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Super-small Voice-controlled Wireless Phone
The phone comes in two pieces, (much like other cordless phones). The earset weighs only 1.1oz (including the lithium polymer battery, smaller than a pack of gum), and only has a single button on it. The base station plugs into your analog phone line, and connects to your computer via USB. The included software runs a custom copy of IBM's ViaVoice speech engine to interpret your voice commands; right now the software only runs on Windows.
The software integrates into Outlook, ACT! and Windows Address Book. At boot-up, the software looks at the list of contacts, and loads their names into a custom speech dictionary. If you want to call John Public, you press the button on the earset and say "Call John Public at work." The software matches your speech to John's name, looks up John's information, finds his Work number, and dials it for you. (Very cool). Dialing by numbers is done by pressing the button, and saying "Dial" and announcing the digits you want to dial, (i.e. "Dial one eight-hundred five five five one two one two").
All the other telephone functions are also handled via voice command, (answer, hang up, flash, mute, hold, volume, etc).
Right now the software only works with telephony functions, but they have just released an add-on package that lets you use the phone as a wireless headset for your computer, (for voice-dictation, IP Telephony, other voice-recognition software, etc). They say they want to extend the software to handle home-automation and entertainment, (can anyone say voice-controlled X10?!?)
The phones are priced at $300, which is targeted at the business crowd. It's a little steep for home use.
I happened to find a deal on mine, and have been using it for about a month now. I work out of my home for a software company on the other side of the country. It is very handy to be able to talk to my co-workers simply by saying their name. The size and form factor are also very nice. I can wear it around all day, and am able to take a call from anywhere near the house, (office, back deck, breakfast table, neighbor's house, changing a diaper, etc).
I know this doesn't have much to do w/ Linux, but the geek in me couldn't keep my mouth shut! I thought this might be an interesting story, simply for the application of voice technology and miniaturization.
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Is a really good idea, especially if you could hook it up to an X10. Being able to say "lights off" is much easier than having to clap :-).
The only concern I would have in the business application is what frequencies it uses and how secure it is. Most companies I know dislike cordless phones for this exact reason, and usually stay with in building lines. But they probably have a solution for this already.
I worry about hanging a permanent wireless phone like this on my ear. According to this study Pagers are much safer.
Yes, it's a parody.
tcd004
OK, so this phone does speech recognition. That's cool, if not exactly ground-breakingly new. But does the speech recognition actually work?
Students of this sort of thing are taught all about the problems of getting speech recognition to work in noisy environments, in a car, in a restaurant, in a busy street etc. On top of the noise compensation problems, you have something called the Lombard effect, which means that when they're in a noisy environment PEOPLE TEND TO SHOUT INTO THEIR PHONE to try and make themselves heard. And this means that the speech you used to train your phone in your nice quiet office no longer matches the aggressive shouty tone of voice you're currently using.
True, there are ways and means round both of these problems. But they're by no means 100%, or even 95% reliable. And if I buy a phone that has speech recognition as its primary (its only?) interface, I'd want to make pretty damn sure I can use it anywhere.
So, the question for Noah - you can use this phone while changing a diaper, or around the breakfast table, but can you use it in the middle of Grand Central Station?
Note that this is also possible using ericssons wireless headset (bluetooth) and a bluetooth enabeled phone.
I have one of those bluetooth phones (ericsson T-38) (around 100-150 dollars). And it works great!
'Could lead to all kinds of weirdness. Case in point...
Bob: "So, you really like that tiny phone?"
Ted: "It's fantastic. It's so light I barely notice I'm wearing it. I bought it right after that horrible stuff in New York."
Bob: "You mean the nine-eleven attacks?"
Ted: "Yeah, although I hear you're supposed to call them 'nine-one-one.'"
Alice (911 Operator): "Hello. Please tell me what the nature of the emergency is."
Bob: "Hey, aren't you wearing your phone now?"
