back to article Facebook to gobble voice-recog outfit, not so chatty on price tag

Facebook plans to buy speech recognition and translation app maker Mobile Technologies for an undisclosed sum. The free-content ad-network said on Monday that it had agreed to acquire the outfit, adding that MT's "amazing team" is "behind some of the world's leading speech recognition and machine translation technology". Once …

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  1. Ged T
    Joke

    Keep breathing normally...

    They probably want to keep the chat about the price down as they don't want the shareholder to skyperventilate...

  2. ForthIsNotDead
    Black Helicopters

    Skynet

    This isn't going to be used for voice *recognition*. It's going to be used for voice *tagging*. Android and Apple platforms already have voice *recognition*, so there's no particular requirement there. No, this is about voice *tagging*.

    You'll be required to speak into your phone to "train" the system to recognise certain commands like "send custard pie to Chris Jones". Yeah yeah, very clever. But that's *not* what it's there for. It's actually just learning what *you* sound like. It will then associate that voice with your FB account.

    Once enough voice profiles are in the hands of FB, it will be a simple matter to periodically enable the microphone on your mobile (cos Joe Punter will just mindlessly accept the "FB App needs access to your microphone" permission when he installs the app (what other choice does he have)) and determine who is in a room. This will be correlated with GPS and Network SSID data to determine your physical location:

    9:15pm, Monday, April 9th 2015: John, Chris and Debra are at Peter's house!

    Quite possibly the last link in the chain to the total surveillance net that is Facebook.

    So glad I don't have a FB account.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Source? - "people entering their details into the site as "dumb fucks"

    "Back in 2004, when Zuck founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm, the flame-haired, sneaker-wearing billionaire famously described the people entering their details into the site as 'dumb fucks'"

    Its the sheer misunderstanding of the volume of details being voluntarily handed over and how this can be misused that is the problem. Sometimes I come under pressure from my little lady to post photos of us on this POS. If I don't there must be something wrong with us. WTF? I need to persuade her otherwise. Anyone got a source for this quote? Thanks in advance!

    1. meh1010

      Re: Source? - "people entering their details into the site as "dumb fucks"

      http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas?currentPage=all

      you're welcome :)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        'you're welcome :)'

        Gracias! Its a much better in-depth read than anything that showed up my quick DuckDuckGo search!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Son a 'Dumb Fuck'...

    FB and Gmail et al conspire to form the greatest social experiment ever. It doesn't have much impact today, but what if I have a kid? How much will that system know about them by the time they're 21?

    How will that information be used against them in ways no one in authority ever conceived? By then instead of flying cars the best minds of our generation will have designed cunning behavioural analysis and marketing tools to sell-sell-sell. How well will a kid's defences hold up against that kind of onslaught? That's the upside...

    The downside is the potential nasty dark dark ways the data will get used and slurped. We know the NSA does favours for US businesses. I worry about how this data will be crunched. But hey middle aged pension-staring politicians and cosy bureaucrats like the Irish DPC have our backs. So no worries eh?

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      My kid doesn't use Facebook because I have taught her the fallacy of such "connections".

      As a kid, if you have a friend, then you TALK to that person, you don't type words into a computer. Because, as a kid, the only friends you have are RIGHT WITH YOU, EVERY DAY, in the biggest social connection tool since the dawn of Mankind - school.

      Once you have grown up and become a teenager, the rules do tend to change. There are some old friends that have moved, and you use the Internet therefor can make contact with interesting people you will probably never see face-to-face. At that time, one can start using social sites cautiously, but tools like NSA Messenger (aka Skype) will be much more profitable to stay in contact.

      The thing is just to always remember : whatever you put on the Internet will ALWAYS remain available. So don't put anything you'd rather not be remembered of (or have anyone else find out) in twenty years.

      Yeah, that's the hard part.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        'I have taught her the fallacy'

        Kudos! But in the wider population I wonder how many kids will listen when school peer pressure and proliferation of smart devices takes precedence....

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    " .......the people entering their details into the site as "dumb fucks".

    Of course, Zuck's grown up now and has taken Facebook public. Surely no one would now label the over 1 billion people on his network as chumps for handing over so much personal data, would they?"

    I would!

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