recognition - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Mar

Play Movies App Updated With In-Depth 'Info Cards', Service Launches In India & Mexico

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Google, News

We've all played the "Wait, who is that guy again?" or "What song is that?" while watching a movie. Now, with the latest update to the Play Movies app, if you want to get the answer to that question, all you have to do is press pause. Info cards will then pop up with face recognition of actors on screen, what other movies they're in, and what music you're hearing.

The feature only works on "supported movies" and it's a little unclear which ones those are (there doesn't seem to be any icon or indicator that shows whether any given movie in your library can show cards).

Feb

Utter! Claims To Be The First Non-IME App To Utilize Offline Voice Recognition In Jelly Bean

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Applications, Development, News

Did you know that, since the last update to Google Search, developers have been able to utilize offline voice recognition? Previously, any non-system app that wasn't an IME (Input Method Editor) that hoped to recognize your voice without a web connection needed a rather kludgy typing overlay. Since the update though, apps can hear and interpret not just your words, but essentially any command that doesn't explicitly require web access.

Utter!, taking advantage of the new possibility, claims to have become the first app with working offline voice recognition for Android Jelly Bean. After reaching out to Ben Randall, the app's developer, we've got a clearer picture of what it used to take to recognize speech offline, and what has changed.

Aug

Google Translate Gets Bumped To v2.5, Adds Live Updating And Image Translation

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Applications, News

Google Translate, the frequently-overlooked wonder app of the 3rd millennium, got some new features today. Chief among them is an amazing new image-based translation mechanism. The app now supports use of your camera to take a picture of the text you would like to translate. Once that's done, just "brush" over the word or phrase you need to read and Translate will do what it says on the tin: render that text in your preferred language. It's not quite WordLens' live view, but then, if you've ever used WordLens' pause feature, you know that slowing things down a bit might actually be helpful.

Jul

Thumb Keyboard Gets Updated To Version 4.5 Bringing Continuous Voice Recognition, One-Handed Keyboard, And More

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Applications, News

Thumb Keyboard, one of the most intuitive, well-designed, and practical keyboards available (especially for tablet users) got a big update recently, bringing the app up to version 4.5.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to the new update is that Thumb Keyboard now supports ICS' continuous voice recognition, which in case you've forgotten, is the feature introduced with Ice Cream Sandwich that actively listens and dictates your speech. This is a feature I haven't seen in other alternative keyboards, and it's definitely nice to have. Other big additions include gesture support as well as a new one-handed layout for phones with larger displays.

Jul

Google Adds Handwriting Recognition To Search In Your Mobile Browser, Makes Search More Awesome

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Google, News

In its endless attempts to make searching easier for everyone, Google has introduced yet another way to search via its mobile site at google.com: handwriting recognition. If you go to Google's search page from your phone or tablet's mobile browser and enable the feature via settings, you can now scribble your searches on the screen, even after receiving results. It's pretty fancy!

Of course, this does raise the question of whether this input method is any faster. In the video above, in an attempt to show how this might be used, we see a man who has had nearly all of his fingers broken scribble the words "ski lessons" on the screen.

Jul

Flow Is An Amazon-Powered Augmented Reality Product Search App That's Not Really As Cool As It Sounds

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Applications, News

Amazon-owned development house A9 Innovations has released a product search app built on the idea that instead of tapping buttons to take pictures of products, you'd rather just point your camera at products. Probably not a bad notion! Not exactly the most important thing to spend a bunch of money and time developing, but hey, if you can just wave your phone in front of a movie and get pricing and review information, it's gotta be worth it, right?

Well, it would be, if it worked like that. Unfortunately, in practice the augmented reality app has some trouble recognizing cover art.

Mar

First Alpha Build Of Utter! Released With Limited Functionality, Goes By The Name Of (N)utter, Still Reads Your Mind

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Applications, News

About a month and a half ago, we posted about a highly impressive voice control app named "Utter!". Siri competitors are a dime a dozen nowadays, but Utter! is a lot more HAL than Siri:

Want a add a calendar appointment? Tell Utter, and it'll take care of it. Get travel details, find out the weather, and launch applications - all child's play for Utter, and all done using native applications instead of just simple searches.

Actually, that's just scratching the surface for Utter - if you watch the entire 22 minute video, you'll see the developer, brandall of XDA, use Utter to set his CPU governor (yes, it asks for superuser permissions), reboot into the bootloader, and even have a conversation.

Jun

New App: ObscuraCam Automatically Detects, Blurs Faces And Strips Metadata From Your Photos

Posted by David Ruddock in Applications, Apps/Games, News, Tips & Tutorials

OK, this is probably one of the cooler apps I've seen in a while. ObscuraCam is an open source photo anonymizer project made in concert with the folks over at Witness.org - a human rights violation watchdog. Why is a human rights organization helping you blur those photos you took that night you accidentally [insert potential human rights violation here] but still thought would be hilarious to upload to Facebook?

Well, Witness wants this app to be used by political dissidents in countries where things like facial identification and metadata scraping are major barriers to posting photos of political protests online.

Apr

[Hands-On] Google Docs Photo Upload OCR: It Kind Of Sucks At This Point

Posted by David Ruddock in App Reviews, Applications, Apps/Games, Reviews, Tips & Tutorials

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

We were all very excited to hear about the Google Docs for Android announcement this morning, and even more so when we learned it came with a special surprise feature: the ability to upload photos of physical documents from your Android phone and have them transcribed by Google Docs into editable text.

So, the first thing I was curious about, naturally, is just how well this new feature works in the real world. As you may have guessed from the title, not very. Let me show you the photos I tasked Google Docs for Android with transcribing.

Document 1: Printed handout:

Document 1 results:

OF CONSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS ON DEFAMATÍON
PUBLIC OFFICIALS GENERAL PURPOSE PUBLIC FIGURES
LIMITED PUBLIC FIGURES WHERE MATTER OF PUBLIC CONCERN
LIMITED PUBLIC FIGURE WHERE NOT MATTER OF PUBLIC CONCERN
PRIVATE PERSONS WHERE MATTER OF PUBLIC CONCERN
PRIVATE PERSONS WHERE NOT MATTER OF PUBLIC CONCERN
ACTUAL MALICE.

Jan

Videosurf Will Bring Video Recognition To Your Cell Phone; "It's Like Shazam, But For Video."

Posted by Brad Ganley in Applications, Apps/Games, News, Videos

With all the mind-blowing news coming in from CES 2011, it's easy to forget that interesting and innovative things are coming from other sources at the same time. Here is one of those sources.

A new service somewhat reminiscent of Shazam and Sound Hound has surfaced on our radar, but with one major distinction: this app does videos. Using proprietary algorithms and software (read: magic), newcomer Videosurf will not only help you identify what T.V. show or movie you're watching, but what episode you're looking at, summaries, actors, actor information, and all kinds of information you didn't know you were missing out on right there on your cell phone.