Google Research Blog:

People are remarkably good at focusing their attention on a particular person in a noisy environment, mentally “muting” all other voices and sounds. Known as the cocktail party effect, this capability comes natural to us humans. However, automatic speech separation — separating an audio signal into its individual speech sources — while a well-studied problem, remains a significant challenge for computers.

This is a major hurdle for smart speakers like HomePod and Google Home. While this post focuses on the cocktail party problem (separating individual voices when multiple people are speaking), it is part of a longer problem thread, that of identifying an individual speaker’s voice.

Consider HomePod. If HomePod Siri knew who was speaking, she could be more specific in her response. If I ask Siri to send a text, Siri could look up contacts in my database, but if my wife asked, Siri could use her contact database.

Google Home already solves this problem. And they are well on their way to solving the cocktail party problem as well.

Imagine a day when hearing aids feature the technology to distinguish speakers, offer signal boost on a voice-by-voice basis, let you know who said what, perhaps with the aid of your iOS device.

If this interests you, there’s a series of videos embedded in the Google blog post that shows the current cocktail party tech in action.

First things first, take a look at this Bloomberg article, which started a wave of discussion about alleged stumbling HomePod sales:

At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. “Even when people had the ability to hear these things,” he says, “it still didn’t give Apple another spike.”

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac, responds in this linked op-ed:

HomePod is a much more expensive speaker than its rivals, and is only useful for a particular slice of the market: those who own an iPhone and either have an Apple Music subscription or have all their music in iTunes and subscribe to iTunes Match. It’s not reasonable to expect sales of a $350 speaker with a limited market to rival those of a $50 device aimed at the mass-market.

Ben’s piece goes into much more detail, addressing the gloom and doom of the Bloomberg piece. Well reasoned, worth reading both.

I do think it is way too early to judge this market. Apple is in the premium space, Google Home and Amazon Echo are based in the commodity space. To me, the key to HomePod growth is Apple’s R&D investment in improving Siri intelligence. If Apple improves the Siri experience, they’ll automatically make HomePod more appealing.

I can’t imagine a more important Apple technology to invest in than Siri. Siri impacts every aspect of the Apple ecosystem and is immensely leverage-able. Siri is the rising tide that lifts all boats.

[VIDEO] Facebook. What a mess. Mark Zuckerberg’s two day appearance before Congress has everyone riveted. He’s clearly been incredibly well prepped, expertly responding without answering.

Tons has been written about this, but here are three posts that stood out to me:

• Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies walks you through this reaction poll, asking questions about Facebook and trust.

One takeaway:

Only 15% of our panelists said there is nothing Facebook can do to regain trust as they are just ready to move on to something else.

I would have thought that number would be much higher.

• During Zuckerberg’s testimony, Associated Press photographer Andrew Harnik took this picture of MarkZ’s briefing notes. One subset of those notes were focused on Apple. John Gruber dug into those, with a post titled Regarding Mark Zuckerberg’s Unused Talking Points on Tim Cook and Apple.

First things first, this is absolutely worth reading. Gruber digs deep, deconstructs those talking points. Brilliant.

I have to say, I am surprised that no one in that room thought to bring up a comparison between Apple and Facebook when it comes to privacy. Would have been good to give some expert witnesses, who really understand the subtleties at play here, the chance to ask Zuckerberg some specific questions, to help guide the conversation.

• Finally, here’s a video (embedded in the main Loop post) from The Verge’s Russell Brandom, talking about Facebook, Zuckerberg’s testimony, and shadow profiles. It’s only 3:28 and well worth your time.

This is a follow-up to Apple’s press release, which dropped Monday.

Mark Sullivan, Fast Company:

You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center from the inside to truly understand how huge it is. It’s made up of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry scrubby landscape just off I-80, and the corridor that connects them through the middle is a quarter-mile long. On either side are big, dark rooms–more than 50 of them–filled with more than 200,000 identical servers, tiny lights winking in the dark from their front panels. This is where Siri lives. And iCloud. And Apple Music. And Apple Pay.

Powering all these machines, and keeping them cool, takes a lot of power–constant, uninterrupted, redundant power. At the Reno data center, that means 100% green power from three different Apple solar farms.

And:

Now Apple says it’s finished getting the rest of its facilities running on 100% green power–from its new Apple Park headquarters, which has one of the largest solar roofs on the planet, to its distribution centers and retail stores around the world. Though the 100% figure covers only Apple’s own operations–not those of of the suppliers and contract manufacturers which do much of the work of bringing its ideas to life–it’s also convinced 23 companies in its supply chain to sign a pledge to get to 100% renewable energy for the portion of their business relating to Apple products.

Part of this equation is Renewable Energy Certificates:

One REC is equal to a single megawatt of power produced from a renewable energy source.

And:

It turns out RECs (like carbon credits) can be sold independent of the energy itself. So it’s also possible for a large power consumer to buy only the RECs–and not the power–from a renewable energy project and use them to offset its use of dirty energy at one of its own facilities.

Apple could easily go down that road, buying its way to green. This from VP of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson:

“I am not aware of any other company that uses that same stringency for making sure the clean power that they’re investing in or purchasing is on the regional grid where it’s being used,” she boasts. But she acknowledges that there are still places in the world where that’s not possible, though that may have more to do with the reality of power markets than choices Apple has made. In some cases, the company has had to sign long-term contracts to acquire the RECs from a new project it helped create elsewhere in the same region. That was the case recently for a two-person office in Chile. There was no suitable green energy source nearby, so Apple is now offsetting the brown power used by that office with RECs from one of its green-power projects in Brazil.

Apple does not need to do this. They could simply buy their way into compliance. Credit where credit is due.