Speech recognition has been widespread for over a decade now.  Nuance, a leader in speech technology, brought their first commercial speech application to market in 1996. That’s only 13 years ago!

It’s been slow to break away from the ultra annoying call-steering customer service and PC dictation applications and onto something more widespread and useful, but this year marks a shift for Voice User Interfaces from relative obscurity to mainstream mania.

iPhone 3GS

Upgrades to the new iPhone 3GS operating system include the ability to select playlists for playback and make phone calls using voice commands. There is also text-to-speech for things such as asking your iPhone “What song is playing now?”. They have also opened this up to developers in the API so this new feature is available to 3rd party Apps.

Xbox 360 Project Natal

With the release of Project Natal, you can control your console and games using your voice. Check out the video from 2:58 mark onwards for a showcase of the voice features.

Before Natal, we had…The Clapper?

Conclusion

VUIs and Voice Recognition are still infants. They have to grow up and they haven’t even hit puberty. Recognition benefits from personal training, from getting familiar with the way you vocalize words. I hear the new Dragon Naturally Speaking Software is 98% accurate out of the box, but there’s still room for improvement and I doubt it is that accurate when you are talking about a niche subject that has many lingo terms. Imagine we had a store of speech data that we could point the software to so that we don’t need to personalize it? This would help put your ramblings in context and improve accuracy.

Here is a shortlist of other things using VUIs:

Nintendo DS
Ford  vehicles - Microsoft Sync
Onstar
411 and directory services
Self serve customer service
Blackberry (Powered by Nuance)
Windows mobile
Spinvox visual voice mail
Jaws

Last year I decided that 2009 was going to be the year I had my SNPs uncovered.

There are a handful of  start-ups that offer services around genome sequencing. A few of the more popular companies are 23andMe, deCODE, and Navigenics.

What are SNPs?

SNPs are Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms. They are an area of your genome that today’s Scientist have made the most progress in understanding. Right now it is a lot less expensive to get your SNPs sequenced rather than geting the whole genome done.

Personalized Medicine

Your family physician practices “Medical Arts”.  It’s called an art because there is a lot of creativity that comes into play while deciding the best medicine for a particular patient.  They take into account your ethnicity, family history, the health trends the local community, and a whole bunch of other factors.  In the next 5-6 years physicians will start using the data from your genome as a tool for that decision making process.

Clinical trials for new drugs need to have a very large panel to test on because while a drug may be have the intended benefits on some groups of people, it may be fatal or have no effect on other groups of people. This opens up a much more precise method of defining groups of people based on their genome. Drugs that would normally be turned down after regular Clinical trials may prove useful to niche groups of people.

Has your doctor ever switched your medication because it didn’t do anything for you?
Codine doesn’t work well in  “approximately 6–10% of the Caucasian population, 2% of Asians, and 1% of Arabs…” – wikipedia

Why do it now?

I’m a science enthusiast and beta geek. I want to contribute to the pool of genotype and phenotype data. Although this may seem like mostly a Health and Science related topic, it has internet community and web geek overtones to it. I’m interested in the discovery and sharing of all the community data that comes with people discussing health issues, hacks, and work-arounds. I want to participate.

I want to understand the code that I am made of.

Full genome sequencing is already available at a price of $5000 USD via Complete Genomics in Mountain View California. They went on record to predict a full genome sequencing at a price of $1000 near spring 2009.  But with Genome Anaylsis a large pool of data from different people is required to start making meaningful correlations. I am betting that 23andme, coming from a internet centric position, will be able to gather the data of genotypes and phenotypes, and make sense of it all, by building a community of active customers and experts.

I want to be a part of that experience and add to the community pools of data.

Eventually I will hack into and improve my genome.
The ability to do this will happen within my lifetime.

Either way, I won’t be human forever.

Recorded January 11th 2009.

Long run today in snow.

Here is the route and the Garmin data for the run.

Recorded January 10th 2009

Sore foot but must carry on.

Recorded January 8th

Workout your abs at the end of every gym session.

I am frustrated at the mobile carriers in Canada (lack of) speed of innovation. There is a saying that an Internet year is like 3-4 months long because of how rapidly things change.  The speed of a telco year is 3-4 YEARS long. I’ve outlined a few suggestions for Canada’s national carriers Telus, Bell, Rogers, and Globalive.

Will voice plans be a free service soon?

No, not soon.
But maybe it will come in the future when a carrier’s business model is based on advertising, and that advertising comes at the end of each call. (Globalive + MyScreen)
After all, they will want to encourage you to use that phone so they can serve more ads, right?

How much Bandwidth is enough?

4G networks are absolutely necessary as carriers move from a subscriber based biz model to a relevant advertising based models or anything in between.
I need more bandwidth on my mobile as my PC becomes more neglected.
I want to pay less on my bill and get more, and I don’t mind giving attention to relevant ads to do that.
More bandwidth means more fun and less frustration for customers

Customer Care

Give your Reps the tools to pass on account info to other departments when a customer care call is transferred.

