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Is There A Market For A Voice Controlled MP3 Car Stereo?
big_hairy_mama asks: "I'm the author of MP3VoiceControl, a software package based on IBM's ViaVoice. As it was designed as an interface-free car stereo (in addition to being used at home) and allows you to search for and play all your MP3's completely without the use of a keyboard or monitor, I am seriously considering starting a small business to build and sell voice controlled MP3 player units. My project is called called EmVAX, short for MP3 Voice Activated Car Stereo. This is similar in concept to EMPEG's units, except a lot cooler, and I am confident that I can produce my box at about 1/3 of the $1500 price tag of EMPEG's similar unit. My question is, how much of a market is there for this type of item? How much would you be willing to pay for 140 hours of continuous playback with an easy-to-use voice-activated and voice-searchable system? Is the impress-your-friends factor enough of a selling point so that people will shell out $600 bucks for my unit?" Very cool. I'd love to have one of these, but at $600US a pop, I think I'd have to see one in action, first.
I think the sweet spot for high volume sales is $199. Intro price can be $299 for early adopters and those for the need for new gizmo. It all depends on what sort of volume you want to sell and the profit expect per unit. I think you will need to put in some spreadsheet time to develop product feasability.
Ears doesn't have a very good success rate. Festival works well, though. I kept everything mounted read-only or on a ramdisk so I didn't have to fsck. It was pretty cool. I got to talk to my car. :-)
This summer I plan on using ViaVoice, and enhancing the interface.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Um, I would sell my left......
kidney for one!
Where can I send the check?
Which is why it's rather unfortunate that we're going to have to buy entirely different units to take advantage of different features like voice-recognition or digital radio or whatever.
I'd much rather pay a bit extra to get a generalized system that could be upgraded and enhanced. Why not simply a "ruggedized notebook" whose components are designed to fit into a car? Commodity parts running a standard os, attached to whatever specialized peripherals are necessary (dash-mounted LCDs, a sunvisor mic for voice-recognition, etc.) would be way more flexible, and probably be cheaper than custom-designed hardware.
In other words, solve all the _general_ PC-in-a-car problems -- power, connectivity, resistance to bumpy roads -- with a single 'reference pc', then let the user and third-party companies add whatever hard/software they need for themselves.
I don't think IBM would appreciate him selling/licensing their ViaVoice to other people. Maybe I read that wrong, but it looks to me like he's using ViaVoice...
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
The idea is great -- I'd love to put one in my car. But, I really don't have room for a minitower.
On the other hand, the MP3VoiceControl does look like a pretty cool piece of software -- I may just set this up in the living room for easy MP3 playing.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
This person keeps forgetting some of the major differences between his player and the empeg. Size. My empeg Mark 1 fits in the dash. My empeg can be removed from the car at any time easially for security. My empeg can be used in the house easially. A PC box somewhere in the car has none of these advantages.
Also, the sound quality of the empeg is great. The people who installed mine said it was the best sounding head unit they have ever installed. Also, the empeg is very powerful, and will play many future formats with no problem. MP3 and visuals uses around 20-30% of the CPU. The rest of that time on my unit is used to crack d.net RC5 keys. GPS and CDPD support is underway, and the people working on GPS plan on using the IR to beam maps to the Palm.
The empeg is a well developed product. The prices will change with the Mark II. The Mark II ships June 9th with voice control, ethernet, and other new features. I'll probably see if I can get an Airport to work with the empeg while in the driveway once I recieve my Mark II. Also, I feel the price I paid for my empeg is well worth it. I didn't buy a simple MP3 player. I bought an in dash computer that runs Linux, and I can do whatever I want with, compaired to the similiarly priced AutoPC running WinCE.
This makes me want to record interesting voice commands on MP3, and then putting them into the player.
I can just imagine the track "Recurse", that holds my voice command "Computer, play track Recurse".pooptruck
sweet, tnx for telling us. I've always loved Kenwood's quality, so i'll definetly consider this (would appreciate a link,...if I cant find it). The CDR/mp3 capability has some definite advantages. However, my primary motivation for an mp3 player is to have a HUGE collection of music EASILY (assuming the empeg UI is any good, which i'm not sure of yet) available at my finger tips. Having to insert or find CDs just isn't quite the same thing, even if it is 8x as much music as standard audio cds.
