Google has just acquired a start-up from the University of Toronto that will help it make big steps forward with voice and image searching.
The start-up, DNNresearch, specialises in object and speech recognition. It was incorporated by the University just last year, but Google has clearly spotted it as a way to push its search algorithms into more advanced territory, including searching by viewing an object or face.
We can certainly think of a few areas where this acquisition could be beneficial. A recently revealed app for Google Glass, named InSight, will supposedly use object recognition to identify people just by what they're wearing which is nice, but not exactly convenient if your friends tend to wear different things every day.
And moving speech recognition from a nice extra Android feature to an absolute essential, we expect Google Glass will be the main focus of the acquisition.
Say it ain't so
The acquisition means Google will be taking on the University's Professor Geoffrey Hinton along with two of his graduate students.
"Hinton is world-renowned for his work with neural nets, and this research has profound implications for areas such as speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding," said a post on the University of Toronto's website.
Google previously donated $600,000 (£400,800, AUS$581,000) to Hinton's research group, so Mountain View has clearly been eyeing it up for some time.
Via Engadget
