Make Your Amazon Echo an ASMR Device
June 7, 2017
For people who love simple and soothing sounds, the Internet is a boon for their stimulation. White noise or ambient noise is a technique many people use to relax or fall asleep. Ambient devices used to be sold through catalogs, especially Sky Mall, but now any sort of sound can be accessed through YouTube or apps for free. Smart speakers are the next evolution for ambient noise. CNET has a cool article that explains, “How To Turn Your Amazon Echo Into A Noise Machine.”
The article lists several skills that can be downloaded onto the Echo and the Echo Dot. The first two suggestions are music skills: Amazon Prime Music and Spotify. Using these skills, the user can request that Alexia finds any variety of nature sounds and then play them on a loop. It takes some trial and error to find the perfect sounds to fit your tastes, but once found they can be added to a playlist. An easier way, but might offer less variety is:
One of the best ways to find ambient noise or nature sounds for Alexa is through skills. Developer Nick Schwab created a family of skills under Ambient Noise. There are currently 12 skills or sounds to choose from:
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Airplane
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Babbling Brook
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Birds
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City
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Crickets
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Fan
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Fireplace
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Frogs
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Ocean waves
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Rainforest
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Thunderstorms
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Train
Normally, you could just say, “Alexa, open Ambient Noise,” to enable the skill, but there are too many similar skills for Alexa to list and let you choose using your voice. Instead, go to alexa.amazon.com or open the iOS or Android app and open the Skills menu. Search for Ambient Noise and click Enable.
This is not a bad start for ambient noises, but the vocal command adds its own set of problems. Amazon should consider upgrading their machine learning algorithms to a Bitext-based solution. If you want something with a WHOLE lot more variety to check out YouTube and search for ambient noise or ASMR.
Whitney Grace, June 7, 2017
Yandex Learns Search Can Be Exciting
June 6, 2017
I am not sure if this Thomson Reuters “real news” story is accurate. I found it amusing. You are on your own with this item, gentle reader.
I read “Investigators Search Ukrainian Offices of Russia’s Yandex.” The main point struck me as:
Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) raided the local offices of Russia’s top search site Yandex on Monday in an operation that SBU spokesman Olena Gitlyanska said was part of a treason investigation.
The operative word is treason. Exciting, right?
Yandex has previously said it operates fully in accordance with Ukrainian law. It does not expect sanctions to have a material negative impact on its business.
Let’s assume that the “real news” is accurate. The idea that a Web indexing company is guilty of treason is interesting. I know that in my word with a parent’s group to identify potentially harmful sites for their children, I use Yandex as an example.
Ukrainian officials did not reference Yandex’s more interesting indexing policies. That’s a shame. Treason may be more important to the Ukrainian government that links to certain interesting types of videos.
Treason can have a “material negative impact,” however.
Stephen E Arnold, June 5, 2017
Google CFO Loves Some Data More than Other Data
June 6, 2017
I read “Why Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat Was the Perfect Fit at Google.” I know that CNBC is a “real news” outfit. Its reporters work tirelessly to get the facts and connect the dots for its legions of fans.
However, I noted one very tiny oversight in the story about Google’s data loving chief financial officer.
First, a bit of history. Recode reported in “Google Refuses to Hand over Salary Data to the US Government.” I assume that Recode’s self assured “real news” folks have their facts lined up. In that write up, I learned that Google does not have data about how much it pays its employees. The reasons cited in the article strike me as a bit along the lines of “the dog ate my homework.”
Now consider the CNBC story about Alphabet Google’s data loving CFO, Ruth Porat, a professional from the estimable firm of Morgan Stanley. I learned:
“The most valuable thing you can have as a leader is clear data,” Porat said Wednesday [May 31, 2017] , in describing her role at the company.
Ms. Porat finds the moniker “Ruth Vader” fantastic.
She allegedly said:
The best thing I can do is give them accurate data. It’s really about the data.
Doesn’t it seem logical that the CFO of Alphabet Google would know what the company pays its employees?
Well, pilgrim, that’s not the type of data the company tracks.
Doesn’t the omission of salary data from the CNBC story seem to be a bit careless.
Pretty remarkable for Ruth Vader to only be interested in some company wide data. Love is selective just like deciding what dots to connect.
Stephen E Arnold, June 4, 2017
Bibliophiles Have 25 Million Reasons to Smile
June 6, 2017
The US Library of Congress has released 25 million records of its collection online and are anyone with Internet access is free to use it.
According to Science Alert article titled The US Library of Congress Just Put 25 Million Records Online, Free of Charge:
The bibliographic data sets, like digital library cards, cover music, books, maps, manuscripts, and more, and their publication online marks the biggest release of digital records in the Library’s history.
The Library of Congress has been on digitization spree for long and users can expect more records to be made online in the near future. The challenge, however, is retrieving books or information that the user needs. The web interface is still complicated and not user-friendly. In short, the enterprise search function is a mess. What The Library of Congress really needs is a user-friendly and efficient way of accessing its vast collection of knowledge to bibliophiles.
Vishal Ingole, June 6, 2017
The Next Digital Assistant Is Apple Flavored
June 6, 2017
Amazon Alexa dominated the digital assistant market until Google released Google Assistant. Both assistants are accessible through smart devices, but more readily through smart speakers that react to vocal commands. Google and Amazon need to move over, because Apple wants a place on the coffee table. Mashable explores Apple’s latest invention in, “Apple’s Answer To The Amazon Echo Could Be Unveiled As Early As June.”
Guess who will be the voice behind Apple’s digital assistant? Why Siri, of course! While Apple can already hear your groans, the shiny, new smart speaker will distract you. Apple is fantastically wonderful at packaging and branding their technology to be chic, minimalist, and trendy. Will the new packaging be enough to gain Siri fans? Apple should consider deploying Bitext’s computational linguistic platform that renders human speech more comprehensible to computers and even includes sentimental analysis. This is an upgrade Siri desperately needs.
Apple is also in desperate need to upgrade itself to the increasing demand for smart home products:
Up until now, people married to the Apple ecosystem haven’t had many smart-home options. That’s because the two dominant players, Echo and Google Home, don’t play nice with Siri. So if people wanted to stick with Apple, they only really had one option: Wait it out.
That’s about to change as the new Essential Home will work with Apple’s voice assistant. And, as an added bonus, the Essential Home looks nice. So nice, in fact, that it could sway Apple fans who are dying to get in on the smart-home game but don’t want to wait any longer for Apple to get its act together. “
The new Apple digital assistant will also come with a screen, possibly a way to leverage more of the market and compete with the new Amazon Echo Show. However, I thought the point of having a smart speaker was to decrease a user’s dependency on screen-related devices. That’s going to be a hard habit to break, but it’s about time Apple added its flavor to the digital assistant shelf.
Whitney Grace, June 6, 2017
Antidot: Fluid Topics
June 5, 2017
I find French innovators creative. Over the years I have found the visualizations of DATOPS, the architecture of Exalead, the wonkiness of Kartoo, the intriguing Semio, and the numerous attempts to federate data and work flow like digital librarians and subject matter experts. The Descartes- and Femat-inspired engineers created software and systems which try to trim the pointy end off many information thorns.
I read “Antidot Enables ‘Interactive’ Tech Docs That Are Easier To Publish, More Relevant To Users – and Actually Get Read.” Antidot, for those not familiar with the company, was founded in 1999. Today the company bills itself as a specialist in semantic search and content classification. The search system is named Taruqa, and the classification component is called “Classifier.”
The Fluid Topics product combines a number of content processing functions in a workflow designed to provide authorized users with the right information at the right time.
According to the write up:
Antidot has updated its document delivery platform with new features aimed at making it easier to create user-friendly interactive docs. Docs are created and consumed thanks to a combination of semantic search, content enrichment, automatic content tagging and more.
