Gonna b nice....no quiet period for sensor fusion.....

No, the unit outlook has not changed at all. And as I said in the prepared remarks, I’m actually optimistic about – understanding a little bit more how they are planning to bring this to market because I think there will be some good news associated with that. And I also think that contributes to them maintaining their idea about the unit forecast.

I think there will be some good news associated with that.

Consider not just a nice PR and bundle, but maybe some other platform folks; Health insurance, corps who buy them for all/ etc.?

 

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The adjacent possible has no quiet period.

For example..

Since the beginning of this year, the rumor mill has been hinting that Samsung is working on an improved edition of the Gear Fit 2 fitness tracker. Speculations are rife that it may debut as Samsung Gear Fit 2 Pro. In May, the Gear Fit 2 Pro rumored to launch at the Tizen Developer Conference, but it did not come true. However, its arrival seems imminent as the device has now received certification from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S.

A Samsung device with model number SM-R365 has received FCC approval. Rumors have been hinting that this model number belongs to Gear Fit 2 Pro. Its FCC ID is A3lSMR365. The schematics of the alleged Gear Fit 2 Pro has been revealed by FCC listing. There are no details available on the device, but it is pegged to be an enhanced version of the original Gear Fit 2 fitness tracker that has a model number of SM-R360.



The FCC listing of SM-R365 has revealed that it is equipped with v4.2 LE Bluetooth andsingle band Wi-Fi b/g/n. It is expected to feature an optical heart rate tracker that isavailable on other Gear Fit devices.

It is speculated to be based on Samsung’s Simband health platform that would be a cloud-sourced health tracking device flanked with health sensors for measuring bodytemperature, oxygen level, hear rate and so on. Like the Gear Fit 2, the alleged Pro edition could be also based on Tizen OS. More information on its features are likely to appear in the coming weeks.

Rumors indicate the South Korean company may also debut another device called Gear POP that has a model number of SM-R600. The features of the Gear POP are not known yet. There is no information on when Samsung will be unveiling the alleged Gear Fit 2 Pro and Gear POP devices. The Gear Fit 2 was unveiled in June last year. Since it has been over one year since the launch of Gear Fit 2, the arrival of its improved edition seems imminent.

Also:

With recap:https://www.mobilescout.com/android/news/n96697/samsungs-gear-fit-2-pro-fcc-certification.html

http://www.tizenexperts.com/2017/07/samsungs-next-fitness-band-smr365-spotted-fcc-certification/

Now is a good time to read these snips again, in a better voice....

1. 
   JUN6
   0
   Machine Voice Recognition Becomes More Human
   
   
   Although our approach to implementing this capability is quite a bit different than the way a human would process speech and determine the important content, the net result is a more human-like interaction with both local and cloud-based voice recognition computational machinery. This machinery has been becoming increasingly capable and ubiquitous and represents nothing less than a full-blown revolution in how we humans interact with our devices. We at QuickLogic are proud to be playing our part.
   
   
   
   The excellent implementation for this WILL help QUIK win slots,
   It already has in the most recent news items, with more to come.
   
   
2. a snip from the cc...
   
   
   Let’s focus for a minute on additional markets where we are gaining traction. These include voice enabled by our key products, new wearable devices being developed by app companies. And the emerging market for smart hearable devices. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, we introduced a voice enabled IoT demo that attracted the attention of several potential customers. We have since leveraged it to initiate a new engagement with a top-tier IoT supplier. While I cannot share further details at this time, I am optimistic about the prospects of this engagement.

A snip from the gear fit pro trademark application of Jan....


It's oddly in Samsung's Gear Fit Pro trademark where they introduce "Digital Assistant" .................. Specifically for watches the trademark filings states: "Watches that communicate data to personal digital assistants,


So BIX can become a life coach or something like that.
BIX could be one smart /insightful Jeeves.

+

todays item


you have to make sure that the Text-to-Speech part will not backfire and ruin your product which is AI. You have to make sure that TTS will not ruin the user experience and distract from the actual service, which is Digital Assistance!
Are there voices like this? Yes, there are voices that keep you away from the window most of the times. The TTS voices we develop at innoetics are appropriate for Digital Assistants as they sound flawless in almost any text they read-out-loud. At innoetics we have developed a unique technique for developing custom voices that sound perfect, especially for domain-specific applications.


Great move by Samsung?


+ reach China bullet....

