SMILE is patent pending

This morning Google now let me know that something new had been posted on the Sphinx site.

Google Now has started letting me know if websites I visit often have posted new content,
pretty awesome...

It was an Android app that lets users embed voice data in pictures (along with sharing pictures and doing speech recognition). I went to the play store, the app looked medium unprofessional so I visited their website. They were "seasoned" machine learning experts, but their mobile site had no indication of who they were.

"Seasoned entrepreneurs ... with deep experience in AI and machine learning"

So I said, I like Sphinx, let's see how they used it. I installed their app and giggled out loud at the "patent pending" splash screen. What are they patenting, certainly not Sphinx, certainly not speech recognition, certainly not the ability to take a picture on a smartphone and share it. It must be the embedded voice metadata, which I assume is why they aren't using the built in speech recognition which is far more accurate than Sphinx.

"Patent Pending" technology by seasoned technologists...
It even comes with a splash screen :)

I sent them a few bug reports, it looks as though their app was built maybe a year ago, or at least by someone with limited Android experience and wasn't tested using the camera on Android 4.3...

"Unfortunately Smile has stopped..."