Looking to Top Siri, SoundHound Launches Voice Search

Song-recognition app maker SoundHound Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a wildly ambitious plan to take on Google Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Amazon.com Inc. with its voice search technology, dubbed Hound.

The Silicon Valley company, which had been working on the technology for Hound since 2005, said Hound can potentially be embedded into anything that's connected to the Internet, allowing people to ask questions of their toaster, coffee maker or car and get answers trawled from databases or the Web. For now, Hound is still in beta and is only available as an app on Android devices. A version for iOS is expected sometime this summer. The company did not say when Hound will be available to the general public.

While Hound is being released initially as a mobile app, the company wants to eventually license the technology for all manner of "smart" devices, including the growing "Internet of Things" universe. Gartner Inc. projected that the number of Internet-connected devices will grow from 4.9 billion devices worldwide this year to 25 billion devices in 2020. To encourage developers to explore its technology, SoundHound on Tuesday also launched Houndify, an application program interface that lets developers integrate Hound voice recognition and search into whatever they're building.

"We believe in a world where we speak to the things around us just as we speak to each other," SoundHound's Chief Executive Keyvan Mohajer said in a statement.

It's a vision that plenty of other companies also believe in. Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana, and Amazon has Alexa. Google's voice recognition is built into many of its applications. All are competing to become for voice search what Google has been for desktop search.

SoundHound, which has 110 employees, believes its technology can compete by offering an approach to search that it says is faster, more accurate and more intelligent than what's currently available. 

"Let's say I want to find hotels in Seattle for three nights, starting tomorrow, that's pet-friendly and are within 0.5 miles of the Space Needle," said Katie McMahon, SoundHound's Vice President and General Manager. "I can drill down even further and tell it to leave out hotels that don't have any air conditioner. Hound gives you results to complex questions right away. You can't easily do that with any other service."

For the music industry, McMahon said Hound could potentially be applied to events, such as concerts and festivals. "We did not launch with events today, but that is one area that we are excited to get into," she said, pointing out that Hound could, for example, search for U2 concert dates in California after July 2. "I can get more granular and more contextual without having to type or text."

The company, which raised nearly $40 million in financing over the past 10 years, continues to draw an undisclosed amount of revenue from its eponymous music recognition application in the form of advertising, technology licensing and affiliate fees generated by traffic referrals that lead to sales.

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Tencent Challenges Google, Alibaba With Own Smartphone Software

Tencent Holdings Ltd. released an operating system for smartphones and smartwatches Tuesday as it tries to win more of the 557 million Chinese accessing the Internet through mobile devices.

The software, called TOS+, provides voice recognition and includes payment systems, Chief Operating Officer Mark Ren said during the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing.

Tencent follows domestic rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. in creating its own operating system for a country where more than nine out of 10 smartphones use Google Inc.’s Android. TOS+ seeks to tap Tencent’s stronghold in online gaming by including virtual reality and supporting play on televisions.

“What Tencent will be in the future is a connector,” Ren said. “We want to make an open platform to connect all people, devices and services.”

The Shenzhen-based company, which owns stakes in Activision Blizzard Inc. and Riot Games Inc., will work with partners to integrate the software into devices including smart glasses, Ren said.

Tencent is leveraging its ownership of China’s two most-popular instant messaging applications -- WeChat and QQ -- to boost its efforts against Android. Google’s software accounted for 78 percent of the global industry in 2013, followed by Apple Inc.’s 16 percent, according to Gartner Inc.

WeChat and QQ have more than 1 billion users combined, and Chairman Ma Huateng is finding new ways to make money through advertising, payment services and partnerships with Alibaba shopping competitor JD.com Inc.

Asia’s largest Internet company, Alibaba, also developed its own operating system, called YunOS. The company plans to have it installed on tens of millions of smartphones in the long term, Joseph Tsai, Alibaba’s vice chairman, said in an interview in November.

Tsai said he hoped an operating system could help drive consumption in unexplored sectors including digital entertainment, health care and travel. Alibaba announced it would invest $590 million into smartphone maker Meizu Technology Corp in February.

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The law that predicts computing power turns 50

Today represents a historic milestone in technology: it's the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law, the observation that the complexity of computer chips tends to double at a regular rate. On April 19th, 1965, Fairchild's Gordon Moore (later to co-found Intel) published an article noting that the number of components in integrated circuits had not only doubled every year up to that point, but would continue at that pace for at least a decade.

