GetMobile, Volume 18, Issue 4, October 2014.
Mahadev Satyanarayanan
Carnegie Mellon University
Every time you use a voice command on your smartphone, you are benefitting from a technique called cloud offload. Your speech is captured by a microphone, pre-processed, then sent over a wireless network to a cloud service that converts speech to text. The result is then forwarded to another cloud service or sent back to your mobile device, depending on the application. Speech recognition and many other resource-intensive mobile services require cloud offload. Otherwise, the service would be too slow and drain too much of your battery.
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