Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 15

• Creating a Computer Voice That People Like: The challenge of creating a computer “personality” is now one that a growing number of software designers are grappling with as computers become portable and users with busy hands and eyes increasingly use voice interaction.Machines are listening, understanding and speaking, and not just computers and smartphones. Voices have been added to a wide range of everyday objects like cars and toys, as well as household information “appliances” like the home-companion robots Pepper and Jibo, and Alexa, the voice of the Amazon Echo speaker device. A new design science is emerging in the pursuit of building what are called “conversational agents,” software programs that understand natural language and speech and can respond to human voice commands. However, the creation of such systems, led by researchers in a field known as human-computer interaction design, is still as much an art as it is a science. It is not yet possible to create a computerized voice that is indistinguishable from a human one for anything longer than short phrases that might be used for weather forecasts or communicating driving directions.Most software designers acknowledge that they are still faced with crossing the “uncanny valley,” in which voices that are almost human-sounding are actually disturbing or jarring. The phrase was coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. He observed that as graphical animations became more humanlike, there was a point at which they would become creepy and weird before improving to become indistinguishable from videos of humans. Beyond correct pronunciation, there is the even larger challenge of correctly placing human qualities like inflection and emotion into speech. Linguists call this “prosody,” the ability to add correct stress, intonation or sentiment to spoken language. Today, even with all the progress, it is not possible to completely represent rich emotions in human speech via artificial intelligence. The first experimental-research results — gained from employing machine-learning algorithms and huge databases of human emotions embedded in speech — are just becoming available to speech scientists.

• Why robots and smart thermostats keep America’s spy chief up at night: Some people are already used to having their personal information exposed in massive data breaches. But the rise of artificial intelligence and connected computers in everything from toasters to implanted medical device could dramatically raise the stakes of digital security. In fact, they topped a long list of "global threats" that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper unveiled Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services committee. "The Internet of Things will connect tens of billions of new physical devices that could be exploited," Clapper wrote in his Senate testimony. "Artificial intelligence will enable computers to make autonomous decisions" that hackers could disrupt to cause chaos. For the nation's spy chief to place those threats so high on his list is a big deal, and it reflects how deeply concerned the intelligence community is about the potential pitfalls of these technologies. But Clapper also found a silver lining, writing in his assessment that the technology can "also create new opportunities for our own intelligence collectors." In other words, you can expect America's intelligence community to use driverless cars, smart thermostats and automated networks for spying purposes, too. And indeed, in the written assessment Clapper notes that "intelligence services might use the IoT for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," in the future. Back in 2013, for example, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on a company that sold web-connected cameras. The privacy watchdog alleged that faulty software packaged with the devices, which were marketed as secure, left private video feeds exposed online, eventually allowing hackers to share links to live streams from 700 customers' homes online. More alarming is the potential for people to be able exploit devices to cause lethal results, from medical equipment to cars. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration warned hospitals not to use one kind of drug pump after researchers uncovered a flaw that "could allow an unauthorized user to control the device and change the dosage the pump delivers, which could lead to over- or under-infusion of critical patient therapies."

• Apple May Ditch Samsung For Next iPhone Chip: Apple and Samsung have been asymmetric competitors for years, fighting to grab smartphone market share and partnering when it comes to chips. According to a recent report from The Electronic Times, TSMC (the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) will be the only company manufacturing the A10 for the next iPhone. Samsung won’t be working with Apple for the next iPhone. This isn’t an overnight change as Apple has already been working with TSMC in the past. The A9 chips in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are currently manufactured by both TSMC and Samsung. Before that, TSMC was the sole supplier of the A8 for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Using multiple manufacturing partners provide different advantages. First, it’s a good way to make sure that you won’t have any supply shortage. Given that Apple sells tens of millions of iPhones per quarter, it’s unclear whether Samsung alone or TSMC alone can manufacture enough chips for all these phones. Samsung and TSMC also manufacture chips for other phones as well. Second, negotiating with multiple companies lets you get better prices. It’s unclear whether Samsung is more expensive than TSMC, but Apple can drive the prices down as the A10 represents a huge contract. Finally, Apple can pick the most efficient design. TSMC’s A9 was slightly better when it comes to battery life. So Apple might favor TSMC for this reason as well. According to The Electronic Times, TSMC should start production of the A10 in June ahead of the iPhone 7 release this Fall. It could feature a 10nm design. We’ll have to wait for an iPhone 7 teardown to learn more about the A10. For the end customer, it doesn’t change much if your iPhone chip is manufactured by TSMC or Samsung. Both companies implement Apple’s own CPU design. But Samsung’s chip business could take a hit from this failed contract.