You need to have circuitry similar to that found in noise-cancellation headphones. In real time, take the input from the microphone, subtract the output of the stereo. What's left is the ambient noise (road noise, etc) and your voice. Apply a bandpass filter centered around the frequency of the human voice, et voila.
With loud music, of course, you may have some trouble, depending on the dynamic range of the microphone/input signal.
-bp
bp
Does it run EmVMS?
Geez, I'd pay $600 just for a decent MP3-playing car stereo (with 140 hours of playback). Voice control would be icing on the cake. I'd love to buy an EMPEG, but $1000+ just to get a small disk is asinine. It costs $2000 to get one that would hold my MP3 collection.
$600 is a great price point -- high enough that folks are serious about it (since it's new tech) but low enough that folks like me who don't have
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
The new empegs have voice recognition software on it. Check out the new EMPEG Mark2 at http://www2.empeg.com/mark2
USB, 10bT ethernet, a better design and interface and as you mentioned, voice control.
(having trouble accessing your site... host not found) If you could make an affordable and easily removable car mp3 player with USB and Ethernet and a remote that would be enough to convince me... but voice control would be damn cool too!
I'm considering my first car and right now an mp3 player looks just a bit more attractive than a 6 cd changer.
What would really sell your product is a slot loadable mp3 cd player. You can skimp on the HD then too (maybe none)! Finally 11Mbit wireless ethernet capability... perhaps a PCMCIA slot on the front! then you could use all sorts of media (SM/CF that standard handheld mp3 players use! or iomega click, sony memory stick (is there a PC card mem sick reader?), and wireless ethernet cards among other goodies)
If your product had all that I'd almost be willing to pay the full $1500 for it!
Though it may be entirely possible to produce something like the empeg for a much cheaper price... keep in mind the amount of work that goes into putting something like the empeg into production. What if you have to sell thousands of these things? how will you make them? What about the machined parts? will it fit in a standard car audio bracket? Where will it go? What about vibration? Will you vibration test it, or will the drives just croak?
What I would like to see is a player for my Jeep that can read MP3 files off a CD changer.
There are several problems with hard drives in the vehicle. The biggest is, how do you get the MP3's onto the hard drive? Fragility and lack of expansion are problems too. How do you manage deleting files and adding new ones when the drive is full?
Solution: a 5 or 10 disk CD changer full of CD-R's full of MP3 files and playlists. That way I can create the CDR's at home, fill up a changer cartridge, and take it out to the car. I can easily add a new CD every few months as my music collection expands.
The perfect solution would be if it could hook right up to my Clarion Pro series head unit with Clarion's own mobile-bus system. This would allow me to use the fast forward, rewind, skip, and shuffle controls directly from the existing head unit, without installing more "user interface" stuff.
The user interface would be a bit tricky. I think it would be best to require each MP3 to be included in one or more playlist files. These would appear to be "virtual CD"s in the changer, allowing them to have names that would appear on the faceplate of the head unit. This might give a limitation of 40 playlists, but each playlist could have several hundred tracks in it.
I would be willing to pay about $300 dollars more for this than for a regular CD changer. But I bet it could be built for a lot less than that.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Not only that, but when Sinead O'Connor sings the line "Nothing compares to you", the player starts the song over. Chicks don't like guys that get stuck in recursive loops.
Other people have mentioned how the stereo creates sound and is also controlled by sound. I can say that my Samsung voice activated PCS phone (3500 something) does NOT do well if the car stereo is on at all. What you could have is a mute/command input button either on the unit or wired to the steering wheel. This would solve the background noise problem and the need for a command word prefix.
-B
To make it really superb, add a wireless LAN receiver so when your car is parked out front, it can download a new batch of MP3s from your PC. Perhaps if you automated this (car flags songs as "played", requests new ones whenever it detects the LAN again) you wouldn't need 140 hours of storage, just 8-10 hours or so.
Imagine: gnutella for your car wireless LAN so you can swap songs with the guy in the car next to you on the highway/at the stoplight.
I would plead for one thing - please make sure the command sequences are accessed by first speaking a command word, then acknowledging you are in "command mode".
The most classic example I can think of here is Star Trek, where they say "Computer", and it responds "Boop-bleep" (or whatever) do let them know it heard them - then they can tell it to do whatever, it acknowledges that, and goes to work and stops listening. This eliminates all ofthe complaints of constant-on voice recognition.
As a side bonus, I'd love to be able to use my Palm to beam it playlists or even as a remote control when I didn't want to talk to it.
Also, please include a CD player that plays MP3 files - I can't get through to your site to see if you've thought of that already.
Wait! One more thing - please include support for adding other formats as well, like the recently discussed open format that could replace MP3's (forgot the name already).
Other than that, I've been yearning for a car MP3 player (I'm going to buy a portable CD-MP3 player mostly for that porpouse) and think there is definatley a market!
Oh, one last optional feature would be nice - if I could add wireless ethernet so I could beam the car songs from my house.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> If I'm not mistaken, most voice recognition software makes you sit there for quite some time and program it so > it recognizes your voice... wouldn't you have to do this with this player? I've always wondered why one doesn't record one's voice to CD the first time you train, and then just pop in the CD after that. Hang on, lemme quick patent that.
I used ViaVoice (the voive app here) a while back, and experimented with this sort of thing.
:)
h tml will get you through, the link given above doesn't work) doesn't specify this sort of thing, unfortunately.
:)
It was trained with the stereo off, but one day I did some dictation with the stereo on. It's fairly loud and less than 2 metres from my computer to the nearest speaker. I think it was Deep Purple's Made in Japan, for those who know the album
Anyway, it _didn't_ recognise stuff from the lyrics, though the accuracy did go down a little.
What I'm wondering is how this is going to be practical. ViaVoice is designed around a headset with the microphone about a inch from your mouth. I would _love_ this sort of toy - and would pay that much - but I can't see where I'd put the mic that it could work. It wouldn't be acceptable to have a system which only worked if I was wearing a headset or throat mic. The website (http://ghs.ssd.k12.wa.us/~pdavis/projects/emvax.
The other thing that puzzles me is why ViaVoice? It simply isn't that good. Having used both it and Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a little while, I'd have to say that NaturallySpeaking is _far_ more powerful. Though ViaVoice comes with a better headset
It might also be a bit of a problem fitting one to my Citroen ZX - the stereo's an odd size as an anti-theft measure - but if I could find a way then this sounds nice. Assuming it could have a radio with AM and UK frequencies, that is.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
If you try to market this to consumers, you've got a zillion challenges trying to break into the sales channel.
But the auto manufacturers are another story. They want more high-margin, high-tech communications, navigation and entertainment devices in their cars, but are worried about the Feds blaming them for drivers taking their eyes off the road. Consequently, are very hungry for voice-activated technology.
For example, GM already has plans to put a voice-activated cell phone in every car the sell (a logical enhancement to their OnStar emergency communications system). I'll bet they'd love to offer a Delco-branded voice-activated MP3 player.
Get your fanny up to Detroit and talk to GM, Ford and DCX. That's where the real market for this is.
What's to stop the lyrics from changing songs??
-- Segmentaion Fault (core dumped)
I can't get to the site at the moment, but if it's comparable to what I've seen before..
Sure. I'd probably buy 2 at $600/ea. The voice is a cool gimick..make sure other controls are there, too.
I think probably he used ViaVoice because it's freely available for Linux.
Your post had some credibility until you told us you own a Citroen. That blew it - it's hard to go lower than Volvo, but you've done it. [grin] (My eight-year-old daughter wondered aloud the other day "Why are Volvo drivers always so stupid and slow?" I guess we're raising her right.)
Not really to bash French cars (OK, yeah, to bash French cars) I'll tell a true story: In college, I worked for one of the handful of EPA certified emissions test facilities. Peugeot sent us one of the first new 505s with some engine change that mandated re-testing. The interesting thing was that *it wouldn't roll*! It took us several hours of trying everything (and we had several skilled mechanics handy) before we finally gave up and took it off the truck with a forklift. The next day, we discovered that some drunk Frenchman had somehow hammered the front calipers onto the rotors with the wrong pads - pads so tight that it took us half a day to pull the calipers off. How it got all the way from France to Texas that way, and how they even even managed to put it together that way remains a mystery...
Dino 308gt4 forever!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
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Obi
And an hour later, when your file has trickled through that cell modem, you can listen to it!
It's in that banner, at the top of each page, the one I always ignore...
