Talking Palm

Isotopia writes: "This article from the NY Times is very cool. It's about this guy from IBM who was able to put voice recognition on his Palm III and it talks to him! It can remind him about meetings and it will tell him when his battery is getting low." I bet if you used this much, it would tell you how low the battery is -- frequently. That aside, it's amazing that IBM has been able to squeeze this onto a Palm.

Comments

Better Uses

[under_score]

Personally, I think this sort of tech is better used in cell phones. A device which already has a decent text input system is probably only made more clumsy by including speech recognition and text to speech capabilities. Why? Because it "requires" switching modes of interfacing with the device which is something humans don't tend to like. Rather, most people will choose one mode and stick with it. And, be honest now, you can guess which mode that will be: stylus or keyboard. On the other hand, in cell phones, the vastly predominant mode is already voice and hearing oriented. It would be really nice to be able to get rid of the keypad (or at least severly reduce its usage). Other reasons cell phones are a better place for this tech: when you listen to a cell phone, what you hear is private. Cellphones cannot speak at you: they ring first. Two different rings would be sufficient to distinguish between a person call and the cell phone telling you something.

They used additional hardware

[drinkypoo]

That aside, it's amazing that IBM has been able to squeeze this onto a Palm.

They didn't. They made the palm bigger by adding at least a mic, speaker, and an additional processor to it. The first two are par for this course, though the handspring visor at least has a mic built in. The third makes this into a pretty basic accomplishment for someone with IBM's resources, especially if that CPU has more RAM attached to it, or embedded in it.

All I really want is a speech recognition module for visor. I don't want my palm to talk to me, one of the nice things about a handheld is that only I can tell what's going on on it. The visor already has a mic built in, so now I just need the speech recognition hardware/software in a handspring module.

More embarassing than innovative

[nyquist_theorem]

I can't see this being a bit hit. My experience with voice recognition software, even on fast computers, has been that without a good microphone and very little background noise, recognition is horrific. Most of the world is, unfortunately, rather noisy and as such muttering into a palm pilot is going to produce very little workable speech - and yelling into a palm pilot is likely to get one arrested for being a freak.

Worse - imagine sitting in a boardroom meeting.
CEO: "well, gang, sales results are up for this quarter!"

fifteen cronies all mutter into thier palm pilots in unison - "well comma gang comma sales results are up for this quarter exclamation mark new sentence" except for the one poor sap who accidentally brushed his thumb across the front panel of the palm while dictating, and is madly muttering "begin edit delete r-e-s-u-l-t-s-delete-s end edit". Just what the world needs - longer meetings.

Or a girl gives you her number at a bar, and you proceed to yell it into your palm pilot - is that cool? What about those of us who love using our palm pilots while in the bathroom? Imagine wandering into a public bathroom with geeks muttering in every stall? The kind of stuff I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night having nightmares about, I tell you. Even grocery stores would produce entries like this:

TODO LIST: Don't forget attention shoppers to get sale on meatloaf a gift in aisle for mom seven

I can't see it being too useful.