How do phones constantly listen for voice commands like ‘Hey Siri’ or ‘Ok Google’ without draining the battery quickly?
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There are things very easy for you to do without thinking about them, like walking or balancing. You have brain cells that are dedicated specifically for these tasks. They don’t require much thought for them to do their job and they don’t need as much food or oxygen as the rest of your brain does.
Electronics in your phone or your computer eat a lot of electricity the harder they have to think. It used to be that in phones and computers even simple things required that computers think hard about them and so listening for speech used a lot of energy.
Nowadays we’ve figured out how to make parts of computers think the same way that your brain thinks. We can create neural networks that understand speech, and those networks can run very efficiently on special processors in your phone or computer that don’t require a lot of energy. They can now listen for those special words, or even identify songs, and they don’t need your phone to think about it, and so they’re very energy efficient.
If you want to learn more, search for stuff about “machine learning” and technologies like TensorFlow.
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