Everyone has an idea for a cool new gadget. Why should you get free exposure on one of the most popular news sites on the net, when everyone else has to pay for it?
I think the empeg and this unit are both toast; Kenwood has a really slick cd/cdr mp3 player coming out in the summer. While I don't know the model number offhand, the local car audio place has it listed in their preorder catalog for this summer. It looks awesome, nice display, no voice (voice sucks, imho), and it plays cds, too. Check a kenwood dealer. Might be on their web site, too. The dealer had the info, though.
The price point was, interestingly, about $1200cdn, or about $700usd. But, it's Kenwood - car audio is a hard market to break into because anyone that does circuit design knows that a car is a rough environment for a unit to be permanantly mounted in, and failure rates are high.
I'll be shopping for a replacement for the CD player I have in my car now soon, and this definately looks like an attactive option. The prices being charged for these things are NUTS.
Right now I just use a diamond rio (noise free!) and when I want new music, I charge it up off my vaio. This works well, because I'm rarely in the car long enough to repeat, and most of the time I either want techno or talk radio.. :)
Kudos
..don't panic
I built one, without voice input capability, for less than $250 US. Sunnylab GXLite MediaGX POS board($40), ES1371 soundcard ($20, OEM), GL5446 videocard ($14), 8G Maxtor HD($79, on sale), 100W micro supply ($10 used) and a small inverter ($59). With a wee bit of modification, (a pair of L-shaped PCI adapters to lay the cards flat and a roll-your-own DC-DC supply) you could fit it into a case slightly smaller than the Kenwood changer it replaced. You can roll your own supply for $20 in parts, (a $50 savings) and toss the video card for a voice interface. Just add a uni mike to the FD ES1371 and your software. Buy in bulk and I'm willing to bet you could get the constituent parts for under $170, add a case for $20, and still make a decent profit at $279.99 final retail..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Gee -- if slashdot wants to become a forum for marketeer surveys and focus groups, maybe it should require that requesters pay the participants, just like in non-electronic forums. Most of these surveys pay $20, although a friend of mine participated in a "focus group" for Banana Republic for a $100 gift certificate. Market information like projected demand, prices, desired features, etc. is very valuable information, and I'm not going to give it away for free, nor should I expect Slashdot to provide a cost-free source of information for these people.
Safer? Yeah, until you get clever and teach it that it's name is "Pig", and set the stop playing command to "Die!". And then get pulled over by a motorcycle cop in a quiet neighborhood with your stereo blaring and start screaming over it to try to get it to shut up.
Or maybe that's just me.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
. . . or you could just whack out a frontal lobe, and achieve the same effect!
I'm out.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Why everybody using it in apps (Can you say GNOME?) when IBM hasn't clarified this?
-Jeff
I'd hate to be expressing my love to a date and have "Nothing Compares 2 U" start up accidentally.
How does the player differentiate between conversation and orders?
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While you could probably make a way to connect something like this to Napster it would be rather useless. Connecting over the internet using a cell phone will give you a very slow speed. It would not be practical to try to download a lot of mp3s while connected by this means. Also I don't want to be crushing I-70 going 80 miles per hour and have some guy driving all over the road because he is searching napster for the latest Backstreet Boys song. Cell phones make the road dangerous enough we don't want to add danger by having peopel connect their phones to Napster.
If he's gonna make profit on this, he definetly needs to use some research firm and not non-random benevolent slashdot readers.
Also, anyone else wondering how this thing is going to be powered? It's a minitower case. Display? Where do you put it? Runs on batteries?? There's too many details left out of the site and description to make it even a viable question "would you want one".
"In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." -Nietzsche
MP3 player for my car? Sign me up - the only reason I got a CD player for the car was that I couldn't get an MP3 player. :)
(I wonder if those little cassette-adaptor things work for mp3 players, too?)
Voice activated, on the other hand, I'd have to pass on. Other posters have brought up the point - what if I'm having a conversation with someone? What if I'm muttering to myself? What if I'm singing along to that wonderful hit, "Halt and Catch Fire"?