•  Built upon reaching user-testing stage with Tier-one smartphone OEM wearable program 

Bix. is gona sound very very good. Nice addition?
Notice how with the M & A they are grabbing them small and ASAP?
Can't wait as someone else will get them.
The coral reef around voice has the tasty morsels going so fast - can't keep up.



TTS for Assistants: Towards HAL-9000

• DECEMBER 5, 2016

One of the hottest topics in the world now is the Digital Assistants Technology. New devices try to catch up Amazon’s Echo and its Alexa vast AI ecosystem. Google is about to release its own home-based assistant, while Microsoft with Cortana and other software giants will soon follow up closely with more devices and possibly avatars.
Most of us consider HAL-9000 to be the first and possibly the best Digital Assistant we have encountered (putting aside its subordination against Dave). Who can’t remember HAL’s final attempt to make David sympathize him before disconnecting his memory modules?

Who can’t remember HAL’s calm and soothing voice, even though he was disobeying his master with his epic response: “I ‘m sorry Dave, I am afraid I can’t do that!

That voice of Douglas Rain was considered to be the perfect voice for a futuristic Digital Assistant, and it truly was.

In today’s concepts of Digital Assistants such as robots or avatars we often meet robotic voices when a machine talks. In these movies, even though the AI is super advanced, the speech most of the times is more robotic than today’s regular Text-to-Speech voices. The creators want to remind the viewer that this is a robot, a machine, and even though it can understand anything you say well, even though it can think, process and have a mind of its own, it will speak back to you like a robot! Cortana in Halo, AUTO in Wall-e, almost all automatic prompts in self-destructing space-ships need to sound robotic in order for people to understand that behind this intelligence there will always be electrons that power it.

When AI assistants have to show a more humane side, consciousness or even feelings, then these robots must sound more human-like. Scarlet Johansson in Her, Paul Bettany in Iron-man or Kevin Spacey in the Moon voiced the most advanced and human-like AI assistants, and made the viewers feel sympathy for them.
What kind of voice do we want for a Digital Assistant? A robot-like one or a human-like? But there is another question that needs an answer first: can we actually create a voice that sounds like a human? A synthetic voice that sounds like HAL, like GERTY, like Samantha or like JARVIS? And if not, how do we define if a TTS voice is appropriate for an AI device or not.
A good approach would be what a friend and guru in the AI field once told me: “if I can listen to a Wikipedia article from a TTS voice and it does not make me want to jump off the window, then it is OK for a Digital Assistant’s voice!”

What the above statement describes is that you have to make sure that the Text-to-Speech part will not backfire and ruin your product which is AI. You have to make sure that TTS will not ruin the user experience and distract from the actual service, which is Digital Assistance!
Are there voices like this? Yes, there are voices that keep you away from the window most of the times. The TTS voices we develop at innoetics are appropriate for Digital Assistants as they sound flawless in almost any text they read-out-loud. At innoetics we have developed a unique technique for developing custom voices that sound perfect, especially for domain-specific applications.

But we aim further that this! We are currently focusing on the most advanced synthetic voices ever designed, mainly for Digital Assistants and dialogue systems. Voices that will sound more human-like than any other synthetic voice before! Synthetic voices that will sound flawless with any text, and will be able to be driven by advanced linguistic and supra-segmental data. Synthetic voices that will give a unique character to the target AI agent or device, and make it become a part of everyday’s life.


Bix. is gona sound very very good. Nice addition?

The M & A activity related to voice UX is brisk...

Samsung acquires Greek text-to-speech startup Innoetics for under $50M
Posted 50 minutes ago by Ingrid Lunden (@ingridlunden)


With the launch of Bixby and reports that Samsung is building its own competitor to Amazon’s Echo, the consumer electronics giant has now made an acquisition that could help power its next generation of voice-powered services. Samsung has acquired Innoetics, a startup out of Greece that has developed text-to-speech and voice-to-speech technology that can, among other things, listen to a person speaking, train on what that person is saying, and then read out a piece of completely unrelated text in that same voice.

Innoetics had been working primarily on B2B services up to now, with telcos and other businesses using its tech by way of a set of APIs. Innoetics has now posted a note on on the homepage of its website announcing that these B2B services have now been discontinued.

It’s not clear yet what Samsung plans to do with the tech, but according to one person, “it is perfectly suited for consumer services.” In other words, we could see it working with Bixby, or a new piece of hardware, or something for Samsung’s extensive mobile handset business, or all of the above. Or something else entirely different, given Samsung’s reach into so many other areas of consumer electronics. In any case, Samsung plans to keep Innoetics and its 8-10 employees (the higher number includes contractors) based in Athens as a subsidiary of its wider business.

