Intel Sees Communications As Company's Next Frontier

WSJdpatton writes "Intel is mounting a long-term campaign to turn personal computers into more reliable tools for calling and conferencing. Intel business-client architecture director Steve Grobman argues that instead of exploiting the Internet to lower communications costs, the next phase is about adding new features. Among the benefits for business: broader access to online meetings with advanced features such as TiVo-style playback, instant captioning of conversations — or even translation into multiple languages. 'That technology could be a foundation for companies to add improvements such as the ability to identify the current speaker during a conference call ... He eventually expects advanced features -- such as automatic transcription or translation of conferences. Intel has used deals to advance its plans. A February 2006 partnership with Skype included joint development to tailor the service for Intel's dual-core chips, and free PC-based conferencing for as many as 10 participants.'"

Comments

Ultimately it is all about Information Exchange

[anoopjohn]

I dont understand why it is a new idea - The whole internet is about information exchange - read "Communication". Of course people have been looking at means to improve the way in which we communicate and make it easier to communicate between different people from different regions of the earth and also to make it easer to communicate with larger number of people. People have been trying to do it from the point Internet was started.

Here we go again

[ch-chuck]

The 'videophone' has a part of the future since 1927 (Metropolis) and has come up in countless visions of the future (ATT exhibit at 1964 World Fair) but for one problem: mass customers just don't seem to want or need it. We had videoconferencing at my last workplace - so you get to see a funky image of the big boss as he speaks, big deal. Might as well let us tele-smell his cologne for all it added to the conference.

Computing Networks

[Archangel Michael]

The purpose of a network, in whatever form, is simply communication. Anything more detailed than that is losing sight of the purposes of networks and networking.

The purpose of Computers is data manipulation. Anything more detailed than that is losing sight of the purposes of Computers and Computing.

I'm reminded of the failure of the Railroad companies in the dawn of motor vehicles 120 years ago, and again during the dawn of Aircraft 80 years ago, to realize what business they were in. The long running idea of "we're in the railroad business" was extremely short sighted, because they became focused upon the niche of the greater business; transportation.

When Computers connected to the Network, it created a hybrid business, that of Computing Networks. I believe that INTEL has forgotten what business they are in (Computing) because they've lost sight because of the Hybridization of the Computing Network.

In order to accomplish what they have outlined, which is quite admirable, the computing power driving their visiion has to be greatly increased. The Network side is easily expanded, but the computing side is suffering from the constraints of current technology. Intel (and AMD) ought to pay attention and know what market they are really in; computing.

Voice recognition AND translation?!

[RingDev]

This aught to be good:

CEO: Sales are up, things are looking good!
Caption: Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Computerized Russian Voice: , let's delete
Russian repeats back message.
English computerized voice: The dear aunt, us the duel assassin of to erase has left therefore establishes chooses everything

The Cold War 2.0 breaks out.

-Rick

VoIP?

[el_flynn]

With VoIP, a lot of resources are dedicated to make two or more endpoints (usually VoIP phones) talk to each other, especially when each device is talking a different codec. A lot of codecs exist - G.729, G.726, GSM, WAV, Speex et al. And so there's stuff in the middle that's required to translate from one codec to another (this is called transcoding), and at the same time take care of other audio quality issues such as echo cancellation, comfort noise generation, DTMF etc. Usually some sort of PABX takes care of this, but at the expense of CPU processing power.

What I'd like to see is for Intel to come up with a specialized chip that is good at the computation and bit-moving required to do these kinds of transcoding and DSP-type functionality. I've heard from someone in the know that when these things are done in software on generic Intel Pentium/Xeon/whatever type chips, they're not that good at doing it (how accurate that is I don't know, maybe its hearsay).

Now if Intel can throw their resources into creating something like this, that would be very nice for the VoIP space.