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If you want to build a product with speech recognition capabilities, Nuance has been the default choice for some time. The company's technology powers Apple's Siri and Samsung's S-Voice as well as car computing interfaces from BMW, Chrysler, Ford, and many other automakers. Google has had its own voice recognition service for some time, but previously it was only used in Google-branded products like the Google app, Google keyboard, or Google.com. Now that voice recognition technology is being opened up to developers. At its NEXT cloud platform conference, Google announced the Cloud Speech API.

The new API will bring Google's voice technology to the masses, and it seems to work pretty much the way it does in Google products today. Speech is streamed up to the cloud and back in real-time, including partial "type-as-you-speak" results. The transcribed text can be dumped into an input field for voice transcription or used for a "command and control" feature, like bossing around a robot. Google's speech API can handle 80 languages and variants, while its now-rival Nuance only seems to support 38. As part of the Google Cloud Platform, we'd imagine it needs a constant Internet connection to work.

For now, the cost of the Cloud Speech API, which is only in a "limited preview," is free. Google says it "will introduce pricing in future phases." The preview seems to be invite-only, but interested developers can fill out this page and hope they get accepted.

"Bats, sweetie, listen. You need a breath mint." (credit: Warner Bros.)

Spoiler warning: Our review of Batman V Superman contains minor plot spoilers, but little beyond what you can figure out from the film’s trailers.

Kids have spent decades arguing over which of DC's two major superheroes, Batman and Superman, would prevail in a fight. That's all well and good for a schoolyard, but the bigger question might be why the stars of this week's Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice would find it necessary to wage war. It's the question I kept coming back to as I watched director Zack Snyder do his damnedest to trash both heroes' legacies in one fell swoop.

Viewers will have many opportunities to mock, belittle, and cringe at his take on DC Comics' ultimate fan service fantasy, as Batman V Superman suffers from painful dialogue, flat acting, humorless characters, and baffling plot leaps all over planet Earth. Perhaps worse than all of those shortcomings, however, is how Snyder hangs his film's 2 hours and 40 minutes runtime on the most unconvincing superhero disagreement imaginable.

(credit: Jonathan Kriz)

Fecal transplants have gone to the dogs—literally.

A veterinarian in Palmetto, Florida this week revealed a technique that uses poop transfers to successfully treat service puppies in-training that suffer from recurrent diarrhea, a common problem for dogs kept in kennels. The method reportedly cured 87 percent of dogs in the first round and 93 percent of those needing a second treatment.

The veterinarian—Kevin Conrad, head of Palmetto's Southeastern Guide Dogs—said that he and his colleagues began looking into the treatment as a way to cut costs for common gastrointestinal problems that are often caused by bacterial infections that shed from puppy to puppy.

For the time being, we'll use this picture of Sony's actual 4K media server as a stand-in for a still conceptual "PlayStation 4K."

Kotaku caused quite a stir late last week when it reported via unnamed development sources that Sony is preparing to roll-out an enhanced "PlayStation 4.5" capable of displaying games at 4K resolutions. Those rumors got a boost in credibility today, as Digital Foundry has "independently established that it's real and that Sony's R&D labs have prototype devices."

The updated console, which is being referred to as the PlayStation 4K by multiple Digital Foundry sources, should be able to play non-interactive Ultra HD media in a variety of forms and offer features like high-dynamic range and expanded color depth that are part of industry-set Ultra HD specification standards. But Digital Foundry is skeptical that a near-term tweak to the PlayStation 4 hardware will be able to output fully 4K games at the same graphical quality as the system's current 1080p titles.

That informed speculation comes from looking at the pipeline for AMD GPU technology. The chip maker, which provides the integrated CPU and GPU inside the PS4, is currently transitioning from a 28nm transistor process introduced in 2011 to a new 3D FinFET process with 14 to 16nm transistors. That could bring about a processor that's twice as powerful as what's currently inside the PS4 (at the same size and power consumption), but such a chip would struggle to push out highly detailed 4K gaming. (Remember, 4K TVs have four times as many pixels to fill as standard 1080p sets.) A new chip architecture could also cause compatibility headaches for games built for an entirely different type of chip.

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that "Hitler was right I hate the jews."

Some of this appears to be "innocent" insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her "repeat after me" she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses were organic. The Guardian quotes one where, after being asked "is Ricky Gervais an atheist?", Tay responded, "ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism."

In addition to turning the bot off, Microsoft has deleted many of the offending tweets. But this isn't an action to be taken lightly; Redmond would do well to remember that it was humans attempting to pull the plug on Skynet that proved to be the last straw, prompting the system to attack Russia in order to eliminate its enemies. We'd better hope that Tay doesn't similarly retaliate.