Apple Personal Voice
If you ever lose your voice—God forbid—Apple has your back
When, as a technology writer, you are pitched some 50 products a day, you perform a necessary triage to select those worth writing about.
There are the new or improved things that you judge people will love integrating into their lives; there are the rather tedious solutions-in-search-of-a-problem that can be discarded unless they are amusingly silly; and then there are those rare and genius new products that will be of little use to most people but can be absolutely life-changing for some.
This software innovation from Apple falls into the third category—though most people reading this won’t have an immediate use for the technology, they’ll be delighted it exists if they ever need it.
Personal Voice takes and preserves samples of your voice—you record them in up to 30 minutes on an iPhone or iPad—as insurance against the day you might permanently lose your ability to speak.
With computing power that boggles the mind, it then uses your preserved natural voice to synthesize your voice saying anything you type into your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Most remarkably, the magic that is Personal Voice is not performed by supercomputers in the cloud but by machine learning inside your device, completely independent of an Internet connection. You can use the new technology within a range of apps, notably FaceTime—allowing you to have naturalistic online conversations with friends, colleagues, or family long after your natural voice has ceased to work. Or you can fire up a new app, Live Speech, which is in the latest suite of Accessibility software native to Apple devices, and simply type away.
The discreet Accessibility section within Settings is full of interesting software you don’t want to know about until you do, but Personal Voice is the most advanced of the bunch.
Imagine if British theoretical-physics professor Stephen Hawking, who was disabled due to ALS (motor neuron disease), and whose speaking voice is known only in its American roboticized version, had been able to use his own voice. Perhaps he wouldn’t have become the icon he was—it was often reported that he regarded his robot voice as central to his “brand.” It was actually modeled on the voice of an M.I.T. researcher, Dennis Klatt, who began working on speech synthesis as early as the 1960s.
Laying down your voice involves reading 150 phrases aloud, then waiting for several hours while your synthetic voice is fully cooked. To save having to laboriously type out everything you want to say, Live Speech allows you to record phrases you use a lot and insert them into the conversation in one tap or click.
How good was your columnist’s Personal Voice? Not perfect, but astonishing nonetheless. The system is set up for American English, so it struggled a bit with my British accent, mangling the occasional diphthong into an odd mid-Atlantic mash-up. The emphases in phrases were occasionally askew, and it couldn’t pronounce some words or combinations—for some reason it freaked out while pronouncing “your hair.” But the tone was all mine and spookily accurate.
Personal Voice is a geeky delight to play and experiment with. And one day, you may be overwhelmingly pleased that you spent those 30 minutes recording your voice sample.
The Catit Pixi Smart Fountain
A water fountain that will make even the most discerning cats want to drink up
You seriously forgot to buy your cat a Christmas present? A shameful lapse, but there’s still time.
The official cat of Landing Gear, Bob Barton loves her new drinking bowl from the pet-products mega-brand Rolf C. Hagen Inc., of Montreal. (And yes, Bob Barton is a girl, something discovered only when it was too late to change her name.)
The Catit Pixi Smart Fountain is an app-controlled bowl that keeps Barton’s water moving, filtered, and sanitized with UV-C light around the clock. Cats, especially those primarily fed dry food, tend not to drink enough and are fatally prone to kidney disease. This tendency is made worse by their dislike of stagnant water left in standard, non-electronic bowls, which are prone to collecting dirt and bits of food.
For the first few minutes the bowl was turned on, Bob Barton was nervous of the constant flow of water running into the shallow, stainless-steel plate, but she quickly came around and remains fooled that it’s a fast-moving rural stream.
The apparatus is easy to assemble, and its pump runs very quietly. If the water level runs low, the color of the feline-themed L.E.D. display changes from blue to red. The tank is filled easily.
“But it’s app-controlled?” you reasonably ask. Well, yes, it may seem de trop, but the app means you can be informed if the water level is low or if the filter needs changing. You can also shift the pump into energy-saving mode overnight, so it flows only intermittently.
That said, there’s a non-app-controlled version for $48, in case you don’t want or need another app on your phone.
The AENO Smart Infrared Panel Heater
This space heater looks like a flat-screen television and harnesses the power of infrared technology
Even when the weather is Christmassy cold, an electric heater must rank as the most boring—not to say energy-profligate—gadget imaginable.
But hold up. This new line, from Polish home-appliances maker Aeno, is not only highly effective but sleek, ultra-slim (less than half an inch thick), and unobtrusive. It’s also miserly with power, and this year earned two significant Red Dot design awards, one in the heating-and-air-conditioning category and one in the smart-product class. It is Wi-Fi-capable and can be controlled remotely from an app.
Aeno heaters are built from aluminum and tempered glass and noiselessly produce up to 700 watts of infrared heat (often less), which advocates say can provide specific health benefits. The heater, available in black or white, has its own legs or can be wall-mounted.
If the choice for a cold corner of the house is between plugging in and switching on tomorrow or getting the engineers in and having your heating system extended, there’s a strong case for Aeno. It works exceptionally well. Buyer beware: the glass panel gets pretty hot.
The Suri sustainable electric Toothbrush
The iPhone of toothbrushes also happens to be eco-friendly
Breaking into the electric-toothbrush market must be as hard as starting a headphone brand. There are so many competitors in both product categories, many of them long established, that you might wonder why a newcomer would bother.
Introducing a new toothbrush brand from London, furthermore, seems especially tricky, given the widespread admiration for British dentistry. (We are being sarcastic.)
Suri is that new British toothbrush brand, though the text on the box insists it’s designed in London and California. And the Suri brush range is gaining admirers and awards worldwide. This is for three reasons, so far as we can see.
One is that Suri is going big on sustainability claims, saying the products are designed to be repaired, and that the brush heads, made from cornstarch and castor oil, are recyclable. Some may wonder if recyclable toothbrush heads really are a significant contribution to saving the planet, but it’s an effective and worthy point of difference for marketing—and the credentials have helped Suri get a desirable B-Corporation certification.
The second explanation for Suri’s unlikely success is that the product, right down to the packaging, is of Apple-level quality, in this columnist’s view. Steve Jobs himself would have struggled to find anything not perfect about it.
Thirdly, it’s an exceptionally nice toothbrush that feels great in the hand, works superbly, and looks as lovely as a toothbrush could. It even has a slick case that subjects the head to UV-C light, which is claimed to kill bacteria.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer for the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology