Your Smartphone Is Listening To You Sleep: The Next Terrifying, Awesome Frontier In Voice Tech

Nuance is the company behind many of the innovations in voice recognition, and may or may not have played a part in the latest iteration of Siri, which grew out of SRI International.

The recent advances in voice tech are partly due to developments in the core technology of voice recognition and partly due to Nuance's clever choice to make a database of millions of bits of real speech from its users, which it can use to train and optimize its algorithms--even to the point of better understanding different dialects. This week the company's chief technology officer Vlad Sejnoha revealed that Nuance has been working with chip manufacturers to give smartphones an amazing new voice-command power. Nuance wants to give phones the power to listen to you when they're otherwise "asleep."