Ambient voice and IoT
UCIC / Ubi
A computer you could address from across the room.
The problem
Consumer devices were becoming connected, but every interaction still began with a screen or a proprietary app. Voice offered a more natural control layer if it could be reliable and open enough to extend.
The work
What I carried.
UCIC built voice interaction for connected products. Ubi brought an always-available, programmable voice interface into the home before the category settled.
- 01
Led research and development for AI and IoT cloud services on AWS.
- 02
Oversaw voice-enabled mobile work for iOS and Android and helped extend the Ubi platform to third-party products and services.
- 03
Worked across speech recognition, APIs, device integration, and the operational demands of an always-listening product.
Selected outcomes
Decisions that mattered
Let developers extend it
Ubi could respond to HTTP requests, call web APIs, and work with services such as IFTTT. It was useful because it was programmable.
Treat the room as the interface
Far-field speech, background noise, device state, and response timing mattered as much as the command grammar.
The work taught me early that ambient computing succeeds when the technology gets out of the way and the person stays in control.