 He would later revise that guideline to every two years, but the concept of an unofficial law of progress stuck. It not only foresaw the rapid expansion of computing power, but frequently served as a target -- effectively, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The revised law has largely held up over the past five decades, but it might not last much longer. With chips at 14 nanometers (such as Intel's Broadwell processors), the industry is starting to hit physical limits. Circuits are now so small that escaping heat is a big problem. 

While Moore's Law may survive for another couple of processor generations, there's a chance that chip designers will need new materials or exotic data transmission techniques (like quantum tunneling) for the rule to hold true. Semiconductor companies have run into seemingly impassable barriers before, though, so Moore may be vindicated for a while yet.

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Hands Full? Navigate Using the NailO Thumbnail Trackpad

Capitalizing on the recent nail-art craze, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a thumbnail trackpad intended to be fashionable and functional.

The wearable sensor, dubbed NailO, sticks to your fingernail and essentially brings your smartphone's touch screen to your finger. Scroll through a digital recipe while cooking, or answer the phone when your hands are full.

"It's very unobtrusive," said Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, an MIT graduate student working on the NailO. "When I put this on, it becomes part of my body. I have the power to take it off, so it still gives you control over it. But it allows this very close connection to your body."

Still a prototype, the device was inspired by the colorful stickers women often apply to their nails.

"It's a cosmetic product, popular in Asian cultures," Kao said in a statement. "When I came here [from Taiwan], I was looking for them, but I couldn't find them, so I'd have my family mail them to me."

Using capacitive sensing—like the technology embedded in an iPhone's touch screen—the device works even with a thin coating between the sensor and your finger. That's good news for the MIT researchers, who hope to develop a commercial version featuring detachable "nails" that can be swapped out for different colors and styles.

You won't find NailO next to the polish remover or emery boards on shelves any time soon, though. This early prototype is still under development. As you can see in the video, it's still a bit larger than the average nail, so researchers are working to slim down the device and battery without losing functionality.

Still, the team has already managed to pack capacitive sensors, a battery, and three separate chips into a thumbnail-sized gadget. Not an easy task, according to grad student and researcher Artem Dementyev.

"The hardest part was probably the antenna design," he said. "You have to put the antenna far enough away from the chips so that it doesn't interfere with them."

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Drone Makers Seek Traffic Control

The commercial use of drones remains mostly illegal in the U.S. All the same, businesses are moving ahead with ways to profit from the small helicopters, with some assistance from the Federal Aviation Administration. In February the FAA, which is preparing drone rules, agreed to exempt State Farm from the prohibition, letting the insurer test the use of drones in claim inspections. On March 19 the agency granted Amazon.com a waiver to continue testing its package-delivery drones. And in Portland, Ore., startup SkyWard is pushing forward with a drone traffic control system that will allow thousands of the machines to fly through cities without colliding with one another or endangering people.

SkyWard is working with NASA and the world’s three largest drone makers—DJI in China, 3D Robotics in the U.S., and Parrot in France—to demonstrate that swarms of drones can safely coexist in crowded airspace. “It’s about applying the regulatory framework to a new kind of aviation infrastructure,” says co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Evans. The software project, Urban SkyWays, is designed to resemble a conventional air traffic control system at altitudes of 1,200 feet or lower, says Parimal Kopardekar, who manages NASA’s experiments on drone coordination and whose researchers are contributing their time to the project.

Urban SkyWays would load SkyWard’s cloud software onto each drone and the computer used by its pilot, says Marcos Osorno, SkyWard’s chief technology officer. The software plots the paths of all drones equipped with it, so a dispatcher working for a company such as Amazon or UPS could log on to the system to file a flight plan and receive an automatically generated route, from pickup point to destination, to help a drone avoid other machines. The flight plans will also take into account local and federal regulations. “The first question our system has to answer is, ‘Where is it safe to fly?’ ” Osorno says.

“There are rules of the road up there, and SkyWard is extending them to drones.”—SkyWard CEO Jonathan Evans

At this point, not very many places, and not very far. If adopted, the FAA’s rules for commercial drones will restrict flights to their operators’ line of sight. They would also ban flights above unprotected bystanders. Although the FAA acknowledges that technological advances may persuade it to tweak or rewrite the draft rules, slated to take effect in the next year or so, there are no guarantees.

