Motorola Is Building a New Kind of Walkie-Talkie For First Responders 56
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: Motorola Solutions (not to be confused with Motorola Mobility, which makes the smartphones you know), the biggest global player in these LMR walkies, is releasing what appears to be the most advanced walkie-talkie ever. Called the APX Next, it's a chunky black brick with a thick antenna and a giant push-to-talk button on its side. Much like an iPhone, it also features a touchscreen on its front -- but don't be distracted by that. Its real innovation was born from 2,000 hours of interviews and testing with more than 50 emergency service agencies, including SWAT teams and detectives. It's a voice-recognition system that can operate in extremely loud environments, with artificial intelligence software that can look up 95 of the most common things a police officer or firefighter would call into dispatch -- like a driver's license, or license plate -- without any human operator on the other end of the line. But its ultimate promise is simply to free up the user's hands as much as possible, ensuring that someone is as safe and capable as possible during an emergency.
APX Next is a walkie-talkie and a cellphone combined. It has both the high-powered radio chip for land communications and a low-powered 4G/LTE chip for cell-tower data. These two chips can work at the same time, which is an engineering challenge, especially because the walkie-radio has 25 times the wattage of the 4G chip. The core buttons, including the large talk button, are all designed as you'd expect, to ensure they can be used without looking, and purely by muscle memory in stressful situations. Four separate microphones capture your voice, with programming designed specifically to cancel out exceptionally loud noises. But it isn't always listening for a wake word like the Echo or Google Home. You need to hit a button to cue the assistant. The company says it's using unnamed third parties to handle the natural language processing in the cloud. "What Motorola did was train the model specifically to handle things like ten-codes and even regionally specific dialects across the U.S," the report says.
"Once a question is sent to the cloud, the AI is able to scour a city or force's database for the same private information a dispatcher would be looking up." What's also neat is that the AI won't automatically read sensitive information out loud. Instead, the radio will beep when it has an answer, and the user can get to a private place, if they wish, before hitting a button to hear the results.
APX Next is a walkie-talkie and a cellphone combined. It has both the high-powered radio chip for land communications and a low-powered 4G/LTE chip for cell-tower data. These two chips can work at the same time, which is an engineering challenge, especially because the walkie-radio has 25 times the wattage of the 4G chip. The core buttons, including the large talk button, are all designed as you'd expect, to ensure they can be used without looking, and purely by muscle memory in stressful situations. Four separate microphones capture your voice, with programming designed specifically to cancel out exceptionally loud noises. But it isn't always listening for a wake word like the Echo or Google Home. You need to hit a button to cue the assistant. The company says it's using unnamed third parties to handle the natural language processing in the cloud. "What Motorola did was train the model specifically to handle things like ten-codes and even regionally specific dialects across the U.S," the report says.
"Once a question is sent to the cloud, the AI is able to scour a city or force's database for the same private information a dispatcher would be looking up." What's also neat is that the AI won't automatically read sensitive information out loud. Instead, the radio will beep when it has an answer, and the user can get to a private place, if they wish, before hitting a button to hear the results.
Can we all agree? (Score:1)
Can we all agree that "walkie-talkie" is the dumbest name for a technology ever?
Re:Can we all agree? (Score:5, Insightful)
Go back to WWII and tell them...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Can we all agree? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? It's descriptive, easy to say and remember. It is exactly what the name suggests.
Twitter? Facebook? Blog? Airpod? Hell, virtually everything internet-related is juvenile nonsense.
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Not saying you are wrong about the service names.... but I wouldn't call "walkie talkie" descriptive as I both walk AND talk all the time without the aid of this technology.
My problem with "Walkie Talkie" is with the infantile reduction.... it just seems condescending and patronizing to me. It makes me roll my eyes when I hear the term used. I would think that a more appropriate term is "2-way radio" or just "radio" since that is way more descriptive.
Re:Can we all agree? (Score:5, Informative)
Not saying you are wrong about the service names.... but I wouldn't call "walkie talkie" descriptive as I both walk AND talk all the time without the aid of this technology.
My problem with "Walkie Talkie" is with the infantile reduction.... it just seems condescending and patronizing to me. It makes me roll my eyes when I hear the term used. I would think that a more appropriate term is "2-way radio" or just "radio" since that is way more descriptive.
