Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Interview with Patrick Bergel”.
I’M patrick burgle, i’m the founder and head of product at chirp chirp is a platform for exchanging data using sound. What we do is create a sonic link, a small amount of data, just 50 bits passed over the air as sound as a series of 20 sine tones which we then decode on a device on a more powerful device like a mobile phone, or we can encode It on a simpler device like an arduino. The reason we moved to arduino and embedded hardware is that chirp was always intended to be a platform for very general use, so mobile phones are kind of a relatively fun and unconstrained dev environment they’re pretty powerful these days. Um, but what we want to do is make chirp work on lots of very cheap, simple hardware, so the technology can be available for the internet of things for connected devices generally, because we see a real place for sound as a connecting protocol between devices. So chirp is designed to be a very simple protocol to implement the first two notes of any chirp which lasts a whole church is 1.8 seconds. The first two notes are a front door. The next 10 notes carry 5 bits per note, giving us 50 bits, and the last eight notes are error. Correction, so that we can recover the signal if it’s in a noisy environment, but we use simple sine waves. Chirp is monophonic, so very simple devices can in code chirps decoding. It is obviously out with the scope of simple embedded hardware. We need dax.
We need to do multiple fourier transforms, which is not always possible on the low end devices, but something as simple as a doorbell can certainly send data and that’s a pretty exciting idea to us. So we like to think of jerks being embedded in toys. Chaps can, of course, be embedded in any kind of dumb audio player and played over any kind of regular loudspeaker to trigger some kind of action, usually to open a link of some kind. But really it’s just a sonic trigger and it’s up to developers to find cool uses for our technology. What’S quite exciting is that teachers are using chirp a lot in classrooms, chirps being installed on 40 000 devices in california school rooms.
Teachers are chirping class notes to kids, which is great because we didn’t design chirp for that they had a problem which is lots of kids, who can’t type very quickly, or maybe you can’t type very well, and it’s the easiest way to get everyone literally. On the same page, so, what’s cool is that we’ve been winning ed tech prizes that we haven’t even entered um and that’s very exciting, that kind of validates the platform play. What we want to do with cher the bitcoin community have kind of taken an interest in chirp which is cool. We had a canadian radio station that broadcast an open, bitcoin wallet over the air that was the first known broadcast of actual currency on the radio. So we could have made chirp a lot faster, but then it would have been way uglier. We could have made chirp sound a lot more like a modem, but remember that modems are designed to really carry uh sound down the wire and not over the air. They’Re. Not designed for the kind of uh distortion and echo reverberation and other kind of noises that one will find in in uh over the year, so one challenge was to make it robust as a protocol to make sure that it communicated data relatively efficiently over short distances. The other challenge was to make sure that it was outside of the normal, either time basis of music and speech and also out of the same kind of frequency range as well.
So that made the decoding job a bit easier, but the last part was uh. Really thinking hard about, you know what what could a sound be? What would machines sound like if they wanted to talk to, and we think that church is just the beginning of a whole set, i hope, of sonic languages for the internet of things or connected devices. So we’re often asked could church be an ultrasound. The answer is yes. We have lab versions that work. Inaudibly uh could chur be different, textures different tones timbres uh. Could you have a chirp in walt’s time? Why not uh? Could you have a chirp that was uh bluesy, okay um, so these are stuff? These are the kind of ideas that get me very excited and hopefully, we’ll be part of the next phase of check. So what’s happening right now is we are about to try to raise some money from the crowd from crowdfunding uh.
We are just about to launch campaign on crowdcube and we are looking for the support of the crowd to take the business forward to make what we’re doing come. True, so crowdcube is an equity funding site. So anyone who puts money into that campaign will actually own a share in chirp. So for as little as 10 pounds, you can own a little slice of the business uh.
So the reason we went with crown cube rather than kickstarter is that crowd cube is, is much better geared to what we want to achieve. Kickstarter tends to be product focused and not really the right venue for for investing in the software company. So the reason why we think chirp is an interesting investment opportunity is the the fact that chirp is already being tested by uh, large financial institutions, global telcos, as well as small developers just wanting to play with it. So there’s been a considerable amount of interest in using chirp in zero network environments where the data is pre-loaded onto a device and the chirp is just used as a trigger and there’s a obviously considerable and proper consumer resistance to qr codes.
Maybe people don’t have fancy phones with nfc, which is certainly the vast majority of the world. There’S been a lot of talk, of course, about beacons, but again that’s sort of a fairly niche thing at the moment. So chip goes where other networks – don’t that’s a powerful technology and that’s why we have some significant interest in licensing our sdk and putting it into other people’s applications. So, just last week we launched our sdk program in private beta.
So if you uh hit us up, you can get an invite to the program if you wanted to build something uh with chirp technology. In your application, i think uh, probably the best use for job at the moment is a human to machine communication rather than just machine to machine. There’S lots of great ways to move data between machines, we’re not trying to replace that. But we are trying to be part of the whole ecology of connected devices.
You might want to use bluetooth belly. That’S fine perfectly reasonable chirp has different affordances uh. It is detectable and distinctive as a chirp, so it tells a human being, rather than a machine that some data is being passed. We may decide to characterize the chirps so that they’re much more readily identifiable to humans.
So we think that there will probably be a human in the chain or at least supervising the the chirp experience. Machine’S machine is not directly the goal. Obviously sound is a kind of much underappreciated medium for moving data. You know we see ultrasound is being used. Obviously, in imaging in engineering in communications – and there are places where, where that sound is the most appropriate uh way to detect a structure or even send some information.
So how does chirp work in noisy environments, so chelp is very resistant to noise. To speech to traffic? Sounds to music, but jeff is uh not resistant to other chirps. So if lots of things are chirping at the same time, then the decoder has some problems.
We do have some ideas around that, but that’s not a problem, we’re looking at very hard at the moment. We don’t expect to have multiple devices chirping. At the same time, obviously one of the fun things about using sound is it’s a one to many or one to few kind of communication.
It allows everyone in a room, for example, or everyone around a table or in a classroom to receive the same data. So that’s one aspect of chirp that we like it’s a headless system. We don’t care who’s around just as long as they’re in proximity. You can still address their device and still send them some data. Our goal really is to teach the machines to sing. We want to create a whole set of sonic languages for devices and chirp.
We hope is just the first step towards that awesome. You .