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Looking for gPhone Clues in Google Patents
iced_tea writes "What do Google patents say about the company's possible plans for a Google phone? News.com took a look at some of the related technologies. Just one example: 'This image shows a diagram from a patent filed June 30, 2005 and published October 12, 2006, called "Non-Standard Locality-Based Text Entry." The inventor is listed as Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff research scientist at Google, and the assignee is listed as Google. The invention would allow an English speaker, for example, to use the keypad of any mobile phone to enter Chinese characters, according to Google patent scrutinizer Stephen Arnold.'"
according to Google patent scrutinizer Stephen Arnold.
Is that an actual job title these days, or is that just his hobby?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I don't know what the cost of internet access on cellphones is in other countries, but in Canada the rates are beyond ridiculous! Google would almost have to build their own cellular network to really take advantage of their other product lines.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Love him or hate him, Cringely is talking about a somewhat related topic today.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
Kanji and hangul support would be freaking sweet and I'd go so far as to switch mail provider in order to have that on my phone. The trouble is that kanji/hangul support isn't good enough because you need auto-completion and dictionary lookups as well. Essentially, you need something like NJstar on your phone. Or you need to go the route of the Japanese and have each key represent a sequence of kana (like a-i-u-e-o for 1, ka-ki-ku-ke-ko for 2, etc) that ties in to a dictionary-like lookup.
:)
No idea how to effectively input chinese on a phone, but 10,000 ideograph input on a phone for SMS messages seems complicated without help
If that is truly what the patent is about then there is prior art, entering Jananeese characters via an English keyboard [Bailey Controls (Japan)], for it going back to the early 1980's.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Punch in 4 3 1 5 8 2 3 1 5 6 2 0 1 3 4
Google has applications which run on 'phones -- I use the java Gmail app on mine. This could just as easily be a software patent for more 3rd party products, rather than their own hardware. Google make software which runs on PCs, but that doesn't mean that they sell them.
My god, there was all this clamor of how the iphone was the panacea we all needed. now it's here, and in a time frame sooner than a child can be conceived and born, people are looking to the Next New Thing? The Muslims are right, this constant shallow materialistic concern with toys will be the decline of the USA.
Doesn't seem to fit. Also, wish I had an interobang for the subject :(
You seem to forget that there's already an entire market of Asian cell phones out there that have already solved this problem.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Just how many phones can the human race handle!?!?! I mean soon phones will outnumber people and phones will soon realize this, plot, plan, and strike! And then the phones send out 300+ page phone bills, report on your every move and conversation, and with their new built-in tazers, they'll torture the unsuspected for illegal thought and speech!
The phones have been plotting for years! 10 years ago, it was pagers that leashed their electronic slaves, and then the cell phone bricks became the electronic ball and chain. And then, they drugged their slaves with up-to-the-date news, sports, information, mp3, video, and real-time GPS navigation! It is like giving crack to a crackhead!!!
And worst of all, these phones fuck faster than rabbits!!!!
We must act now to stop the phone menace from taking over and destroying the human race! Flush that iPhone down the toilet before its TOO LATE!!!!!
Have a look at Zhùyïn fúhào, also known as bopomofo. Makes it pretty easy to input using the basic Latin alphabet, though the software side is pretty complicated I'm sure.
Hangul wouldn't need much beyond autocomplete, if you're getting fancy (no Chinese characters used much outside of academia these days). And hey, though Japanese is more complicated, if the folks in Japan can get their phones set up to do this (and they have already, complete with easy switching to Latin alphanumeric input), it shouldn't be too hard for Google or someone else to reproduce that functionality.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
No way in hell would I use Google Patent Search for any serious searches when doing real patent work. That's like handing your ideas over to them! They wouldn't monitor popular patent searches to get ideas, now, would they?
Here is the article that goes with the image.
Google doesn't want to be the infrastructure for information transferral, they want to be the index/gateway/portal to the worlds information...