Evans says his work as a helicopter pilot left him confident that drones can operate safely in cities. “I flew in the low airspace in urban areas all the time,” he says. “There are rules of the road up there, and SkyWard is extending them to drones.” Evans and Osorno met while flying U.S. Army helicopters in Germany more than a decade ago. Evans later flew medical choppers in Anchorage and Portland.

SkyWard and its partners plan to make money from annual subscriptions paid by drone operators to use the traffic control software. For now, SkyWard is consulting and working with companies on drone-pilot training and compliance with FAA regulations. In July the 12-employee company received $1.5 million in venture funding from Voyager Capital, Draper Associates, and Toivo Annus, the former engineering chief at Skype. It declined to disclose revenue.

1,200 ft.

The maximum altitude for SkyWard’s drone traffic control

Exelis, a major U.S. defense contractor, will unveil a drone-focused companion to its manned aircraft tracking system this month, according to program manager Christian Ramsey. The SkyWard engineers say their expertise in low airspace and the participation of the three leading drone makers give them an edge. Besides, Evans says, drone traffic control is more akin to managing “flying cell phones” than Boeing 747s.

SkyWard and its partners are planning demonstrations of their traffic control software from May through September in London, Vancouver, Las Vegas, and Portland. Osorno and Evans say they’re spending most of their time working out demo routines that will be duly impressive—and safe.

3D Robotics has raised $110 million to bring commercial drones to the mainstream. “Doing it safely and responsibly is a big part of that,” says CEO Chris Anderson. “We’re very much counting on SkyWard to ensure the way.”

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This Smart Stove Knob Precision Cooks Your Food Through An App

Hooking the internet up into everyday objects like a light bulb or thermostat usually requires buying entire new appliances and throwing out the old dumb ones. Meld is a new startup in the so-called “Internet of Things” industry that lets you hook your stove up to your smartphone with just a little knob.

The Seattle-based startup’s knob has a motor that automatically adjusts the temperature on your stove based on specific recipes programmed into the Meld app. The knob is paired with a temperature clip Meld is also buildings through Bluetooth low energy radios. The two devices work together to get the temperature precise.

“They say baking is a science and cooking is an art, but the temperature part of cooking is very scientific,” said Meld CEO and cofounder Jon Jenkins. “What we tried to do part is take the part that’s science and what humans are bad at and let you do the part that’s art — the flavor.”

Launched today on Kickstarter, the knob and clip cost $99 for pre-orders and then $129 after that pre-orders end. It will ship in the fall. The knob has seven adapters to fit on almost any stove. And of course if you don’t want to have an app controlling the temperature on your stove, you can simply use it like a regular knob on the stove.

In the Meld app, you select the recipe you want and then it gets loaded onto the knob, which has a 32-bit ARM processor in it and on-board memory. If your phone is not near the knob, it will still remember the recipe it’s following.

Meld is tapping into a recent trend in the culinary world for precision cooking, which is useful when working with proteins such as meat and dairy. Normally, the precision cooking method is done through sous vide, which uses a plastic bag and a water bath to get meat and vegetables at the exact temperature you want.

Jenkins cut his teeth in the tech industry as a software engineer heading up divisions at Amazon and Pinterest. The other cofounder, Darren Vengroff, also has a background in software with a stint at Amazon, where the two met in 2004. They thought up the company while going around their house and looking for the so-called “dumbest” thing that people interact with on a daily basis. They chose the stove.

The two cofounders have been bootstrapping Meld since starting the company last year. After the Kickstarter campaign, which has already raised nearly $50,000 in less than one day, they’ll also start pursuing venture capital. Eventually, they want to work on other connected kitchen devices.

“There’s lots to be done in the kitchen,” said Jenkins. “A lot of kitchen manufacturers are great at building appliances, but not good at software. We’re bringing a bit of software knowledge to the cooking domain. It’s a fertile area. A lot can be done with things like a microwave.”

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A $60 Gadget That Makes Car Hacking Far Easier

THE AVERAGE AUTOMOBILE today isn’t necessarily secured against hackers, so much as obscured from them: Digitally controlling a car’s electronics remains an arcane, specialized skill among security researchers. But that’s changing fast. And soon, it could take as little as $60 and a laptop to begin messing around with a car’s digital innards.

