Cell Phones That Learn the Sounds of Your Life 121
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed new software that uses the microphone on the iPhone to track and interpret a user's everyday activities using sound. The software, called SoundSense,
picks up sounds and tries to classify them into certain
categories. SoundSense can recognize completely unfamiliar
sounds and runs entirely on the phone. It automatically classifies
sounds as 'voice,' 'music,' or 'ambient noise.' If a sound is repeated
often enough or for long enough, SoundSense gives it a high 'sound
rank' and asks the user to confirm that it is a significant sound and
offers the option to label the sound. In testing, the SoundSense
software was able to correctly determine when the user was in a
particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling,
and driving in the car. It also picked up the noise of an ATM and a fan in a particular room. The results [PDF]
of the experiments were recently presented at the MobiSys 2009 conference."
It's easy to say 'OMG PRIVACY!!' but.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets be honest people. If a device is capable, someone will write the software to enable it. This shouldn't be surprising or shocking. When 'wearable computers' started getting buzz it was because people were walking around with web-cams attached to their heads seeing everything they could see and slashdot thought it while amazingly geeky, was cool. This isn't that different except there's no soldering required.
To be honest, we haven't even seen the worst of it yet. Considering the deluge of FPGA and EEPROM powered embedded devices out there you'd best be scared of the things that are _hard_ to reprogram, not the ones with complete IDEs and API documentation available.
I'm more concerned about someone snooping on me from my Jura Capresso than I am from my cell phone.
Re:Oh great.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
GPS can generally tell you were you are, but only up to a point. Are you in the coffee shop, bathroom, or conference room in that giant building located at 455 N. Example?
Ah, the paranoia... (Score:3, Insightful)
Research. That's right. Research. Actually finding out what people are doing/eating/etc. is actually really hard. People's recollection is full of holes. Think about it: What were you doing exactly 1 hour ago? Most people will be able to name the task, but not what specific activity in that task they were doing. Where you talking? Where you typing. Where you taking a two minute mental break and staring off into space? Yeah. It's hard to recall these inane details. But things like how many people you have contact with, how often you're in public-public (and not in an office, etc.) are hard to get at. How many times have I been to the café down the street in the last week? Hell if I know. But if I volunteer for a study - let's say, time spent in a restaurant by number of colds people get (totally made up on the spot for the purpose of illustration), this way the researcher doesn't have to trust a potentially erroneous recollection... they can get another, good estimate. It's made to be opt-in, and for research of this, that or the other thing.
Is there a potential for abuse? Sure. There's lots of things with abuse potential. But I hate to break it to you, but they tracked Pablo Escobar in 93 from his phone. And it's only got easier since. If you want perfect privacy, don't get a cellphone.
how much battery power will this suck down? (Score:3, Insightful)
how much battery power will this suck down?
In response to "Why?" (Score:4, Insightful)
I see a lot of tags/comments asking what this is useful for. There are a few uber-nerd things like recording your life and whatnot that I'm not going to get into, but the big one is determining location.
There are a TON of sweet things you can do with accurate location information, but the one that I'm most yearning for is to control my bluetooth, wifi, ringer volume, etc based on where I am during the day.
I'm an Android user, and there's a very nice applet called Locale that attempts to do this, but it proves to be pretty useless. The reason is that you're either using GPS (drains battery, doesn't work indoors) or wifi (drains lots of battery, and is the primary thing you want to control) to figure out where you are. If using the microphone and cpu is cheaper in energy, then this will be a big win.
Beyond the energy use argument, one of the main things you want to control is bluetooth - again, it drains batteries when on, and is not generally useful. But it's EXTRAORDINARILY useful in the car if you have a hands-free setup. Again, figuring out when you're in a car is hard via GPS or wifi, but this technique would seem to knock that one out of the park.
So, in summary, having your phone know where you are in your daily routine allows it to be more intelligent about what services and functionality it enables, and thus makes your cell phone that much smarter and more valuable.
Real motivation behind this (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
This sounds more like proof-of-concept than anything practical...for now. I'm not so worried about the "government" using this technology as I am concerned that it is a marketer's dream.
It's curious that there is so much concern about the government having some sort of dominion over our lives when corporations, through the use of advertisement, data-mining, targeting, etc have already exerted such a negative influence on us for more than a quarter-century.
Our jobs, our relationships, our belongings, our free-time, even our sex have been so thoroughly shaped by purposeful use of the tools of advertisement and marketing that the areas of free choice regarding our behavior has come down to "extra large or supersize". The tools that corporations use are so shockingly effective that we actually think we're being radical and individualist for choosing one brand over another. Even the best efforts of government to control our behavior have failed miserably (war on drugs) thanks to built-in limitations. No such limitations exist in the corporate world. You can vote out your mayor, senator, president. What similar influence do you have over the direction of Aetna, AT&T or KBR, Inc?