Cheap chips and simple AI could make voice recognition hardware disposable

Pete Warden wants you to throw your voice-recognition hardware in the trash. And then buy more--and more, and more. This Google engineer is on a quest to make voice recognition dirt cheap. His idea is simple enough: cut down the neural networks that are usually used to process sound until they're efficient enough to run on cheap, lightweight chips. "What I want is a 50-cent chip that can do simple voice recognition and run for a year on a coin battery," he explained during last week's Arm Research Summit in Cambridge, U.K. "We're not there yet … but I really think this is doable with even the current technology that we have now." At such a low price, the hardware would effectively become disposable, opening up uses that have previously been unimaginable.