Amazon files mobile face recognition patent for payments

Amazon will soon accept mobile payments using selfies instead of passwords (Silicon Republic)

Amazon has filed a patent application for technology that will allow users to authenticate a payment using a photo or video in a seamless way that doesn’t necessarily require passwords.

“The user is identified using image information which is processed utilising facial recognition. The device verifies that the image information corresponds to a living human using one or more human-verification processes,” the patent reads.

Amazon envisions another way to unlock a phone: Ear photos

Forget Fingerprint Scanners, Amazon is Interested in Using Your Ears to Unlock the Phone — Here’s Why it’s Better (Technology Personalized)

The world’s largest e-commerce company was granted a patent last week that reveals company’s intention to ease up the unlocking mechanism in a phone when a user receives a call without any security tradeoff.

No need to forget fingerprint scanners just yet, though.

Sorting out voice technologies

On the occasion of Amazon's purchase of Ivona, The Verge has a good article sorting out various voice technologies.

 Key bit:

Text-to-speech: reads text that's already been written into something approaching a human-sounding voice (Ivona, AT&T, Microsoft, many others);

Speech-to-text: transcribes what you say word-for-word into text (Dragon, Yap);

Voice recognition: biometric that knows who you are based on your voice (like in Sneakers);

Natural-language AI: transcribes speech and/or parses text, looking for keywords and structure to turn ordinary sentences into computer queries (Siri's core technology).

Those interested in voice tech should click through.