Do Carriers Want To Abandon Google?

Carrier dissatisfaction with the Android maker Google is growing as more of them look to alternatives to curb what they perceive as the search engine outfit’s inflexibility.

AT&T has publically mentioned it is looking at flogging a smartphone powered by an alternative version of Android. If true, the move is a deliberate slap in the face to Google.

US carriers are a little perturbed about the amount of control has over its products and are looking to rivals such as Cyanogen, which distributes a version of Android that’s only partially controlled by Google.

ZTE had been in discussions to make the device, these people say. But mysteriously its involvement was put in jeopardy when the US government suddenly imposed trade sanctions on the company – of course this is nothing to do with Google.

The big idea is to do something like Amazon and create new flavor of Android based on Google’s source code but controlled entirely by AT&T. It would also give AT&T sole responsibility for maintaining the OS going forward.

It would bugger up Google’s because changes to the Android system might be difficult to incorporate into AT&T’s new version, and some might not make it over at all. However AT&T would be able to integrate phones more deeply into its existing infrastructure and issue updates when it wants.

One likely possibility would be an OS-level integration with AT&T’s DirectTV service which is tricky under Google’s rules. It is not clear if AT&T is serious, or if it is just a move to force Google to pull finger.

Courtesy-Fud

Google Upgrades Voice Search

Google said it has constructed a better neural network that is making its voice search work faster and better in noisy environments.

“We are happy to announce that our new acoustic models are now used for voice searches and commands in the Google app (on Android and iOS), and for dictation on Android devices,” Google’s Speech Team wrote in a recent  blog post . “In addition to requiring much lower computational resources, the new models are more accurate, robust to noise, and faster to respond to voice search queries.”

In 2013, Google brought the same voice recognition tools that had been working in Google Now to Google Search.

Along with being able to find information on the Internet, Google Voice Search also was able to find information for users in their Gmail, Google Calendar and Google+ accounts.

At the 2013 Google I/O developers conference, Amit Singhai, today a senior vice president and Google Fellow, said the future of search is in voice. For Google, he said, future searches will be more like conversations with your computer or device, which also will be able to give you information before you even ask for it.

The company went on to make it clear that it would continue to focus on voice search.

And this week’s announcement backs that up.

Google explained in its blog post that it has updated the neural network it’s using for voice search. A neural network is a computer system based on the way the human brain and nervous system work. It generally uses many processors operating in parallel.

The improved neural network is able to consume the incoming audio in larger chunks than conventional models without performing as many calculations.

“With this, we drastically reduced computations and made the recognizer much faster,” the team wrote. “We also added artificial noise and reverberation to the training data, making the recognizer more robust to ambient noise.”

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/google-upgrades-voice-search.html

Bill Had A Hand In Microsoft Buying Skype

One of the world’s richest people, Bill Gates had given his blessing for Microsoft to buy Skype for $8.5 billion dollars.  Actually, Bill Gates pressed other executives on the board of directors to support or back the idea of gobbling Sky which has yet to turn a profit.

Word on the street is that Bill told the Gates BBC in an interview which will be televised this weekend that he played an instrumental role in getting this deal approved by the board of directors. So this really squashes any rumors that Steve Ballmer was the force behind the deal getting approved by the executive team.

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