A team of Dutch developers won a 30-hour hacking challenge at the Next Web conference Thursday with a service that uses a webcam to scan album covers in the database of online streaming music service Spotify.

Amazon appears to have quietly acquired Yap Inc., a speech recognition start-up company, fueling speculation that the online giant is getting ready to produce a voice command service such as Apple's Siri or Google's Voice Actions for Android.

Siri and I just met a few days ago. I think we're getting along pretty well so far (although she seems to get a bit testy and sarcastic when I ask her to "open the pod bay doors."). As great as Siri seems, though, Apple is calling this a beta and I can see why.

The head of Google's Android mobile OS, Andy Rubin, doesn't think your smartphone should be your personal assistant. In comments made during an interview at the AsiaD conference this week, Rubin downplayed the impact of Siri -- the voice interactive personal assistant included with the iPhone 4S.

If you talk to your desktop PC, it's probably for all the wrong reasons -- usually to hurl expletives at the machine for not working properly. Well, users of the desktop version of Google Chrome now have a more productive reason to get chatty with their computers. Google has added voice search for Google Maps to Chrome, offering users a (sometimes) faster way to get directions.

Look for more robust voice recognition to take hold in the realm of personal computing, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said in a brief interview this week that also touched on topics ranging from tablet computing, Oracle's acquisition strategy, and enterprise memory technology.

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