My Digital FootPrint

Voice: as the next big thing has been a cyclic mantra for at least 20 years – which is the time I have been in telecoms and high tech. Why voice? Voice recognition, voice ads, voice biometrics, unified messaging, ease, navigation (interface)… voice is content and that is often more valuable than the telecom operator/ NAS collected data of who made the call, to whom, when, how often, from where and for how long. Patterns and meta data.  Interception and recording of all calls is possible but you need to know who and what to look for. They can listen but not to everyone! In fact Voice and Face recognition appear to be in similar season fashion at the moment, with many of the same fears and mantras.  However it is the tech that lets us down, not our acceptance or vision of what is possible.  Voice and Face recognition are also different.  Voice is content and a continuous stream. Face is a one off, closer to finger print recognition for value, however voic...

Voice/ motion control is heating up again, Samsung’s Smart interaction, Nuance (Vlingo- assuming acquisition completes), Novauris, Microsoft, Apple and Google all have initiatives designed to bring all of the goodies enabled from the connection of the TV to the internet and a second screen; under the control of a combination of voice made announcement and movement. However original ideas such as this patent , issued to Panasonic (Matsushita) in 2006, describes a voice controlled “Home Agent Server” for taking command of household appliances. It references prior filings from Nokia, LG and ultimately AT&T, dating back to 2003.  The area is complex and thick of innovation, however with voice and motion control - who owns the command and how will it affect your privacy?  Where does the data get stored, does it (the system) learn uniqueness of expression and how will it become personalised.  Will learnt profile data, like facial recognition, become you...

Image http://briefmobile.com/opinion-siri-will-change-the-way-we-interact-with-our-phones Loving these stories of the hackers who have enabled Siri to control home heating and starting your car So touch made computing human as we now all have stories of our kids swiping the TV in an attempt to change channel, but now voice control.  Voice control is not new (I worked on some code in 1988 for GEC Marconi for controlling Tanks), it has just not very reliable enough to make it easy.  If you are Indian, Scottish and probably many other national languages you will know all the problems. However, in the world of voice control it is just another interface and it just more data – it is however more human.  But as a human we have actuators and sensors.  As of today we appear to be separating them in computing worlds and this will cause a problem.

  Why print with never die by a digital evangelist. And the reason is that, as of today, it is just too difficult to manage your data.  Two things have recently co-joined to make me think this.   Over the summer I purchased the Epson 650 scanner (awesome bit of kit) so that my daughters could scan old photo’s so that they could load images up to Facebook.  They got very board very quickly and I am left with about 5,000 pictures to do and I have become very selective about what I am now scanning. They also discovered that it is quicker to take a picture on their iphone of the desired picture and side load it.  Who says that they don’t get IT.   Over the weekend, whilst in the attic, I found my old Samsung Super 8mm camcorder.  After a quick clean of the battery terminals (note to self, again, don’t store anything with batteries) the machine pinged into life and we (family plus grandparents) spend Sunday laughing like man people at the ...

one of the joys of the android phone and some other services is "voice search" Applications are as obvious as: - sitting in the kitchen needing to convert lbs to Kg, hands are dirty, but you can use voice search to find out - driving along and needing to find directions or a phone number - leaving a voice reminder to do some action later However, would you feel the same about this (voice oriented) data and the search results being added to your digital footprint as one you typed in.  I am starting to explore why we feel differently about our voice conversations than typed data.   If adverting appeared for a kitchen scale conversion on your TV after your searched would you mind? All views welcome.

This post is more about a question that I am struggling with than insight, the rhetorical question is “can you hear me thinking/”. Ignoring the obvious difference and the all TCP/IP arguments, yes voice can be VoIP and data is clicks are IP packages, I am interested in why our response to voice recording (the recording and interpretation of what you said) differently to data gathering from location, attention, clicks, content creation etc) It seams that we generally accept that our digital footprints will be recorded (collected and stored), this data will be analysed and value will be created from new service discovery or improvements to existing services. We give up the rights to our click data, our blog post creations and facebook entries in exchange for free services (in general) There appear to be 3 types (broadly) of data that can be gathered or harvested from your conversations (voice) ·          “Meaning” what...