How the NSA converts spoken words into searchable text

This is likely one of the the best responses Ive gotten on a HN comment! They really do have some sweet tech you can potentially license from them! I wish I could upvote more than one. Thanks for the info adestefan

I don't understand how some of these merit patenting. Page 11, for instance, describes a patent on Comparing Voice Signals which seems to be an extremely simple form of data augmentation - playing an audio file backwards and rearranging chunks of it. That's hardly groundbreaking.

This is cool: http://m.nsa.gov/research/_files/tech_transfers/nsa_technolo...

Btw. the mobile and desktop version of the NSA's webdesign could take a facelift.

NSA, not NASA.

It's not... you're probably thinking of the fact that anything NASA releases is not copyrightable. This doesn't imply, however, that they must release everything.

One of the quirks of tech transfer offices is that they have emerged from government agencies and universities because it turns out that making technology and patents freely available doesn't do much for commercial adoption.

Anything sufficiently sensitive or representing a US advantage over other nations is ITAR controlled.

A reason, not the reason. I don't imagine these companies discount the sort of money that the NSA seems willing to throw at these sorts of problems. A sum that will not be gained from what is, given the quality of the microphones and the maturity of the algorithms, a novelty item in other respects at the moment.

If the technology matures, yeah, you'd want to sell it to everyone. (Actually you'd want to sell different forms of the technology to everyone, or at least different licenses, so that you could bleed them of as much money as possible.) But in its current form, and perhaps for some years after depending on how much of an edge you'd think it gave you in the market, you'd want to sell to rich customers who have a strategic interest in the technology and can give you some sort of decent return on your development costs.

You could use that analogy, but only if the NSA really really liked pineapples. They really really like spying on people and therefore like the technologies that allow them to do so. And they have a lot of money and power that would appeal to a company that might want to dabble in the gray areas of legality with regards to privacy.

You might argue that Facebook works to perfect facial recognition and identification technologies to sell them to the NSA, along with that nice full database of people and their pictures. That would make more sense than pineapples.