Tomorrow at the Black Hat Asia security conference in Singapore, 24-year-old Eric Evenchick plans to present a new device he calls the CANtact. The open source board, which he hopes to sell for between $60 and $100, connects on one end to a computer’s USB port, and on the other to a car or truck’s OBD2 port, a network port under its dashboard. That makes the CANtact a cheap interface between any PC and a vehicle’s controller area network or CAN bus, the collection of connected computers inside of every modern automobile that control everything from its windows to its brakes.

With just that go-between gadget and the open source software that Evenchick is releasing for free, he hopes to make car hacking a far cheaper and more automated process for amateurs. “I realized that there were no good tools for me to play around with this stuff outside of what the auto industry uses, and those are incredibly expensive,” Evenchick says, referring to products sold by companies like Vector that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. “I wanted to build a tool I can get out there, along with software to show that this stuff isn’t terribly complicated.”

Over the last several years, researchers have shown that car hacking represents a real security threat. In 2013, for instance, Darpa-funded security researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller showed (with me as their chosen crash-test dummy) that it was possible to send digital commands from a laptop connected to a car’s CAN bus that affected steering, slammed on brakes, or even disabled brakes at some speeds.

Evenchick’s gadget aims to make exactly that sort of testing more accessible to researchers. In their tests, Valasek and Miller used a $150 ECOM cable that they rewired by hand to connect to their test vehicles’ OBD2 ports. (Valasek says a stock cable capable of that connection would have cost $1,200.) Evenchick’s CANtact is designed to make that connection out of the box at a much lower cost.

The average coder isn’t familiar with the protocol most cars’ computers rely on to communicate. But Evenchick has written open source software for CANtact that automates much of the manual work of CAN bus hacking. Like the earlier work by Valasek and Miller, the CANtact is designed to send commands in Unified Diagnostics Services, the CAN protocol that auto mechanics use to communicate with electronic control units (or ECUs) throughout a vehicle.

That allows anyone to write python scripts that can automatically trigger commands in a car’s digital network that range from turning off its “check engine” light to automatically pumping its brakes. “Most people have no idea there’s all this diagnostic stuff that someone who’s connected to the CAN bus can use to do all these interesting things,” says Evenchick. “What are the extent of those features? And what implementation problems exist that could be big security holes?”

For now, actually figuring out what a certain UDS command sent from the CANtact might do in a specific vehicle will largely be a matter of trial and error for amateur car hackers, says Evenchick. But by publishing its software on Github, he hopes the code will become a collection of different hackers’ techniques that target individual vehicle makes and models. 

“It would be awesome if people messing around with their cars… could work together to build a library [of code] to do all this stuff,” says Evenchick. “You’re a Honda owner, and someone else is a Honda owner. If they find some cool things to do and you want to play around with it too, they can share it.”

The CANtact, of course, can only test security exploits that require physical access, not remote attacks. But the device does help to automate the testing of security exploits that would be possible once a hacker has already gained a wireless foothold on a car’s network. And the notion of a hacker gaining that sort of initial wireless foothold in a car’s network is more than theoretical. Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego demonstrated in 2011 that they could gain access to an unnamed car’s network through wireless attacks that included a Bluetooth connection, the car’s OnStar-like cellular radio, and even Android malware on the driver’s phone.

Evenchick says his CANtact gadget isn’t intended to make any sort of malicious car hacking easier. Instead, he argues, it’s meant to foster hobbyist car hacking and security research that can expose and help fix real vulnerabilities in the digital components of cars and trucks. Miller and Valasek’s earlier research, for example, served as a public demonstration that cars’ internal networks lack basic security protections. 

Their work led to Senator Edward Markey sending a series of questions to 20 automakers that eventually revealed widespread inattention to security and in some cases a potential lack of anti-hacking measures in their cars and trucks. Only seven of the companies said they used third party security auditing for their vehicles, and only two said they currently had features to respond to a hacker intrusion on their vehicles’ CAN buses.

The more attention and testing those car systems receive, Evenchick says, the more secure they’ll eventually become. “You don’t really own a device until you can open it up and tear it apart,” says Evenchick. “Your car is more connected than ever before. Just having people know what’s going on with cars and understand them better would be kind of nice.”

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