Yes, We CAN Hear You Now! The Rise of Embedded Speech

Day-by-day I am becoming more-and-more excited, because DESIGN West is racing towards us as we speak.

Held in the heart of Silicon Valley, the annual DESIGN West Conference and Exhibition is where the world's top design engineers and product developers gather and learn, gain inspiration, and get practical information and hands-on training they can put to immediate use.

As you may recall, yours truly is the chair for the Processors and Programmable Devices track, which – as you will see when you visit the DESIGN West website – is absolutely jam-packed with AMAZING papers and presentations.

One such paper that I am really looking forward to myself, for example, is Yes, We CAN Hear You Now! The Rise of Embedded Speech, which will be presented by Bill Teasley, VP of Engineering at Sensory Inc.

As the abstract for this paper says:

In the not-so-distant past, the only way for humans and embedded systems to communicate with each other was via knobs and switches and flashing lights and other displays. Now, humans can interact with consumer products by means of highly accurate, low-cost, low-current, small-footprint speech technologies that feature voice recognition and synthesis, biometric passwords, MIDI-like music synthesis, text-to-speech, and interactive robotic controls. This presentation will explain all.

I don't know about you, but I can really imagine all sorts of advantages associated with having things like household appliances that can understand what you say. Suppose you could say to your alarm clock "Clock, please wake me up at 6:00am on weekdays, but don't wake me at all on weekends." Then later, you might say something like "Clock, I'm taking a vacation all next week, so please don't wake me until 8:30am" (the clock would understand from the context that you were talking about all of the weekdays for that week).

Or maybe one Wednesday evening you might say "Clock, please don't wake me until 6:30am tomorrow." And the clock might respond "You've been getting up at 6:30am on Thursday for the last few weeks, do you want me to make that the default for Thursdays?" And so on, and so forth.

Of course, we can but hope that we don't end up with overly-chatty appliances that are annoying, like the Talking Toaster on the British science fiction series Red Dwarf:


Now, before I forget, this would be a GREAT time to bounce over to the Design West Registration Page. As an alternative to the main conference passes, the FREE Exhibit Pass gains you access to three days of Expo (Tuesday - Thursday). And then there's the Expo Plus Pass, which – in addition to everything on the FREE Exhibit Pass (plus a bunch of other stuff) – includes three FREE one-class passes (which means you could attend one of my presentations, for example).

The important point is that, at the time of this writing, you still have three days to grab one of the Early Bird Specials.

And, last but certainly not least, don't forget that yours truly will be presenting a number of papers myself, including Programmable Devices 101 (Everything you wanted to know about FPGAs but were too scared to ask) and Danger Will Robinson! (How Radiation Can Affect Your Embedded Systems).

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