Prior to the walkie talkies radios were so large and heavy that they were essentially immobile. Backpack mounted radios were the first walkie talkies and allowed a unit to communicate while on the move: literally walking and talking. Further into WWII they were able to reduce the size even further to (a still pretty large and heavy) handset only device.
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You are very much right about the history of the term, but it doesn't counter the GP's point of it being an infantile reduction. It's not called a walk-talk, it's called walkie-talkie, like the inventor had a brain dead moment and asked his 3 year old daughter what she would call the device.
Incidentally it's not called "walkie talkie" in the industry due to this. These are "portable radios" or "portables", as distinct from the previously larger ones you described called "mobile radios" as distinct from the
Re: Can we all agree? (Score:2)
True, but you are looking at the term through a modern day lens. Remember, these were invented in the late 30s. Only a decade removed from when motion pictures with sound became popular. So "talkie" would have been a word that everyone was familiar with and, if they no longer used the term, probably knew people who did. It sounds kiddish to us because it's mostly kids that use the term these days.
Re:Can we all agree? (Score:4)
Motorola actually calls them "handie-talkies", and everyone calls them HT's for short.
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HT actually stands for Handheld Transceiver and has for many decades.
Does "many decades" mean more than seven? Since "handie-talkie" is apparently an almost eighty-year-old term.
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Motorola calls them "portable radios". Handie-talkies was a childish trademark from the 1950s which much of the rest of the industry thought was juvenile and instead called the devices Handheld Transceivers which is what HT is actually short for. Motorola stopped using "handie-talkie" long before laptops were called luggables.
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Oh how I wanted an HT-1000 when I was a teenager growing up!
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If you like that, you'll love "Talkie-Tooter" - https://rothenbuhlereng.com/ [rothenbuhlereng.com]
Uuum, already built onto our phones, no? (Score:2)
My last cheap but great quality China phone (BV6000) had a walkie talkie button, that worked like one too, whenever I was in a cell phone network that supported it (or online and using a substitute app). (Apparently German networks don't have this feature.)
But yeah, it is strange that with all the radio tech in modern smartphones, they have such trouble talking directly to one another.
Re: Uuum, already built onto our phones, no? (Score:2)
First responders work everywhere. Cell signal is very unreliable or missing on vast regions of the Earth, including most rural areas of "first-world" nations. People who live in the cities don't seem to understand this.
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My last cheap but great quality China phone (BV6000) had a walkie talkie button, that worked like one too, whenever I was in a cell phone network that supported it (or online and using a substitute app). (Apparently German networks don't have this feature.)
But yeah, it is strange that with all the radio tech in modern smartphones, they have such trouble talking directly to one another.
I remember years ago my parents had the motorola phones that could essentially tether together and act as walkie talkies but only between the 2 handsets. They were bricks (like all phones back then), but they were good phones.
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Cellphones don't have trouble taking to each other, if you're close enough to use the WiFi modem. They are designed to go through the cellular network first and foremost, though, because the whole idea is to profit from centralized infrastructure and control. They could be designed to talk to one another primarily, but that's not what our corporate masters want for us, and most people have no idea that such a thing is possible. Even if they did, most of them are too trusting of the system to demand anything
Re: Uuum, already built onto our phones, no? (Score:2)
Baahh, you kids and fancy sounding phones. We just called them a Nextels and they were pretty cool things in the 90's!
Except the assholes that insisted on using the walkie talkie function in restaurants and have very LOUD conversations.
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"Once a question is sent to the cloud, the AI is able to scour a city or force's database for the same private information a dispatcher would be looking up."
Definitely won't be abused or hacked, pinkie promise.
This is just entirely too tempting for other nation states and criminal organizations. Bring all that data together under one interface, so all it takes is one vulnerability. Well done, Motorola.
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Why is this modded flamebait? It's a realistic comment.
If anything, Slashdot's moderation standards have crashed since blocking true ACs. There's less spam, but also legitimate comments are downvoted an alarming percentage of the time, whether you agree or not with their content.
Stop (Score:2)
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Can we stop calling every fucking thing we want to sell AI?
Someone should make an AI that takes all erroneous mentions of AI and replaces it with the correct term.
KISS (Score:2)
SLA & Damages? (Score:2)
This sounds worse than outsourcing 911.
I bet it's heavily encrypted so the People can't monitor their governments either.