They're building the hitchhikers' guide to the galaxy device.
br/
Them are smart, them pesky Google engineers. Trying to actually put to good use heaploads of data they have on you. For instance, if you constantly search for Japanese restaurants, Google might populate your T9 dictionary with words like wasabi and okonomiyaki, just in case. And if they know where you are, they might throw in names of local sushi bars.
Babelfish must be purchased separately.
you can do this very simply by pounding any key, Chinese will come up. Chinese speaker may not understand though.
True.
But if you look at TFP (picture) on the linked page, it appears to be a method for searching for English (e.g. Jian Guo Road) and, presumably via Google's search index, getting the answer of .
Traditional methods would let you input the first two characters (provided you knew which two characters to choose), but the Road part would be provided by Google.
Still, I'm not sure how useful this is.
Shumeet Baluja, she's my baby
Shumeet Baluja, I don't mean maybe
Shumeet Baluja, she's my baby
Shumeet Baluja, I don't mean maybe
Shumeet Baluja, she's my baby doll, my baby doll, my baby doll
As another poster mentioned, the patent is not what people are saying.
When you input text on a computer in say Japanese, you generally type phonetic spellings (in English letters usually, or maybe using a difficult phonetic keyboard layout if you are very hardcore) which are then converted by a front end processor (FEP) into a list of possible homonyms from which you choose the one you want. Some statistically aware "Artificial Intelligence" subsystem picks good choices for you (which is why the ATOK - probably meaning alphabet to kanji I guess - commercial system is available for on some phones/pdas, it's smart).
Anyway, Google may have some patent about key layout or key stroke order, but they are not listed on the homepage of the guy who did the analysis mentioned by OP, nor is that what the patent number referenced by the article's illustration is about.
So a smart FEP is important to people. The free SKK or EGG that comes with the XEmacs I use sucks. (Based on experience of old software though). ATOK is smart. I haven't read the whole patent (20060230350) but it is basically about combining google searches by other users with the user's own preferences (presumably text input/browsing/gmail history), and the user's location, all to supplement the dictionary, fuel a disambiguation engine, and generally replace or supplement the intelligence of existing FEPs. At least it would work for all languages at once is the idea, and also it would be smart about your locality and interests, so as it says and another poster noted, the subsystem could be aware of ethnic restaurants in your area if you seem to be texting about that.
So since google is inside your phone, your own texting and email, and for all I know even your address book (names to telephone numbers concordance) - though that might cross the privacy line - will fuel the intelligence of other people's phones too. And though I am not sure it is implied in the patent, it would seem that every keystroke a user of a gphone makes would be treated as input to help decide what ads to send you.
In other words, all your keystrokes belong to us. If you realize you have absolutely no privacy using a gphone, since it is basically a terminal to the googleplex cloud, no problem. However it seems likely that just as the recent aol search history fiasco showed, and which I determined by checking some of the data myself, it is very difficult to remove all identifying or dangerous data from such a datastream, and in particular it should be relatively easy to maliciously inject false data, pornographic or hate text into it as well. So google will do well to be a little conservative here and buy a leading FEP solution from a provider that has done the tough work already and gone over it by hand. Otherwise you might very well see some strange things surfacing in the suggestions the gphone subtly gives you.
It would be worth it to me since I don't use texting for important information, if the phone was free, though the kicker is that I do use my Internet enabled phone to look up phone numbers and addresses/maps of places I'm going that day, heck I sometimes check gmail with it and do google searches right now. So come to think of it google already knows a shitload about me. Hmm maybe that's not so cool after all. I'd like to be able to limit the information that goes out like that, but of course that's impossible.
Gmail is free because you agree to give that info to them, and google search results are of course their bread and butter. Well I guess you agree to part with a little of your life and hold them to not screwing with you. So far, so good. I guess this is why "Google does no evil". It's the only way to drive their business model. Since they seem ethical so far I guess I would buy a gphone. At least until they have voice recognition too.