Terms of the deal — which officially closed last Friday — have not been disclosed, but we understand that it’s one of the bigger exits for a tech startup in Greece. Sources tell us that Innoetics went for less than the amount Daimler paid for Taxibeat, an Uber rival that it acquired earlier this year for around €40 million ($43 million).

Samsung acquiring Innoetics follows other acquisitions it has made in the area of voice-based technology — namely, in October last year, Samsung bought the personal assistant startup Viv, which it used to help build Bixby.

(Samsung has incubated and acquired other kinds of tech, too, such as its recent move to pick up VRB, a VR startup that it funded and incubated in Samsung Next.)

Innoetics started as a spinout from the Athena Research and Innovation Center, a research institute in Athens that includes a department focused on speech and language processing. The Athena RIC announced the acquisition itself. We have also contacted Samsung for a comment.

Notably, Innoetics was completely bootstrapped since being founded in 2006 by Aimilios Chalamandaris, Pirros Tsiakoulis, Sotiris Karabetsos, and Spyros Raptis. The company had actually been in the process of getting rebooted and was seeking VC funding when it first started talking to Samsung. Initially, conversations started around a potential partnership before the two entered into acquisition talks.


We have seen a huge boom in voice-powered technology, from personal assistants — not just Bixby, but Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and many more — to hardware like Google Home and Amazon’s Echo range, all of which are using innovations in machine learning and other AI tools, as well as advances in natural language processing, to become more and lifelike and useful.

Innoetics’ technology is an interesting complement to all of this. Many services today are built around single languages before getting adapted, slowly, to more; and they are all basically built around one familiar voice (recall the hot pursuit that finally found the “voice of Siri“). Innoetics currently supports not one but 19 different languages, including English and (naturally) Greek, German and several dialects of Hindi.

“The team has amazing foundational technology in text-to-speech,” says Mallios Kostas, an ex-Microsoftie from Seattle who had started working with the company six months ago as an advisor and ended up helping lead the sale to Samsung. He said Innoetics has “huge capabilities” to increase the languages covered by its tech, and was on track to double or even triple the base. “Their synthesized voices are so accurate you almost can’t tell the difference between it and the real voice.”

Longer term, this may also raise security questions, of course: the smarter AI gets, the more likely it is that malicious hackers and others might use it for nefarious ends, and one of those ends could be in areas like identity theft. Tracking and mimicking people’s voices could be an obvious component of that.

“As synthesized voice has become more human sounding, security is something that will need to be dealt with,” Mallois said. “We’re not quite there yet but I can guarantee that large companies are thinking about how to address that, too.”

This would really make a LOT of sense....


MediaTek will potentially be another customer of Globalfoundries' 22FDX, the sources noted. The Taiwan-based mobile chip supplier is evaluating the feasibility of using Globalfoundries' 22FDX to manufacture its IoT-related chips, the sources continued.


will track along....M tee said this a while ago....


"IoT market is characterized by full diversity, small volume, multiple standards, security, and service-oriented vertical applications. Because of different functionality, specifications, and services, the turnkey solutions that used to be successful in mobile phone market can no longer fit. It challenges not only device makers' design and manufacturing ability, but also chip vendors' to provide total solutions."

commentary, given the comment eFPGA should resonate with Mediatek. It is a Tier 1 who is saying the very same thing as is in the QUIK blogs....

Globalfoundries 22FDX attracts orders from Shanghai Fudan
Josephine Lien, Taipei; Jessie Shen, DIGITIMES [Monday 10 July 2017]
Globalfoundries' 22nm FD-SOI process, dubbed 22FDX, has obtained orders from Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics, according to industry sources.

Shanghai Fudan will likely become the first China-based customer of Globalfoundries' 22FDX, said the sources. Shanghai Fudan will use the process to manufacture mainly processor chips for artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Data applications.

Shanghai Fudan's first product manufactured using Globalfoundries' 22FDX is expected to be available in the second half of 2018, the sources indicated.

Shanghai Fudan is already partnering with Globalfoundries in the smart card IC segment, the sources added.

MediaTek will potentially be another customer of Globalfoundries' 22FDX, the sources noted. The Taiwan-based mobile chip supplier is evaluating the feasibility of using Globalfoundries' 22FDX to manufacture its IoT-related chips, the sources continued.

