The office may start to sound like a fun place with the development by an Australian university of laughter-recognition software. SoundHunter was developed by computer scientists at Monah University in Melbourne to make it easier for employees to log on to computers in a network, New Scientist reports. The software recognises a person's voice or laughter and logs that person on to the nearest computer on a network.
According to New Scientist the voice or laughter is picked up with microphones on each computer and the individual is located by "intelligent agents," or pieces of computer code programmed to move through the network from computer to computer.
The agents travel to the computer from where the person's voice is loudest. In addition to voice or laughter recognition, the agents listen for footsteps to determine if a person is moving around the office, and by doing so track their movement to ascertain the direction in which they're going. Using this process, the agents can log users on as far as two computers ahead in the direction in which the user is moving, according to Monah University researcher Arkady Zalslavksy.
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News source: The Reg
