Ideas abound at the AT&T Innovation Show

Yesterday AT&T opened the doors to one of its Foundry Innovation Centers to showcase and demo some of the technologies that are currently under development at the AT&T Labs and Foundry in Palo Alto. The company has three Foundry centers, the other two are located in Plano, Texas and Tel Aviv, Israel, and has designed them specifically to bring together teams to advance developers’ projects through collaboration.

There were fifteen such projects being shown, spread across a variety of topics and features but all focused on using, integrating, or involving the network. From a Remote Patient Monitoring project that incorporates video calls, tablets, and Bluetooth to keep doctors updated on patient vitals, to the Alpha API Platform which acts as a personal feedback system for developers, the projects displayed ingenious ideas designed to improve existing technology, or build on the existing network to provide new services and functionalities. Here are a few more projects that caught my eye yesterday.

There are a few things in this world that I passionately hate: the post office, the so-called “mid-season” break of television shows, and a phone tree are all high on that list. I don’t want to fight with robots; I just want to be connected to a person who can handle my problem. The Visual Interactive Voice Response was designed specifically to solve the difficulties of maneuvering through an automated messaging system by creating a visual navigation tree. Much like the difference between original voicemail and visual voicemail, Visual IVR lets you opt-in to a visual session by pressing a button; it then sends you an SMS message with a text link that leads you to the visual tree, which looks very similar to a mobile app. You can then navigate through the session to say, book a flight, or you can opt to connect to an agent to assist you. The best part is that you can change between the two seamlessly – the program can easily resume services right from where you left off so you won’t need to duplicate any steps.

Designed to be a highly accessible remote app for those with visual or hearing impairments, the U-Verse Easy Remote App responds to voice commands and is powered by AT&T Watson speech recognition technology. Speech is captured by the service, sent to the cloud servers, where it matches the speech to available programming and comes back with results. You can search for a program by name, or by the name of a cast member, and it will show a list of results that are currently on U-verse. The app uses AT&T Speech API to recognize a speaker and improve accuracy over time. It can remember favorite functions and recognize gestures, and it plays nice with the iPhone’s VoiceOver screen reader.

Another program using AT&T Watson speech technology, Text Translation, also takes advantage of AT&T’s extensive SMS services to “directly transcribe language for various applications.” Basically, when I type out a text in English and send it to my friend in Spain, the text arrives to him in Spanish and vice versa. The application uses regular SMS messages, and works by sending your messages to the cloud in AT&T’s network, where it translates them, and then sends the translated speech to the receiver, in real time. There’s no app to download, install, or open; it’s as simple as checking a box to indicate that you want the feature in your SMS messages. Going forward, there are plans to extend the reach of the project to include texts that the receiver can hear aloud, to work across multiple carriers.

Think of it as an always-on Google hang out, with cameras set all over the office – something even the developer himself admitted could enable some “potentially creepy privacy issues,” which they plan to address with both filters that allow you to put a slider on your visual presence, and an encryption of the videos. While you can go back and review video conversations that have happened in the past, you would need permission from all the video’s participants to do so. The goal is for distant coworkers to still be able to reap the benefits of collaboration, and enable a seamless connection between colleagues. Currently, it’s being used at AT&T Labs, in the future the plan is to deploy it more broadly, and incorporate more enhanced features such as facial recognition and augmented reality.