Windsor Training: technology

Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

Friday, 12 December 2014

Why Skype Wants to Learn your Language

Microsoft's announcement of the imminent arrival of real-time speech-to-speech translation software in the shape of Skype Translator will need to ride a wave of public scepticism, before it lives up to the hype of bringing a revolution in communication that it promises to deliver

In Douglas Adams' fabulously humorous science fiction adventure, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, instant translation is achieved via the Babel fish, which fits in the ear of the user and instantly allows you to understand anything said to you in any form of language. Yahoo even paid tribute to Adams' fictitious animal by calling their original online translation service, BabelFish.com, before changing it to the slightly more prosaic, Bing Translator.

In creating the Babel Fish, Adams set the bar extremely high for any type of machine translation - albeit his version was a fish - perhaps Yahoo even realised they weren't living up to such high expectations and that's why they changed the name! The reality is that any form of translation service that hypes itself as instant translation is going to have to overcome that scepticism, before the public accepts it as offering anything anywhere near what it claims to deliver.

The problem is that we have all experienced online translation services, from Google Translate to Bing Translator, and, whilst they can be useful in a range of circumstances, they also have severe limitations. They often mis-translate with humorous and worrying frequency, but that ls not to say there hasn't been some slow and discernible improvements, particularly with Google Translate, which is where most of my experience lies.

Skype Translator's Unveiling

At an event in July, Skype demonstrated the service to its Worldwide Partner Conference, which was, you would have thought, a generally sympathetic audience. Even they, however, were unable to stifle their laughter when the opening pleasantries in English and German were amusingly mistranslated as:

Well how is it me friends.

Sounding a bit more like Jack Sparrow than an accurate translation of the original, it thereby confirmed the prejudices of a sceptical audience in six short words! Nevertheless, the service, and the presentation, did manage to redeem itself slightly with some light-hearted banter about the World Cup and the lack of English success, compared to that of Germany. It was clever, without being breathtaking, and it's not quite achieved the Babel Fish standard yet, but that's not to say it won't.

Machine Learning

Skype are currently offering the chance to pre-register for the Skype Translatorservice ahead of its official launch. The registration page openly admits that it will have 'a few rough edges' at first - as the WPC event confirmed - but the more it translates, then the more that the machine learning algorithms will be able to incorporate patterns of speech, idioms, accents, and colloquialisms. And this will be the real test of its ability to accurately translate living languages that have been evolving and developing since humans first began to talk.

The Babel Fish Test

To help us to assess the effectiveness of Skype Translator, I've come up with the Babel Fish test, which is the language translation equivalent of the Turing Test for a computer. If we can converse through it and not feel that it is being mediated by a machine and that it also feels natural and authentic - and above all accurate - then Skype Translator will have passed the Babel Fish test.

When Skype Translator launches, I suspect it may initially be ridiculed and provide fodder for many amusing virals and even skits on Saturday Night Live. But if the machine learning is able to incorporate all of the quirks and differences that characterize the various languages it will be required to translate, then it has a future. But that is a big ask! The more that we use it, the better it will get, but if we loose confidence in it at an early stage, then a lack of use will hamper its development. And if that happens, then we'll just have to wait for the next contender to pass the Babel Fish test!

So the launch of Skype Translator won't mean the arrival of the Babel Fish any time too soon, but as an online translator might say: here's hoping the day well goes for you, me friends!

Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter and Facebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Saturday, 29 November 2014

The 3D Printing Revolution in 7 Industries

Here are seven industry sectors where I think that 3D printing is bringing about, or has the potential to bring, a revolution in the way in which we manufacture and distribute 3-dimensional physical objects:

#1: Automobiles

If the arrival of the Strati, the world's first 3D printed car, is anything to go by, there could come a day when you just walk into the car dealer’s showroom and have the make and model that you want printed there and then for you. At least that is the vision of Jay Rogers the CEO of Local Motors the company that designed and built the Strati. With just 49 parts, including the 3D printed body shell, this represents a considerable saving on the circa 5,000 parts needed to build the average family car.

#2: Construction

In China the construction company Winsun recently produced 10 3D printed houses in a single day and for a cost of $5,000 per unit and at USC California a team is working on a large 3D printer that will fabricate a house in one go: walls, electrics and plumbing. These changes may bring cheaper and more affordable houses for the masses and the potential for disruption is huge.

#3: Pharmaceuticals

The potential here is vast and it has the long term potential to disrupt the multi-billion Dollar pharmaceuticals industry by allowing customers to print their drugs and medicine at the point of need. Not only would it make simple over-the-counter medicines, like Ibuprofen, cheaper to produce, but also drugs where there is low demand could be printed cost-effectively for the patient, because economies of scale would not make producing small batches prohibitive.

#4: Aerospace

Disruption is already being felt within the aerospace industry, with GE’s new LEAPand GE9x engines using 3D printed fuel nozzles and turbines that add to the durability of the part, but also reduce fuel consumption. The potential is for airlines to print the part they need, wherever in the world the aircraft happens to be, whether that is at some remote airport, or even for an airforce jet onboard an aircraft carrier.

#5: Healthcare and Prosthetics

In this sector strides are already being made in terms of prosthetics and diagnosis is being assisted by physicians able to see a 3D printed model of a heart from a scan, to enable them to examine its structure and propose an appropriate treatment. There is even progress being made in the field of bioprinters that could make everything from ears to vital organs.

#6: Manufacturing

It is conceivable that when you place an order via the Amazon website that the item is then produced at the large sheds that were once their vast distribution centers and now become their distribution and manufacturing centers and delivered by drone, of course. The ability to produce anywhere and in any volume may well disrupt the comparative economic advantage that low-cost manufacturing nations, such as China, have enjoyed over the developed world. This is somewhat different from onshoring, because you will not see the same numbers of people employed in vast factories being repatriated, instead there may be scope for small specialist printers for items that cannot be fabricated instore or in the home.

