Gizmorama - December 23, 2013
Good Morning, It appears that voice recognition is the next big up-grade to our electronic devices - and Google is all over it! Say "goodbye" to display screens and actually say "hello" to voice recognition operated devices.
Learn about these interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
Erin ****-- NASA airborne mission helps manage water supplies in California --*PASADENA, Calif. - NASA says an airborne mission helped water managers for 2.6 million Californians achieve near-perfect water operations this summer. Despite the driest year in California's recorded history, high-resolution snow maps of the Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierra Nevada provided by the prototype Airborne Snow Observatory mission helped optimize reservoir filling and hydroelectric generation at a reservoir and dam that serves the San Francisco Bay Area, the space agency reported Monday. The result was a full reservoir at the end of the snowmelt season, no water spillage and generation of more than $3.9 million in hydropower, NASA scientists said. "For the first time, Airborne Snow Observatory data are telling us the total water in the snowpack in the watershed and the absorption of sunlight that control its melt speed, enabling us to estimate how much water will flow out of a basin when the snow melts," said Tom Painter, observatory principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. This helped reservoir managers more efficiently allocate water inflow between power generation, water supplies and ecological purposes, he said. Efficient reservoir operations are vital in the face of ongoing climate change, larger weather uncertainties, California's ongoing severe drought and increasing demand for water, he said.
*-- Google hard at work bringing voice recognition to the mainstream --*LONDON - The next generation of computing devices may dispense with display screens and rely strictly on voice recognition, an engineer at U.S. search giant Google says. Google has seen dramatic growth of voice search and recognition tools, with recent improvements encouraging more people to start using the capabilities, the company's senior engineering director Scott Huffman said. "We are looking to a future where we have a whole variety of devices," Huffman told Britain's The Guardian from Google's London offices. "We have a super computer in our pockets, but also one in our watch, one in our glasses, maybe on our lapel as well as our laptop. "Some of those have a screen and a keyboard but some won't, and we're seeing dramatic growth in the numbers of people interacting through voice recognition." Google has already made its first foray into the world of voice recognition with its pilot project for Google Glass, its wearable computer offering navigation directions, photo and video shooting and basic web searches accessed mostly through voice commands. The company is also expanding voice recognition services on its Android mobile operating system, running on almost 60 percent of the world's smartphones. "It's a cultural thing, getting used to a technology like this, but there will be a whole set of devices built around it," Huffman said. "Two to three years ago we crossed the line from a demo to a real product, so now at least most of the time it can understand what I say. We're still work on the recognition of accents, and there are a litany of problems. But when it works, it is magic."
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