It’s more than just annoying to need to reiterate your phone number, postal code and DOB, every time they transfer a call.
Faster more efficient service = Happier customers

Let me access my bills from my handset. See Mobile Website.

Audio services

I want to to access my voicemail and all call data visually from my handset, tag it, store it, forward it. Let me do this from a browser too. (@timoreilly’s idea)
Let people send me voice mail over the internet straight to my audio inbox.

Push-to-talk – I want push-to-talk to work like instant messaging does. ex. Availability settings

Send audio msg – make it easy to just record an audio message on the handset and send it to an audio inbox. I don’t want to deal with people in real time ALL the time. I want the audio version of a SMS.

Preloaded Applications

Preload each handset with the applications that suit that device.
Provide a portal (or marketplace) that lists all these apps for easy download straight onto the handset…and update it regularly!
Present only the apps that are available for the handset that is visiting the portal.

Photos – Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, etc
Videos – YouTube, Blip.tv, DailyMotion, etc
Barcode scanner – see my post on Hyperlinks in the real world
Social Apps – Facebook, Twitter, etc

Deals Channel

Create an application that allows customers to browse through all the adverts that are relevant to them in terms of where they are at that time and their interests. If you do this right you can make both advertisers and customers very happy and make a lot of money in the process.

Mobile Website

Make a mobile version of your website. I want to be able to see my bill and offers for upgrades. Why do mobile carriers have crappy mobile websites?

If there is a portal page which is preloaded into favourites on the handset, make sure that page is current and useful for that device. I don’t need links to the BBC and CBC desktop websites. They are not mobile friendly.

This is the beginning a series of posts about my quest to qualify for the Boston Marathon.  I’ll be talking about my training efforts, nutrition, and all the peripheral things around all this that I think you might find interesting. I’ll be supplementing the posts with my @retrofitweb twitter feed.

I am doing this series for a few reasons:

• I want to document this because I can’t depend on my brain to remember all the hard work and preparation it will take (swiss cheese for memory).
• I hope I can inspire at least one person to run (It’s you!)
• I find I am more accountable for my present and future actions when they are to be made public so this is a good motivational tool

I’ll be looking for help and advice from you so please make comments.

BTW -The sound and video quality will get better. This is all part of my training to be a better video blogger.

Another BTW – I have never ran a marathon.

Hello Friends,

I’m doing my very first solo (but not really) acoustic gig at The Harwood Blues on the Saturday night of June 28th 2008.

I would like your help. I know many of you have guitar, harmonica, banjo, or singing talent, so I would like your to look through this song list and let me know if you would like to get on the stage and play some tunes with me.

Have a look through the song list, pick out a few you want to join me on and leave a comment on my retrofitweb blog, on my facebook wall, or phone me or shoot me an email about it.

…and spread the word!

thanks,
Bobby

A Hard Days Night
American Music
Another Round
At A Medium Pace
Bad Day
Bad Timing
Barbarella
Be My Lover
Behind Blue Eyes
Believe Me
Bird Dog
Blaze Of Glory
Boiled Frogs
Boy Inside The Man
Breaking The Girl
Bring It On Home To Me
Broken Fuckin Heart
Cathy’s Clown
Change The World
Crucial
Dock Of The Bay
Dream
Dream A Little Dream Of Me
Drugs Don’t Work
Easy
Eighteen
Eldery Woman In A…..
Every Rose Has It’s Thorn
Fulsom Prison Blues
Glycerine
Go Your Own Way
Good Day Sunshine
Half The World Away
Hard Luck Woman
Head Over Heals
Heartbreak Station
Heaven
Here I Go Again
Hide Your Love Away
Hole Hearted
Hunger Strike
Inside Out
Joey
Keilbasa Sausauge
Losing A Whole Year
Lucky
Maggie May
Man Who Sold The World
Mighty Quinn
My Name Is Jonas
Not An Addict
Not Feeling Fine
Not Getting Tired Of You
One
Patience
Peace Train
Remember Yesterday
Run Around Sue
Runaway
Say It Ain’t So
Self Esteem
Selling The Drama
Sexx Laws
Shooting Star
Signs
Silent Lucidity
Solsbury Hill
Starlight
Sunshower
Sweet Caroline
Take It Easy
Talk Shows On Mute
Tangerine
The Freshman
The Good Life
The Government Totally Sucks
This Wreck Of A Life
Tiny Dancer
To Love Somebody
Tribute
Try
Tweeter And The Monkey Man
Wake Up Little Suzie
We Can Work It Out
What I Got
Where Have All The Good People Gone
White Hot
White Lies/Black Truth
Wonderwall
You Burn First
Your Song

Everybody is familiar with the 1 dimensional UPC bar codes that are found on just about every packaged product.
The codes are read at the check out counter. They tell the cash machine what the product is and how much it costs.
These codes have primarily been used as a tool for inventory control, shipping, and quick check outs.