Globalfoundries and the Chengdu municipality recently disclosed plans to jointly build a FD-SOI ecosystem in China with an investment of more than US$100 million, which has attracted the participation of many EDA and IP providers including Cadence, Synopsys, Invecas, Verisilicon and Encore Semi. The announcement followed the pair's joint statement on the establishment of a new 12-inch wafer fab in Chengdu.

Construction of the new Chengdu fab has commenced, and is scheduled to complete in early 2018, according to Globalfoundries. The fab will begin production of mainstream process technologies in 2018 and then focus on manufacturing 22FDX, with volume production expected to start in 2019.

Globalfoundries in 2015 rolled out its 22FDX developed specifically for the rapidly-evolving mainstream mobile, IoT, RF connectivity and networking markets. The technology delivers FinFET-like performance and energy-efficiency at a cost comparable to 28nm planar technologies.

1. jeff, 29 minutes agoReport

   #7LikeReply
2. 

   jfiebWell-Known Member

   
   

   Competitor or
   Snowboy a possible Quik
   Collaborator
   
   
   NOT a competitor....for casual readers...QUIK's voice hard block can listen for Alexa, Hello Blue Genie, the Mandarin chosen by AISPeech.
   AND ANY and every ONE of the Snowboy ones. We can do this for Amazon via Sensory, For AISpeech, for KITT.AI, etc.
   
   The key takeaway? Always listening wake up words are expanding into each and every major ecosystem; the adjectives are not closing, diminishing but exactly the opposite- Ever expanding, growing, flourishing, we will have more reading material from QUIK on this...
   remember the Mary Meeker info....if you have any lingering q. now is a good time to read this blog post....
   
   http://blog.quicklogic.com/mobile/m...-internet-trends-report/#sthash.ndfPCwZ1.dpbs
   
   Use the move by Baidu to take out KITT.AI to be part of MM message?
   
   

   1. Time spent on mobile devices approximately doubled from 2014 to 2016. Primary drivers for that growth were new use cases and improved accuracy of voice interface.
   2. 20% of all mobile inquires are done using voice and that number is growing rapidly.  Google’s voice recognition technology achieved 95% accuracy this year, which is a key milestone and roughly as accurate as human recognition. Soon it will be even bette

   
   Those 3000 KITT.ai developers? Many are using those words to activate some thing or other...
   Baidu is the China search engine, i.e. GOOG of China, they will be ready for these voice inquiries. AEC will be nice to have in noisy China.
   

   Last edited: 6 minutes ago

   jfieb, 12 minutes agoEditDeleteReport

   #8Reply
3. 

   jfiebWell-Known Member

   New
   

   
   

   With the purchase of KITT.AI by Baidu fresh on my mind I wanted to reread this item also...
   
   http://blog.quicklogic.com/eos/machine-voice-recognition-becomes-more-human/#sthash.fthOKJH2.dpbs
   
   
   JUN6
   0
   Machine Voice Recognition Becomes More Human
   
   
   Although our approach to implementing this capability is quite a bit different than the way a human would process speech and determine the important content, the net result is a more human-like interaction with both local and cloud-based voice recognition computational machinery. This machinery has been becoming increasingly capable and ubiquitous and represents nothing less than a full-blown revolution in how we humans interact with our devices. We at QuickLogic are proud to be playing our part.
   
   
   
   The excellent implementation for this WILL help QUIK win slots,
   It already has in the most recent news items, with more to come.

1. 
   

   a snip from todays reading...
   
   
   King Kun announced at the venue Baidu will be wholly-owned acquisition of voice wake-up and natural voice interactive technology KITT.AI company.KITT.AI is the only company in the world to receive Amazon Alexa and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and has selected CB Insights for a hundred strong entrepreneurial intelligence.KITT.AI co-founder, CTO Chen fruit now demonstrates how to use KITT.AI voice wake-up technology to quickly create a voice wake-up device.
   

   jfieb, 9 minutes agoEditDeleteReport

   #2Reply
2. 

   jfiebWell-Known Member

   
   

   Baidu acquires natural language startup Kitt.ai, maker of chatbot engine ChatFlow
   Posted Jul 5, 2017 by Ingrid Lunden (@ingridlunde
   
   China’s search giant Baidu has made another acquisition to continue its push into artificial intelligence, and specifically to help it carve out a place for itself as a platform for developers who want to create chatbots and other services based on natural language technology.
   