#7: Food

Who needs Raymond Blanc when your 3D printer can rustle up a gourmet meal without the need to travel to the nearest fine dining restaurant? All I do is download the file and the printer does the rest and with no messy pots and pans to wash up after the meal! There are a number of 3D food printers already on the market, such as Foodini, Candy and Chefjets and they are working with confectionary, pasta and chocolate. NASA has even funded research to produce 3D printed food for deep space missions.

These are just a few areas where the initial ripples of disruption are starting to be felt from 3D printing, but this revolution is not going to be overnight, and my list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, I could quite easily have mentioned the advances being made in other applications, such as entertainment, art, fashion, and jewellery, etc. And if you think the price of replacing your laser print cartridges is exorbitant, just you wait until you are paying for the 3D replacements for your desktop 3D printer!

Friday, 7 November 2014

Steve Wozniak: Apple's Other Steve

With an upcoming Hollywood biopic and the record-breaking recent sale of an Apple-1 computer, Steve Wozniak's indispensable contribution to the success of Apple and to Steve Jobs himself, is often overlooked in stories of the latter. But what can we learn from the Jobs-Wozniak relationship and are there lessons for start-ups as well as some insight for success in life?

Steve Jobs stares wistfully into the camera and strikes a pose, whereas Steve Wozniak is lost in thought and concentrating on solving the technical problem at hand. To my mind, this picture seems to neatly encapsulate the complex and symbiotic relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the two co-founders of Apple. There is no question that they needed each other: Jobs, the showman, marketer, and public face of Apple; Wozniak, the technical genius and problem-solver. There is also little doubt that we probably wouldn't have heard about Jobs without ‘Woz’, as he is affectionately known, and vice-versa.

A Tale of Two Steves

The relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is often characterized in the media as almost the perfect metaphor for two extremes of personality: exuberant extrovertism, personified by Jobs on the one hand, and introverted diligence and application on the other, summed up in Wozniak. There is no doubt that Wozniak had a great deal of admiration and affection for Jobs, but he wasn't blind to his faults and the friction that Jobs's style of management brought, particularly in the early days. His confrontational style alienated as many people as it succeeded in winning over and Wozniak said of the younger Jobs in a recent interview:

"Steve Jobs had a lot of these questionable things, like some of my very best friends in Apple... almost all of them said they would never, ever work for Steve Jobs again. It was that bad."

From Homebrew to Garage Startup

The two Steves met in high school, where they were both members of the Homebrew Computer Club. Despite a difference of five years in age between the older Wozniak and the younger jobs, they collaborated on building a device that could be used to enable free phone calls worldwide. It was Wozniak’s early homemade computer, however, that switched Jobs onto the potential for computing for the masses.

Apple Computer Inc. was founded in the garage of Steve Jobs’ parents’ house in 1976, with the name inspired by a visit to an apple orchard, according to Jobs. Recently one of the first Apple-1 computers made by Wozniak and Jobs fetched an incredible$905,000 at Bonhams auction house in New York, with the winning bid coming from the Henry Ford organization. The original machine had a price tag of $666.66, apparently because of Wozniak’s penchant for repeating number sequences, but it was basically a printed circuit board and very little else.

Woz and Apple-1

In creating that first Apple-1, Wozniak’s expertise and technical input was significant and the foundation of Apple’s subsequent success was in no small part due to the innovation of that earlier machine and the ones that followed. The Henry Ford organization is proposing to display the computer in its museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Commenting upon the significance of the Apple-1, the president of the museum, Patricia Mooradien, described it as ‘a key artefact of the digital revolution,’ and she also added:

“Similar to what Henry Ford did with the Model T, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs put technology directly in the hands of the people with the creation of the Apple-1, completely altering the way we work and live.”

Both men left Apple in 1985. In the latter years Wozniak and Jobs were not as close as they had been in the early days, with a suggestion that Jobs allegedly refused to write a forward for his autobiography, iWoz. Wozniak, however, remained loyal to Jobs and determined to defend his legacy, particularly in interviews following his friend’s untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2011. In one interview, Wozniak said that Jobs had revealed to him when they were very much younger, a belief that he would not live past 40 and this was something that Wozniak felt gave such an urgency to Jobs and his mission. Nevertheless, Wozniak believed that he developed as a person and the earlier confrontational Jobs gave way to a more thoughtful person in latter years:

"Steve Jobs was a very different personality over the time frame I knew him. I met him when he was in high school. And, back then, we played jokes and pranks on each other. […] Once we started Apple, he sort of had something he wanted in life: to find the formula to be an important person."

There have been a number of big and small screen portrayals of Wozniak. In a forthcoming movie about Jobs, the role of Wozniak is set to be played by Hollywood funny man, Seth Rogen, in what will be a high profile biopic of Jobs and directed by Danny Boyle. But however Woz is depicted in that film, there is no doubt that Wozniak played a pivotal role in the early success of Apple and that Jobs might not be the household name that he is without that symbiotic early partnership. Maybe the real lesson of the ‘tale of two Steves’, is that the secret of a successful high tech start up is that you need the diligent and technically-minded engineer, in the shape of Wozniak, who is prepared to occupy the back-room away from the distractions of the limelight, so that the front man can get on with promoting the business.

Perhaps the secret to success for us all is that we all need to be a little bit Woz and a little bit Jobs to get on in life: the technical skills of the engineer, combined with the showmanship of the front man able to promote our ideas to the wider audience.