Don't get me wrong, I like the concept of voice commands, there just needs to be a good way for the reciever to tell the difference between a command to it and regular speech. I'm reminded of the radio in one of the Hitchhiker's guide books - the one where you had to sit absolutely still while listening to it, otherwise you'd end up changing the station
-Denor
$600 sounds very reasonable. Heck, it's safer than a regular radio AND plays mp3s? If it delivers as promised it might be the first sound system that actually tempts me to get rid of my AM/FM.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I realize that this is a verboten topic on slashdot - home of free software - but have you considered trying to sell/license your voice technology and design to any major manufacturers? You might be able to cut costs by having some electronics firm build what you design and then make your money through volume and licensing from them.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
"Computer, play that song...uhh that one that goes 'road runner' by that band..uhh I wish I knew the words.... Computer are you lis-" Sound of 1970 VW van wrapping around a light post.
"Computer, call the doctor."
Driving on the expressway... heavy metal
Driving in the ghetto... rap music
Driving in the country... country music
Pulling up in your Driveway... well, you get the point
Shuts car off.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If I'm not mistaken, most voice recognition software makes you sit there for quite some time and program it so it recognizes your voice... wouldn't you have to do this with this player?
Also, how would it be able to tell if you're talking to it or talking to someone else in the car?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
Your idea sounds cool, but you already knew it's cool when you posted your question here. A million /.ers are gonna tell you "Ya, I'd love to have one of these things!" The problem is that voice controlled UI increases complexity, and MP3 players are already relatively complicated appliances for the mass market. So, in order to really get some feedback, you pretty much need to do what the corporations do: market research. Or more specifically, targetted market research. You need to define your market and set sales goals in order to be able to gauge your success. As much as I appreciate the technical arts (I am an engineering student), and as much as I make fun of my MBA roomate, I must give credit to the business people that are able to collect technical talent, capital, and ideas and turn them into products we all use. It's not as easy as we might think....
Good luck to you
Learn to fly! www.beapilot.com
The problem with the UK empeg is that it's produced in the UK. It's not quality or anything like that it's price. I've been there, I've purchased there, and even without VAT the costs are higher. The software isn't the problem. It's putting it all together. In the US you could have the parts come in from Singapore and Japan and have final build in Mexico, or some urban area (read The Hood). It would be 1/4 of the price as Empeg. Last year I had a question about the price of HD's, and Empeg said the prices couldn't be cheaper in the US because they bought directly from Fujistu in Japan. What they don't realize is the US market is way different than the EU. US Hard Drive market is domminated by Seagate, IBM, Maxtor, and Western Digital. US companies. Asian hard drive makers practically dump drives in the US just to make get product through the door.
At any rate a large company like...Sony, Pioneer, Kenwood, etc. would be able to put together the hardware in bulk for a super cheap price.
Me personally, I would look to team up with the people who are testing the StrongArm (LART) based computers that run linux (similar to Empeg) and license the "technology" both to large companies, but to general public as a hobby.
In the spirit of OpenSource what I would like to see is someone take the work with LART, and perhaps create a module, or kit so to speak. A series of kits perhaps. The LART being a cheap PC, and a Car Kit that would connect to the LART and provide a user interface. I look at this as almost a computer. So why not make it modular so it can be upgraded.
Just my $.02
Let's look at a hypothetical situation ... Someone passes you and you scream "Shove it" and just by coincidence you have the Deftones (My own summer shove it) in your playlist. Does this mean that unless you have quite a few songs named after choice phrases you won't be hearing much else.
Also I really dis-like the "HaaavING too tawlk and bee punctwoal in ordehr two gewt theee thINGs to werk.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The problem is price. Years ago, cell phones, home computers, car navigation systems didn't have a market. When I wanted to buy my first computer in 1978 my aunt told me that "only rich people have computers at home, for toys."
As more work is done, processing power increases at lower cost, the low price will generate a market.
Fight Spammers!
I am fairly heavily into Hi-fi car eqpt, and spending $600 on a piece of hardware is not really all that much. Whether or not you can hit a market will depend on whether the hardware you use to build it will be high enough quality to be used in high end systems, because those are the kind of people who would spend that kind of money. I would definatly not skimp on the DSP that you use, it can make a big difference in the background noise. How would you tie it in with current stereos? FM modulation or RCA outputs would work, but digital optical outputs would cater more to the high end eqpt, which could easily raise the price into an unreasonable range.
