Somewhere, deep in an office building in Boston’s Kendall Square, Amazon is officially “up to something.” While the wildly successful e-tailer has been in the news lately mostly for drone package delivery, a concept that may or may not be a publicity stunt, some sources say the new project is being kept way under the radar, and that it may have something to do with speech technology.
The Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner recently reported that Amazon has been quietly recruiting employees who possess programming skills in the realm of speech recognition. Many people with these qualifications have been contacted through business social networking site LinkedIn (News - Alert). One thing for certain is that the recruiting efforts are highly secretive.
“Current and former employees are forbidden from talking about what happens at the Cambridge office, and the company won’t even tell prospective employees what they’d be working on, if hired,” wrote Kirsner, who noted that the Cambridge offices in question don’t officially exist, or aren’t being acknowledged. “In fact, according to my sources, Amazon employees on two teams in Cambridge can’t even tell each other what they’re up to.”
Research on Kirsner’s part found that one of the teams is headed by speech recognition expert Bill Barton, who joined Amazon last February and who has tenure at both Nokia and Microsoft (News - Alert). According to his LinkedIn profile, he is a “leading development of speech and language solutions which will enhance user interactions with Amazon products and services.”
So Amazon’s working on something with a speech recognition component. But what is it? According to some, the company could have a phone product on the horizon. Others are supposing that the company might be venturing into the realm of wearable technology with a kind of “communicator.”
Whatever the device is, the public may not have long to wait. In late December, Amazon sent out invites to an invitation-only recruiting event that it said was related to “a new, revolutionary V1 product that will allow us to deliver digital media to our customers in new ways and disrupt the current marketplace…We believe this new product will be even bigger than Kindle!”
In the meantime, Amazon has been knocking down the price of its Kindle tablets. So is the new device some kind of tablet, perhaps? Only time will tell.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson