Someone in the Android community was bored over the last few days and decided to open up one of the .xml files for the Face Unlock feature in Ice Cream Sandwich. They noticed a list of items that for some reason, made them jump to the conclusion that these are a part of Google’s rumored voice recognition/artificial intelligence service codenamed “Majel.” As you can see from the list, they appear to be somewhat witty responses to actions. The only thing is, these are clearly alternate responses that appear on the screen when the Face Unlock doesn’t recognize you.

The first response listed is “Sorry, don’t recognize you.” If anyone has used Face Unlock at all, you will know that this is the canned response that appears every time. The others, are options that can probably be enabled, but for whatever reason, have not been. It’s not Majel. These aren’t voice-related or intelligent responses. They are pre-set lines that are displayed on the screen when the unlock feature does not recognize you. That’s it.

Moving on…

According to Apple patent investigator Patently Apple, the Cupertino based king of patent trolling has filed for a new facial unlock detection patent. Seriously, Apple? You don’t even have facial recognition technology out to the public yet, but your competitor does and you file for a patent on it? I mean, come on. We get that you hate Android with a passion, however, this just looks pathetic.

If you glance over the fancy little stick-figured depiction of this new technology, you will see that it matches up almost perfectly to what the same feature does in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Let’s see, it says that the device will look for eyes and a mouth in normal locations, analyze weight differences, and then unlock if it matches up to the one on file. Yeah, that’s exactly how Android’s face unlock works.