To speak to the pricing question you pose, there is a marketing technique known as (I hope I get this right, it's been a few years since my college MKTG class...) "price skimming". Basically the idea is that, with any new technology, there is a small portion of the market that is willing to pay a very high price for the device. As the product matures, the price moves downward. This is because a) it becomes easier/cheaper to produce the product; b) more competition enters the market, driving the price downward; c) the manufacturer has recovered r&d costs and other minor factors.
The risk is, of course, that the product introduction fails for any number of reasons, and you are never able to recover your r&d costs. In this case, though, it sounds like you've already done most of the r&d and you're willing to eat those costs... so you just need to cover the unit costs, which gives you quite a bit of pricing advantage.
The Daily Build
Sounds like a cool idea, but I'm tired of these "Ask Slashdots" where we end up doing someones work for them.
Can't he do his own market research? What does slashdot get back from this? It seems to me that the point of "Ask Slashdot" is so one may ask a question that others might also be interested in learning the answer to. Who cares whether people will buy a voice-activated mp3 player.
I tired of have slashdot being used a guinea pig population of geeks that others can pitch their ideas at. Lets go back to the intellectually stimulating "Ask Slashdot".
Control
One big issue seems to be how the unit knows you're giving it a command. A "keyword" would work, though there is the issue of the music being too loud for the microphone to hear your voice. I would propose that rather than a audio cue for the system to listen to you, there be a physical one. A simple one button remote that would both tell the system you're giving it a command and instantly cut the output by 20db would likely work.
Voice recognition/dictation
About the effectiveness of the voice recognition. Like someone else mentioned, there is a huge difference between dictation and recognition as the words are used in the industry. (I once worked in a lab that was experimenting with voice controlled aircraft, hence my knowledge on the subject.)
Any voice system works like this: listen to the sample, break it down into elements, and extrapolate a word from a given set from the sample.
With dictation, the set of words is extremely large -- perhaps into the hundreds of thousands of words. With recognition, the set is much smaller -- maybe only a few hundred.
If you've never used one, most voice systems will always "come up with" a word for what you said. Yes, they're essentially the same thing. The "dictionary" is just smaller with recognition. Therefore, the probability of it choosing the correct word is much higher.
If you're going to use the voice system as recognition, i.e. replacing the functions of the buttons of an ordinary unit, it's considered recognition and fairly trivial, with probably at max 50 commands or "words".
If you try to actually choose the song by name, you're essentially doing dictation. That would be difficult, though not as difficult as normal dictation, because the system can use logic such as the number of words in the song to choose between songs. I personally wouldn't want to tackle coding this.
(This is, of course, ignoring the issue of how the computer thinks you should try to access the file 04_SMASHING_PUMPKINS_MELLONCHOLY_AND_INFINITE_SADN ESS_DISC_1_ZERO.MP3)
Alternative Interface
What if someone is speech impaired or doesn't like the voice interface? An alternative interface, perhaps in the form of a complicated remote control, is probably necessary, and is another issue (and cost) to think about.
This product, properly implemented, has real potential. Design and propagation into the market are the roadblocks.
I'm a market strategist for a major semiconductor manufacturer that deals a lot with automotive applications. As such, I've seen what the bid autos have planned for their vehicles in the next few years. By 2005 every mid/upper-level car will ship with a computer built in complete with net access. Many of them will be in place by next year in fact. These devices will easily play mp3's along with CD's and some will even support DVD's, all with voice command. I don't see your product as being compelling enough to push people away from a factory installed device that does this and more. Sorry
Cops have better things to do than to see if you paid for the music you're playing. Considering recent developments, I'd be more concerned about Dr. Dre executing a drive-by on me.
Adding features to digital products is relatively easy, so in addition to the MP3 playback and voice capability, give the player a Tivo-like feature. I want to be able to listen to a radio station with the unit recording it in the background so that I can shut off the car, run an errand, then come back to listen starting where I left off. Not to mention rewind a bit to listen to something a second time. I like talk radio and it would be great not to have to miss things when I'm driving around. It would also be nice to be able to set the unit to record specific programs at specific station/times for later listening.
For those of you that doubt the viability of voice control because of your experiences with NaturallySpeaking or ViaVoice, read this: There is a _huge_ difference between dictation and command and control. Voodoo Voice, and almost certainly the original solution mentioned in the article, use command and control. I can almost guarantee you will be surprised at just how good command and control can be with no training at all.