The phrase “content enrichment” suggests to me that multiple indexing and metadata identification subroutines crunch on text. The idea is that a query can be expanded, tap into entity extraction, and make use of text analytics to identify documents which keyword matching would overlook.
The Fluid Topic angle is that documentation and other types of enterprise information can be indexed and matched to a user’s profile or to a user’s query. The result is that the needed document is findable.
The slicing and dicing of processed content makes it possible for the system to assemble snippets or complete documents into an “interactive document.” The idea is that most workers today are not too thrilled to get a results list and the job of opening, scanning, extracting, and closing links. The Easter egg hunt approach to finding business information is less entertaining than looking at Snapchat images or checking what’s new with pals on Facebook.
The write up states:
Users can read, search, navigate, annotate, create alerts, send feedback to writers, with a rich and intuitive user experience.
I noted this list of benefits fro the Fluid Topics’ approach:
- Quick, easy access to the right information at the right time, making searching for technical product knowledge really efficient.
- Combine and transform technical content into relevant, useful information by slicing and dicing data from virtually any source to create a unified knowledge hub.
- Freedom for any user to tailor documentation and provide useful feedback to writers.
- Knowledge of how documentation is actually used.
Applications include:
- Casual publishing which means a user can create a “personal” book of content and share them.
- Content organization which organizes the often chaotic and scattered source information
- Markdown which means formatting information in a consistent way.
Fluid Topics is a hybrid which combines automatic indexing and metadata extraction, search, and publishing.
More information about Fluid Topics is available at a separate Antidot Web site called “Fluid Topics.” The company provides a video which explains how you can transform your world when you tackle search, customer support, and content federation and repurposing. Fluid Topics also performs text analytics for the “age of limitless technical content delivery.”
Hewlett Packard invested significantly in workflow based content management technology. MarkLogic’s XML data management system can be tweaked to perform similar functions. Dozens of other companies offer content workflow solutions. The sector is active, but sales cycles are lengthy. Crafty millennials can make Slack perform some content tricks as well. Those on a tight budget might find that Google’s hit and miss services are good enough for many content operations. For those in love with SharePoint, even that remarkable collection of fragmented services, APIs, and software can deliver good enough solutions.
I think it is worth watching how Antidot’s Fluid Topics performs in what strikes me as a crowded, volatile market for content federation and information workflow.
Stephen E Arnold, June 5, 2017
Dark Web Notebook Now Available
June 5, 2017
Arnold Information Technology has published Dark Web Notebook: Investigative Tools and Tactics for Law Enforcement, Security, and Intelligence Organizations. The 250-page book provides an investigator with instructions and tips for the safe use of the Dark Web. The book, delivered as a PDF file, costs $49.
Orders and requests for more information be directed to darkwebnotebook@yandex.com. Purchasers must verify that they work for a law enforcement, security, or intelligence organization. Dark Web Notebook is not intended for general distribution due to the sensitive information it contains.
The author is Stephen E Arnold, whose previous books include CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access and Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator, among others. Arnold, a former Booz, Allen & Hamilton executive, worked on the US government-wide index and the Threat Open Source Intelligence Gateway.
The Dark Web Notebook was suggested by attendees at Arnold’s Dark Web training sessions, lectures, and webinars. The Notebook provides specific information an investigator or intelligence professional can use to integrate Dark Web information into an operation.
Stephen E Arnold, author of the Dark Web Notebook, said:
“The information in the Dark Web Notebook has been selected and presented to allow an investigator to access the Dark Web quickly and in a way that protects his or her actual identity. In addition to practical information, the book explains how to gather information from the Dark Web. Also included are lists of vendors who provide Dark Web services to government agencies along with descriptions of open source and commercial software tools for gathering and analyzing Dark Web data. Much of the information has never been collected in a single volume written specifically for those engaged in active investigations or operations.”
The book includes a comprehensive table of contents, a glossary of terms and their definitions, and a detailed index.
The book is divided into 13 chapters. These are:
- Why write about the Dark Web?