Well, North America will soon be familiar with a handful of new 2D barcodes that are primarily being displayed for public consumption. Using your mobile phone, with the right software you can scan these images with your phone’s camera and get information on that item.

What are they?
Real world hyper-links.
A mobile marketing technology.
Fantastic for marketers hoping to measure the effectiveness of their print campaign.

What can they do?
They can spawn a mobile browser session and take you to a website. It’s often a pain to type in a long URL into your mobile browser. Why not provide a 2-D barcode for your website to ease that pain.
They can spawn a pre-populated SMS message, complete with destination phone number or shortcode and some text in the body.
They can deliver a binary file to your mobile phone. (think graphics, text, or any file supported by the handset). The amount of information a 2D bar code can convey is different for each format.
Initiate a phone call.
GeoSpatial tracking.
Labeling.
Textual information.
Save contact information.

How do they work?
On your mobile phone, start the scanning program. Typically, this will launch your camera. Then just snap a clear shot of the bar code.
The program will decode the image and deliver the information to your handset.

Many 2D bar code formats and readers
There are many providers of 2-d bar codes. Some are proprietary formats, that as a creator, you need to pay to use. All of the code readers are free.

Quick Response code

Open format created in 1994 by Denso-Wave. The most popular 2D code in Japan.
Get the reader here :: http://reader.kaywa.com
Create one at http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ or at http://nfggames.com/system/qrcodegen.php
Cost = free

ShotCode

Created by High Energy Magic
Website – http://www.shotcode.com/
Get the Reader here :: m.shotcode.com or on your PC go here http://www.shotcode.com/download
Cost = 50 pounds/month for 1-10 shotcodes.

Moseycode

Open format. Initially designed for Android platform. Created by Tom Gibara.
Website – http://www.tomgibara.com/android/moseycode/
Create a Moseycode here :: http://www.tomgibara.com/android/moseycode/barcodes
Cost = free

Semacode

Open Data Matrix format created in 1989
Website – http://www.semacode.com
my semacode for retrofitweb.com website -
http://semacode.com/display/tag.html?hide=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.retrofitweb.com&title=RetroFit+Website+Services+-+Semacode+for+website
Create one here = http://semacode.com/tag
Cost =

EZcodes

created by ScanBuy
The ScanLife reader also works with QR and Data Matrix codes.
Website – http://www.scanlife.com/
User Guide – http://www.scanlife.com/images/ScanLife-Client-Application-User-Guide.pdf
Create an EZcode :: You need to register your company fisrt. http://www.scanlife.com/register_company.html
Cost :: ???

ZXing (Zebra Crossing)

Google’s Open Source barcode reader reads QRcode, Data Matrix, and UPC
Google plans to trial QR codes in print ads. They have no plans to develop a new bar code format.

Closing words
This should both thrill and scare marketers and store owners because I can imagine many layers of information being layered onto these codes. Imagine you are in a big box store, you scan an item’s bar code and a layer from ebay or Craig’s list that tells you that the item you have scanned is available through them at 40% of the cost.

Or perhaps you are on a diet, but you have no time or desire to spend the time to figure out what kind of foods you absolutely need to stay away from. Then you would just need to install the latest reader plug-in from Google Health, modified to your personal settings, and then you could get ratings on each item scanned.

The ubiquitous UPC bar code is enough reason to have a wide install base for these code readers. Everything else is just the gravy on top. It’s just a matter of time until someone builds a specialized search engine for the upcoming explosion of these information layers. Really, right now these readers are crude visual pattern recognition programs that work with a limited number of symbologies. Later they will be able to recognize logos, common objects, and eventually places and faces.

Well it’s been a month since my last post and competition for hosting your activity stream has already started and is starting to pick up.

Plaxo released a new feature dubbed “Pulse” that ties into many of your other social networking accounts and combines them into one feed. Their have been rumours this week about Google buying Plaxo. It would be a great fit for their mobile offering. Great for Android. Contact data and communication tools are what you should be investing in to build a great social network. I think Plaxo is way under valued at this fictional price of $200 million. Now let me play match maker here and say that I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo made a play for Plaxo in the interest of keeping their dominance in email services.

FriendFeed is now doing some beta testing of their re-combinate social network feed service. I like it! They currently have 27 services you can draw from, including Flickr, del.icio.us, Google Reader, and Twitter. You can make your feed public or keep it private. Items in public feeds can be commented on…you can click on the ‘like’ link to say that you like a stream item. Not really sure what this is for yet, but I imagine they will be building APML from this data. The website is quite simplistic and baron right now, but I really think this company has the right idea and I am excited to see what they unleash in the next few weeks.

My FriendFeed is http://friendfeed.com/bobbykelly
LinkedIn where are you in this race to host my activity stream? There are plenty of people using services like Twitter and Blogging for business reasons. I want to know what my business colleges want me to know. Know what i mean?

more about the activity stream later…