BBC hoodwinked into running ad for magical cell phone
A top-secret project developed by a tiny ejector seat company, the Zumba Phone cracks one of the holy grails of artificial intelligence: perfectly accurate voice recognition. It also becomes "instantly useless to anyone else" when you lose it, according to designer Dean McEvoy.
Unfortunately, the BBC elected to run this promotional story without including standard elements such as demonstrating that it even exists as a functioning product: the reporter simply waves around a model and describes the magic!
Engadget commenter CooperFBI did a little research, and found that Mr. McEvoy is apparently a party promoter by night.
You know, if the story here was "local business has cute high-tech product, employs 40" it'd be great: small western businesses source blank gear from big Chinese factories all the time. But here we have wild product claims echoed as news by credulous reporters under a very respectable masthead.
They're mass-producing a cutting-edge handset from a light-industrial warehouse in Hereford, but no-one's allowed to see it? Oh, beeb.
Here's the logo:
Zumba phone report [BBC via Engadget]
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That logo needs some serious work on it.
Oh, and the phone will too.
The name comes from the sound of the tiny perpetual motion machine inside each phone.
I just watched the viddy and you guys must have hearts of stone.
Who wouldn't want a phone hand bread-boarded by a whole team of friendly matrons resembling Nurse Ratchet?
The best feature of the phone is that if you throw the earpiece, it will always come back to you.
Zumba, Lumba,
Zumba-dee-doo,
BBC has got some
vaporware for you.
Zumba, Lumba,
Lumba-dee-day,
I hope the Cybermen
don't dial in this way.
Reminds me of the "news" segments on the car that runs on water. Man, reporters and news agencies are gullible when it comes to technology.
Oh hey, kinda like the Palm Pre, that Boing Boing touted as wonderful and cool and great. Where do I buy one? Oh yeah, they aren't out yet. I'll put $20 that at least one significant feature will be missing on launch.
But I guess Palm's cred is 'nuf for folks to fall over themselves to say how wonderful it'll all be. Oh yeah, same happened with Android, no?
(Sorry, don't want to hate on your parade, love the blog and read it regularly, just wanted to point out the irony.)
I don't think the issue here is as much the lack of a "Buy" button, and yes how unsubstantial the information is? If they had shown a sample of the technology at work, even if it was an hoax, it would get some other kind of reception.
All they show is a plastic model of a phone, and a "web-based-service" that is described to have enhanced voice-decoding abilities. Both are perfectly possible, but this is both shoddy, uncritical reporting and a lousy job from the company in promoting the technology.
I think the logo makes it all seem respectable. Possibly the best crayon made logo I've seen all week!
Claud9999, I do believe you're reaching with that attempt to assign equivalence between (a) a multinational corporation with billion-dollar revenues derived from existing cellphones it has manufactured and sold for a decade and (b) a team of three dozen grandmothers led by a Hereford party planner.
Not terribly good reporting, but it sounds like it uses speaker-dependent voice recognition. It doesn't sound like it's on the phone: it uses an 'internet portal'. I suspect that they have packaged the SpinVox service or similar.
SpinVox uses a mixture of voice recognition and human intervention.
Disclosure: I'm a friend of a SpinVox person who works on the voice recognition systems.
Claud9999, you speak of Palm's cred - what is this cred of which you speak? I wouldn't buy a toaster from them - it would burn their software partner's logo into the bread, then stop working until I paid for an upgrade...
This is typical of a lot of journalism nowadays, it drives me crazy, a lot of the time even when it's true it's not news, like I was reading one the other day, also on the BBC, saying that apparently having a cold or flu can impair driving, which I could have sworn we knew already from when it was news before. This time the story was 'insurers claim...', from some research they commissioned, suggesting to me yet another barely altered press release.