Your smartphone can recognise voice, even while asleep

Accessing the voice commands on a phone currently involves waking the device up by pressing a button and unlocking it.

Imagine waking up in the morning, stretching, and asking your sleeping smartphone, "Ahoy, Google, what's the weather like?" to get the local forecast.

A new feature unveiled this week by mobile chip maker Qualcomm could soon make this a reality. Called Snapdragon Voice Activation, it will wake up gadgets that include the company's Snapdragon 800 processors-intended for things like high-end smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs-from standby or airplane mode once you've uttered a special voice command that phonemakers like HTC and Samsung can determine. The feature then starts up the phone's own voice-recognition software, such as Android's Google Now voice search.

Such "persistent listening" technology may pick up steam as growing hordes of smartphone owners become acquainted with voice-activated search and virtual personal assistants like Google Now and Siri, and as Qualcomm and others begin adding it to chips.

In addition to Qualcomm, a consumer speech technology company called Sensory announced this week the latest version of its TrulyHandsfree Voice Control technology, which can also wake a smartphone from slumber with a customized command, and a partnership with a chip maker. And late last year, Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer for speech-recognition software maker Nuance, said the company is working with "a number of" chip companies who are "thinking very actively" about how to make low-power persistent listening work.

Norman Winarsky, the head of SRI Ventures, who helped turn DARPA-funded research at SRI International into the now Apple-owned virtual personal assistant Siri, expects this kind of always-on audio monitoring to eventually become common.

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