going to be a Killer App someday. Imagine if you could
> just tell your computer what you wanted to do, see, or find and it took
> care of it for you.
>
> So far most commercial implementations of voice command have been
> pretty clunky. Some recent Honda cars have a pretty nice voice system
> that recognizes more than 500 commands and works pretty well.
>
> Voice command for a large media collection would be great, frankly. It
> would let a lot more non-techies into the party.
>
>
>
Looks to me like someone intends to marry Dragon and Slimserver, but they
still haven't even decided which platforms to support. They know it's going
to need a computer and a wireless network though, which means that they'll
be open to all the same customer support issues that SDI has to handle
(firewalls, wireless interference, permissions, performance, &c).
http://www.navvo.com/how_it_works/default.htm

It also looks to me like they're still seeking investors and have no actual
products. It's a long way from a photoshopped website and an idea to
shipping product and a support organization. Wake me when someone's bought
and tested this "Squeezebox killer".

--
"I spent all me tin with the ladies drinking gin,
So across the Western ocean I must wander" -- traditional

[Paul_B]

Hmm the thing about a Squeezebox is it is virtually audiophile quality if you are using a lossless format. In addition it is not power hungry. This is a major differentiator in the market of low cost multi-room audio

[Michaelwagner]

VOCO will be available for the 2006 holiday season.
Sign up now and we’ll notify you by email as soon as VOCO is available in stores.

I think Stinkingpig is right. Vapourware at this point.

Interesting backers though. Polaroid is one.

http://www.navvo.com/company/partners.htm

[fathom39]

Why would voice be the killer app for accessing any kind of extensive library? The picture on the website shows a yuppie doofus sitting in a La-Z-Boy playing with with some sort of walkie-talkie device. I suppose that he either doesn't have a large collection of songs or he knows exactly the song he wants and doesn't need to search around. To quote from the website: "Now, instead of scrolling and clicking, you can simply say the music you want to hear." BOGUS! How many of you out there prefer a telephone IVR interface to a web-based interface? The eye and the hand will always be faster than the ear and the mouth! Imagine the disaster if we had to drive vehicles / fly airplanes / fire weapons in battle / etc. without using our hands. But then again, last Sunday I learned how fighting is done on the soccer field without hands!

[autopilot]

I really hate voice command stuff. I just feel like a complete idiot and nerd using it. I really dont want to talk to electronic stuff, why are some people to obsessed with it? I guess because it's all futuristic like star trek. No, not for me.

Also, i would like to know how well it would work in a room full of loud music

[Michaelwagner]

last Sunday I learned how fighting is done on the soccer field without hands!

Someone on local radio called it the head-butt seen around the world. :-)

[Michaelwagner]

I really hate voice command stuff. I just feel like a complete idiot and nerd using it. I really dont want to talk to electronic stuff, why are some people to obsessed with it? I guess because it's all futuristic like star trek. No, not for me.

I have a friend who is a musician with severe repetitive stress injuries from playing violin and piano. She was working on her master's degree when her hands kinda gave out. I offered to help her by typing some of her thesis (it was mixed English/German and not so easy to just hand to a secretary) but she opted instead to get a grant and get a computer with voice response. OK, this was probably 8 years ago, but it sucked the big one. Every time she said something slightly wrong, it would type it wrong. Then she's say "oh, shit" so then it would type that. You get the point.

There's no good syntactic way to give out of band or meta information. We as good listeners running a syntactic and semantic engine in parallel understand when someone goes back and corrects something, but computers don't have nearly the horsepower we have and software isn't there yet anyways. Not by a long shot.

When I was in undergraduate school lo those 30 mumble years ago we were told voice recognition was around the corner, 10 or 15 years or so. I stayed in the sidelines of academia for another 15 years and each year got the CSC reading lists and bought all the books. Every few years they'd push that estimate out. If anything, all that's happened in the mean time is we have realized what a large goal that really was and gained new respect for how amazing the human brain is.

Now, I'm far even from the outskirts of academia these days, but I do subscribe to a kind of clipping service for SciAm. If there had been a breakthrough in voice recognition in the last few years, I think it would have knocked on my mailbox, either through the SciAm feed or some other way. Nobody's come knocking, so I doubt there's any breakthrough.

Without a breakthrough, it's like Dangerous Dom says. Won't work in a room where the music is already playing. Won't work for different people without retraining. Won't work if you have a cold. etc.

Someone did a nice job with photoshop, and someone's looking for investors (I think that's the main thing). I think it probably works marginally enough to be a gadget. They have 3 voice recognition products. Polaroid is one of the backers. I'm sure it's not a total crock. It's just that the distance between "kinda works" and "works well enough that it's like talking to my friend" is so vast, most of the public won't realize it either until they've bought into it.

To give you an idea, my lawyer's answering system asks you to speak the name of the person you want to speak to. I say his name, it connects me to him.

My cell phone can dial for me if I say the name of the person I want to speak to.

Each of these examples works with a vocabulary of a few dozen words. How many of you have a few dozen songs in your library?

Think about saying "I want to listen to a version of All along the Watchtower, not the hendrix version but the original dylan version, but not from a live concert".

It's a long way from saying "Call Home" to your cell phone.

[CardinalFang]

Also, i would like to know how well it would work in a room full of loud music

That is such an obvious point - probably why I hadn't thought of it!

Can you imagine shouting "turn the $%&*!! volume down!!!"

It's the wrong solution to the problem. Selecting music is often based on looking through your records until you see something and you say to yourself "Hey I haven't heard that for a while..." It's why the random option is so good - you hear stuff you haven't heard for ages. Also, visual clues are so good for choosing music, voice means you have to remember what's in the library. I want to choose based on album art, not correct pronounciation of band name.

Paul