- An Introduction to the Dark Web
- A Dark Web Tour with profiles of more than a dozen Dark Web sites, their products, and services
- Dark Web Questions and Answers
- Basic Security
- Enhanced Security
- Surface Web Resources
- Dark Web Search Systems
- Hacking the Dark Web
- Commercial Solutions
- Bitcoin and Variants
- Privacy
- Outlook
In addition to the Glossary, the annexes include a list of DARPA Memex open source software written to perform specific Dark Web functions, a list of spoofed Dark Web sites operated by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and a list of training resources.
Kenny Toth, June 5, 2017
Partnership Hopes to Improve Healthcare through Technology
June 5, 2017
A healthcare research organization and a data warehousing and analytics firm are teaming up to improve patient care, Healthcare IT News reports in, “Health Catalyst, Regenstrief Partner to Commercialize Natural Language Processing Technology.” The technology at hand is the nDepth (NLP Data Extraction Providing Targeted Healthcare) platform, Regenstrief’s specialized data analysis tool. Reporter Bernie Monegain elaborates:
Regenstrief’s nDepth is artificial intelligence-powered text analytics technology. It was developed within the Indiana Health Information Exchange, the largest and oldest HIE in the country. Regenstrief fine-tuned nDepth through extensive and repeated use, searching more than 230 million text records from more than 17 million patients. The goal of the partnership is to speed improvements in patient care by unlocking the unstructured data within electronic health records. Health Catalyst will incorporate nDepth into its data analytics platform in use by health systems that together serve 85 million patients across the country.
In addition, clinicians are contributing their knowledge to build and curate clinical domain expertise and phenotype libraries to augment the platform. Another worthy contributor is Memorial Hospital at Gulfport, which was a co-development partner and was the first to implement the Health Catalyst/ nDepth system.
Based in Indianapolis, the Regenstrief Institute was founded in 1969 with a mission—to facilitate the use of technology to improve patient care. Launched in 2008, Health Catalyst is much younger but holds a similar purpose—to improve healthcare with data analysis and information sharing technologies. That enterprise is based in Salt Lake City.
Cynthia Murrell, June 5, 2017
Helping Machines Decode the World of Online Content
June 5, 2017
With voice search poised to overtake conventional search, startups like WordLift are creating an AI-based algorithm that can help machines understand content created by humans in a better way.
The Next Web in an article titled Wordlift Is Helping Robots Understand What Online Articles Are Really About says:
The evolution of today’s search engines and the rapid adoption of personal assistants (PAs) – capable of understanding user intent and behaviors through available data – require an upgrade of the existing editorial workflow for bloggers, independent news providers, and content marketers.
Voice activated search assistants rely on Metadata for understanding what the content is about. Moreover, metadata alone is unable to tell the AI what is the user intent. WordLift intends to solve this problem by applying advanced AI for understanding the content and make it voice search engine friendly. Structured data, understanding of textual content are some of the strategies WordLift will use to make the content voice search engine friendly.
Vishal Ingole, June 5, 2017
Whirlpool Snaps up Yummly, Recipe Search Engine
June 2, 2017
IBM Watson’s book or recipes may have been a harbinger for foodies. Now Whirlpool, the appliance manufacturer, has taken another step into the future with the acquisition of tech start-up company Yummly, a recipe search engine/shopping list creator with 20 million users. Terms of the deal have not been made public.
Techcrunch reports in Whirlpool Acquires Yummly, The Recipe Search Engine Last Valued At $100M:
Yummly basically can help extend the kinds of services that Whirlpool can offer … it can (generate) more recipes and other suggestions for your food items; Yummly has created a lot of specific parameters for recipe searches which help make results more specific to what users need.
Yummly will maintain its offices and act as a subsidiary of Whirlpool. The acquisition provides Whirlpool with new avenues into technology and Yummly with a source a revenue as it continues to grow.
As tech start-ups continue to spring up and established companies evolve, nothing remains the same. Whirlpool seems to agree with us at Beyond Search. IBM Watson’s recipes are more like kale sandwiches than a trucker’s special.
Mary Pattengill, June 2, 2017
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