Month: April 1986
How Do Earphones Work?
What’s your favorite feature of the radio accessory? In my opinion, I much like the design job – It is cooler than an Inuit’s underpants!
To put it very simply, your earphone includes a piece of plastic that vibrates in accordance to the signals received from the device it’s attached to. The plastic moves due to a metal coil that’s attached to a magnet, which allows the plastic to form the sound waves that pass into your ear.
That’s it, really. It seems easy enough, but I couldn’t have thought of it.
Jezen Thomas at eHow.com provides a more detailed explanation to us, he says that,
“Earphones consist of a speaker cone, an iron coil, a magnet and speaker cables. When earphones are plugged into a music-playing device like a stereo, electricity is sent along the speaker cables. The speaker cables feed this electrical current through the iron coil, which behaves as an electromagnet. The coil then attracts or repels the permanent magnet, depending on the electrical current sent by the music-playing device. This causes the coil to move, which subsequently pushes and pulls the speaker cone. As the speaker cone vibrates as a result of this movement, it creates sonic waves that resonate through the air and are transferred through small bones and membranes inside your ear”.
Of course, there are different types of earphones, but basically, that’s it.
Some earphones, however, do feature additional functions. Noise-canceling headsets, for example, can generate a small field of white noise around the speaker itself, which acts as something of a vacuum and has the effect of disabling outside noise. These headphones are also better for the health of your inner ear than most other types. Sam Costello at About.com writes,
“The noise around us can contribute to cause us to change how we listen to an iPod. If there’s a lot of noise nearby, it’s likely that we’ll turn up the iPod’s volume, thus increasing the chances of hearing loss. To cut down on, or eliminate, ambient noise, use noise-deadening or –cancelling headphones. They’re more expensive, but your ears will thank you”.
Chris Woodford, writing for ‘Explain That Stuff.com’, gives a detailed description of the main differences between earphones and speakers. Despite essentially operating in the same way, there are variations between the two, it seems. He says,
“The biggest difference between loudspeakers and headphones is, of course, size. A loudspeaker needs to set all the air moving in a room so you can hear the sound it’s making, but the speaker in a headphone only has to move the volume of air inside your ear canal. That’s why it can be so much smaller and more discreet”.
If, even after all this tech talk, you’re still interested in seeing what’s going on in your headphones, the Youtube user Cayde Brown has a series of videos called ‘Take Apart’, which will probably be of interest. In one episode, Cayde takes a pair of headphones apart and shows us exactly how they work.
Making “Her” Into Reality
Without giving too much about this radio accessory article, but I thought it fascinating and relevant to what Im currently doing.
Spike Jonze’s latest movie, “Her,” creates a future where technology is less visible, yet more ubiquitous than today. The main character uses an earpiece and handheld device to communicate with an operating system that follows a user across any platform, rarely utilizing the traditional desktop screens except when at work. And the main way of interacting with the operating system is through natural, conversational speech.
Even though it is science fiction, “Her” seems to be the end state for many current acquisitions and research from real-life tech companies. These companies are pursuing enhanced artificial intelligence and speech recognition. And the companies who don’t jump on this future will be left in the digital dust.
Established artificial intelligence
The most well-known characters in AI today are IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri.
Watson takes human’s natural language and filters through data to find the most probable answers. It can take “unstructured data,” that is, data computers typically cannot read because it isn’t structured in tables, rows, or columns, and turn it into knowledge accessible not through complex queries but simple, vocal questions. It’s now being used to help doctors find better cancer treatments and financial planners find better investments. IBM hopes Watson will bring in $1 billion in revenue by 2018.
Siri first debuted in Apple’s iPhone 4S, allowing for simple functions like searching the web and initiating a call or writing a text message. The latest iOS version added more functionality for Siri, like sourcing information from Wikipedia and Twitter.
Apple’s latest acquisitions point to further enhancements for Siri. In 2013, the company picked up intelligent calendar application Cue, which helps layout a user’s day similar to Google Now. It also bought Topsy, which allowed customers to analyze and search social posts. And, a recently published patent points to expanding Siri from phones to docks.
Up and coming AI
Now, Google spent a rumored $400 million on an artificial intelligence company called DeepMind. DeepMind’s website describes its software as useful in “simulations, e-commerce, and games,” and the company has an impressive talent list with a former child chess prodigy and a Skype co-creator. This piles on to Google’s other recent acquisitions of robot maker Boston Dynamics and smart home hardware maker Nest. If Google can succeed in integrating these seemingly disparate companies, it seems like having a conversation with your thermostat isn’t too far off.
Losers of an AI future
While these companies are priming themselves to own any science fiction-like future, there are companies doomed to languish if they don’t change their path.
This includes the lowly hardware maker. The future presented in “Her” doesn’t contain several devices in multiple form factors as we have now, but one handheld device and one wearable earpiece that connects to a cloud-based operating system. IBM, a case study in staying relevant, keeps shedding its hardware operations with its latest $2.3 billion sale of its server business to Lenovo. As the main players build their artificially intelligent ecosystems, the hardware becomes less important as it’s commoditized, and the main differentiation becomes software. Companies might also want more control over their hardware and the user experience, and produce their own. For example, Apple recently purchased a cutting-edge chip maker, Primesense. Microsoft stepped into producing its own hardware with its Surface tablets.
Just a movie?
On the other hand, “Her,” like most future predictions, could be far off base. While it seems artificial intelligence will play a large role in future computing, we may combine such technology with even more screens. The point where computers become more intelligent than humans, called the singularity, may not come as quickly as predicted, and these future bets may be too far off to have any impact on company values today.
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