With the launch of the original Moto X, we all praised Motorola for its voice activation features, which allow the phone to respond to your voice once you said the magic phrase. The only problem with it is that if you were in a room full of Moto X owners, everybody’s phone would also respond, something that Motorola has addressed on the new Moto X by detecting the location of the source voicing the command. If you thought Google was done, there’s actually more to come, but these new changes are rather creepy.
Google’s September 4 patent named “detecting the end of a user question” addresses the features that we see on the new Moto X, which is great since that means we might see the technology make it to other Android smartphones in the future. The biggest problem here is that if you keep digging the documents, you might notice that Google isn’t only planning to use microphones to detect the location of the user, but cameras and video are also mentioned in the patent.
Surely the phone will do a much better job at knowing who it should take commands from, but it’s hard to not be skeptical about what Google can do with the video footage. Hopefully this is a feature you’ll be able to opt out from, as the phone will actively seek others around you, and that’s not necessarily good.
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