If the ... (Score:5, Funny)
Stamps = Lickie Stickie
Defibrillators = Hearty Starty
Bumble bees = Fuzzy Buzzy
Pregnancy test = Maybe Baby
Bra = Breastie Nestie
Fork = Stabby Grabby
Socks = Feetie Heatie
Hippo = Floatie Bloatie
Nightmare = Screamy Dreamy
src: https://twitter.com/Flaminhays... [twitter.com]
Ask it important questions... (Score:2)
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African or European Swallow?
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I don't know that.... Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!
[stupid lameness filter]
Third Party ... (Score:2)
You must think in Russian.
Re:Third Party ... 1977 Movie Firefox (Score:1)
A little more background (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA, Motorola wouldn't talk about pricing. I'll give a little insight as to why, this coming from a municipal volunteer firefighter who just went though this. We were using the HT series of radios for almost 2 decades now and just started getting the grants needed to replace them, as they've been out of production for almost 10 years. The HT's are of legend, sort of: you can hammer a nail in with it and it doesn't really care. FDNY used them for years. Tough little things. We were looking at the Motorola APX4000's, as they are largely in the same lineage as the old HT family.
That 4000 might as well have been the advertised price. They were somewhere around 3k for each radio. EACH! That was before the remote hand-mike, the extra batteries, etc. We lose or destroy 3 or 4 radios a year, on average, which comes out of operating budget. So now, rather than spending 1500 bucks a year on replacement parts and radios, we were looking at spending over 10k out of our budget. No can do. Motorola was zero help with the pricing, too, as "Well, this is our top-shelf radio, so if you don't like the price, sorry". They know full well that most of these are purchased from grants, so they charge an arm and a leg. Yes, it's a relatively low volume item with a lot of engineering behind it, so I don't expect it to cost like an iPhone. It was more Moto's attitude that sucked. They know who they are.
We ended up going with the XPR series of radios from Motorola. Are they as "good" as the APX family? No. You can't hammer nails in with them and expect them to survive. Are they good enough? Yes. Are the 700 bucks a radio? Yes, yes, they are. Motorola has a lock on a lot of municipal departments, including mine (It's the "No one was ever fired buying IBM" mentality), but Harris, Icom, and Kenwood are slowly chipping away at that dominance. Good, too. Moto needs the competition. We're not getting into radio programming, either. That chaps everyone's asses with what Moto pulls compared to the competition
So, my point: I'd hazard a guess that this little wunderkind radio is going to be North of 5k each, and another $$$ for the backend you'll need to support it. Will it save your dispatcher's time? Maybe. Their supposition of "Let the dispatcher answer 911 calls rather than looking up licence plates" is negligent. I don't know a single dispatcher that won't tell an officer "Wait 1 - on 911" if they're busy. They get what ranks as more important.
Yeah, TLDR.
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I am sure your last paragraph is getting closer to the sales pitch on these: sure they're expensive, but if they allow you to eliminate one or more jobs, that's a whole lot of money.
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As pointed out earlier, HT does indeed start for "Handi-Talkie"
No it stands for Handheld Transceiver. Motorola hasn't used the therm Handi-Talkie since the 70s. Incidentally they haven't used the term Handheld Transceiver for a long time either and no products are listed as HT on their website outside of their "discontinued" line.
They are called portable terminals, incidentally what do you think the P stands for in APX?
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Australian police departments have used Icom for the last couple of decades. They don't seem to have adopted Moto's pricing model (at least not yet).
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Design already broken (Score:3)
If your design depends on a "cloud," that is, it depends on having a data connection in a disaster area , your design is gone, dead, kaput. I hope that some day the new generation developers will understand, once and for all, that they should NOT expect to have a data connection 24/7.
Look it up without human intervention? (Score:2)
with artificial intelligence software that can look up 95 of the most common things a police officer or firefighter would call into dispatch -- like a driver's license, or license plate -- without any human operator on the other end of the line
How long until it is discovered that cops are using them to look up the plates of that cute gal who just drove by?
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What if you can't reach a cell tower? (Score:2)
One of the reasons The Granite Mountain Hotshots died because comms in Yarnell were terrible. Having worked roadblocks during that event, I can tell you for a fact that there was no cell service in many places. What good is all that fancy-shmansy AI when very basic radio links don't work? IMHO, this illustrates the ivory tower technology companies live in especially those in Silicon Valley. They don't understand that there is a very big world out there without ubiquitous high-speed internet.
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