   Baidu has acquired Kitt.ai, a profitable startup based out of Seattle that has developed a framework to build and power chatbots and voice-based applications across multiple platforms and devices (presumably named after this Kitt).
   
   The deal has been confirmed to us directly by Baidu. It was also announced on stage at Baidu’s developer event in Beijing, confirmed in a blog postfrom Kitt.ai, and also made public with a short note from Baidu on Weibo. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, a Baidu spokesperson said.
   
   Kitt.ai has been around since 2014, but it appears that it had only disclosed a seed round of funding of an unspecified size as a startup. Its backers were Amazon’s Alexa Fund and the Seattle-based Founders Co-op.
   
   Importantly, the company was growing and thriving. It has paying customer across four continents “and we are profitable,” co-founder Xuchen Yao notes in the blog post. Kitt.ai’s tech powers apps for smart phones, speakers, appliances, web chat, cars, homes, conference rooms, offices, hospitals, “and even telephone lines.” Yao and his two other co-founders Kenji Sagae and Guoguo Chen come from academic backgrounds, variously at Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon.
   
   The company had released three products, all of which will remain operational as before: Snowboy (“a customizable hotword detection engine”), NLU (“a multilingual natural language understanding engine”), and ChatFlow (a multi-turn conversation engine that we covered here), and appeared to be built as a cross-platform service, improving its ubiquity.
   
   Kitt.ai’s star has risen with the growing use of natural language applications, from personal assistants and other voice-base apps, through to chatbots that operate through text but also rely on computers and artificial intelligence to be able to ‘interpret’ what a person is asking in order to answer correctly.
   
   
   In addition to being profitable and international, Yao notes Kitt.ai now has more than 12,000 developers using Snowboy. It doesn’t disclose user numbers of its other apps but had built ChatFlow as a paid B2B service.
   
   
   
   Baidu — like its U.S. counterpart Google — has been investing over many years in building AI expertise and technology, not only to power its own services and whatever moves it plans to make next in search on existing platforms like mobile and computers, but also completely new areas like automotive as a new endpoint for its search technology.
   
   There have been some setbacks in this area, such as the departure earlier this year of Andrew Ng, who had founded Google’s deep learning division Google Brain and was Baidu’s chief data scientist. The company has, however, also been making some key hires, such as Qi Lu, another AI specialist, from Microsoft; and it been making other significant acquisitions to continue building its expertise, such as computer vision specialist XPerception.
   
   Kitt.ai is Baidu’s tenth disclosed acquisition
   

   jfieb, 6 minutes agoEditDeleteReport

   #3Reply
3. 

   jfiebWell-Known Member

   New
   

   
   

   KITT.AI joins Baidu
   
   
   https://blog.kitt.ai/2017/07/05/kitt-ai-joins-baidu/
   
   
   
   
   Since its inception, the mission of KITT.AI has been making human machine interaction simple with natural language understanding technologies. With roots in two of the best universities in speech and NLP -- Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon -- we chose a path of empowering the world of developers with the best of our knowledge, products, and service.
   
   Over the past two years we developed three products: Snowboy (a customizable hotword detection engine), NLU (a multilingual natural language understanding engine), and ChatFlow (a multi-turn conversation engine). As of July 2017, we power more than 12,000 developers on the Snowboy platform, who created the largest hotword library in the world with 9,000 unique hotwords in 15 major languages. We have turned ChatFlow into an enterprise-level software, actively exploring a monetization strategy in the war of chatbot platforms.
   
   
   
   Now KITT.AI's products are deployed in smart phone apps, speakers, appliances, web chat, cars, homes, conference rooms, offices, hospitals, and even telephone lines. A good mouth of word has awarded us in return quite well: we have paying customers from 4 continents of the world and we are profitable.
   
   Is there a bigger platform that can put KITT.AI in the trajectory of serving 10x or 100x more developers in the next few years? Today KITT.AI joins Baidu, a search, AI, and autonomous driving company, to continue a joint mission of making the complex world simpler with (natural language understanding) technologies.
   
   How does this affect existing and future developers of KITT.AI? Better products, better services and a peace of mind that KITT.AI will continue to operate with its existing products in the years to come. Yes, literally nothing changes in our existing products and brands. We'll be continuing to support developers with best of our efforts as we have always been.
   
   We look forward to hearing the exciting products you have built with KITT.AI, now a Baidu company.
   
   QUIK can you do some hot words for them like the other China ones?
   tanks