Google’s DNNresearch acquisition to help with voice search

Google Inc.’s acquisition of Toronto technology startup DNNresearch Inc. could help the company perfect its voice search technology on mobile devices and computers, analysts said. In a release on March 12, the University of Toronto said DNNresearch, owned by Geoffrey Hinton, a professor in the department of computer science, and two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, was acquired for its research on deep neural networks, which has implications for speech recognition, as well as computer vision and language understanding. The university and Google did not disclose the value of the transaction though the release said the acquisition follows a $600,000 “gift” that Google awarded to Hinton’s research group for work on neural networks. Roberta Fox, chair and chief innovation officer at consulting firm Fox Group in Toronto, said in a phone interview that neural networks have implications for voice recognition technology. She said more sophisticated voice capabilities are emerging for users to command searches and other functions on mobile devices without their hands—which is particularly useful while driving. “It’s that kind of thing, bringing the global positioning intelligence with the network locations, with services, and more intelligence between devices and people,” Fox said. “That’s probably why Google wants to do it.” Fox said a main driver behind Google’s neural network research may be changes to laws worldwide that are limiting or restricting the use of smartphones while driving. “If you’ve got voice and you’re hands-free in your car, you can still browse,” she said. Duncan Stewart, director of technology, media and telecom at Deloitte Canada, said in a phone interview that neural network companies are in “hot demand” as there are few that excel in voice and gesture recognition technologies. “It’s of compelling interest for any smartphone operating system manufacturer to get significantly better at voice,” Stewart said. Smartphone operating systems, such as Google’s Android, Apple Inc.’s iOS or BlackBerry’s BB10 system, have voice controls or voice search capabilities. Apple's popular Siri program is a so-called “intelligent personal assistant” that can receive voice commands to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions on Apple iOS devices. Stewart said tech companies will often acquire a small, innovative company or startup if they are interested in it and if they don’t want it to be bought up by a competitor. He said voice capabilities are convenient for dialing numbers, though the error rate is 15 to 20 per cent higher for search functions. “If I tell my computer, ‘Page up, page down,’ those are nice and clear,” Stewart said. “If I say something like, ‘Find me a colour TV that’s 42 inches and offers HDMI cables,’ there are so many different places that it could go wrong and be imprecise. Search would be a very likely place where more effective voice would be of great utility,” he said. The promise of neural network research is that it will hopefully lead to the better detection patterns, Stewart said, such as a human face or hand, and better speech and gesture recognition. A Google official, who asked not to be named so they could speak more freely, said the company views the DNNresearch purchase as the hiring of new talent. “We really look at it as having hired the talents of Geoff Hinton and a couple of his post-graduate students,” the person said. Hinton can apply his expertise “to a variety of complex problems Google is trying to solve,” the Google official said. The official would not comment on whether DNNresearch’s work would be applied directly to mobile, though they said voice search technology requires the development of “reasonably great” speech recognition and natural language understanding. Hinton's research has “broad implications” for cataloguing the web and the ways in which search information is found, the official said. “Everything that we do right now is geared towards understanding and improving the mobile environment,” the person said. —With reporting by Danika Grenier at dgrenier@thewirereport.ca and editing by Simon Doyle at sdoyle@thewirereport.ca

Google’s DNNresearch acquisition to help with voice search

News | March 26, 2013

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