Ted: "uh-oh..."
Alice: "Sir, abusing the Emergency Response line is *not* funny..."
(And I won't even get into what happens if you badmouth an ex by name while wearing one... although 911 might come in handy)
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Here in the uk where theres lots of worry abuot mobiles, we still ahvent decided if a hands free kit (mike/earphone) is better, worse or makes no difference.
A local computer reviewer had a bit on this unit - said it was nearly impossible to get the earpiece/mic unit to stay on the site of their head, and that they found it uncomfortably heavy.
I'd prefer something that used a small in-ear speaker/mic combination (something like my pair of Sony EX70LPs, although those don't have mics) and a small pager-sized beltpack.
Besides looking like a spy, I think it would be less intrusive and not look like you had become a borg drone.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
They are some wired headsets that use an air tube to transmit the sound instead of putting even the tiny speaker in your ear.
Anonymous Coward: (n.) 1. nerd at school or library. 2. karmawhore in training. 3. embarrased prep.
What would be even better is a cellular phone that would double as a regular cordless when in range of its base station. This way when you are in the confines of your own home the phone could be used on your regular line saving you cell phone fees. Maybe they could get really slick and make the cell and the home numbers the same so you could cary it with you at all times and never need to deal with multiple numbers.
Please stop apologizing for stories not being about Linux! they don't have to be... according to the Slashdot faq,
"There are many components to the Slashdot Omelette. Stories about Linux. Tech stories. Science. Legos. Book Reviews. Yes, even Jon Katz. By mixing and matching these things each and every day, we bring you what I call Slashdot."
Just a random thought...
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If this thing relies almost solely (if not completely) on voice recognition, how accurate are the results?
I have a mid-range priced phone by Verizon that supports voice recognition. The thing is ok, but it isn't very accurate... especially with multiple words.
For example, when I tried to call "Rob cell"... I got back:
Automated voice: "Did you say 'Rob Work'?"
Me:"No"
Automated voice: "Did you say 'Rob home'?"
Me:"No"
Automated voice: "Did you say 'Robert apartment'?"
Me:"NO"
Automated voice: "Did you say 'Robert cell'?"
Me:"NO!!"
Automated voice: "Calling: 'Robert cell'"
Me:"GRRR!"
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
Uh...I think you might be wrong. What about your printer or modem? Or Palm? It could be used without another machine, but it loses a lot on its own. I think your logic is really quite flawed.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
What kind of range does this device have from the base unit?
What is the sound quality like?
How does the headset respond to sources of interference like running microwave ovens?
How long does a charged battery last compared to the manufacturer's claim?
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
And three hundred dollars for something that automates dialling a number?
I've got a few friends with phones that do this. They got the phone free with their 12 month contract, and have voice dial for upto 10 numbers. No fancy recognition, just record your voice.
Dialing by saying a name is nothing new -- many cell phones do it. All the ones I've had did it poorly. Is this any better?
Dialing by saying numbers is something I wish my cell phone had. It should be very simple to implement, and very useful.
obviously you don't ever intend to have kids ;)
You say that like it would bad. :^P
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This seems like a pretty clunky piece of equipment. You can get telephone services that give you voice dialing with any phone. Many cell phones already have something like this built in. If, at least, the thing worked standalone and didn't use the PC for voice recognition. You can probably throw together an application like this from open source speech recognition and Linux telephony software fairly easily.
1. What happens when you need to use an automated system? "Press 1 for ...." ?
2. I thought the whole point of pressing a mute button was to be discrete about it. Not yell "MUTE!" into the ear of the person you -don't- want to hear you.
3. "So, I was standing there, then there's this great flash of light, and in the muted silence that followed...."
How does it know that I didn't just want to a) switch lines and b) shut off my mouthpiece?
Sounds like ACTUAL logic, to me. We were once turning a dial with our fingers to dial phone numbers. It wasn't that difficult, but it was unnecessary when we had the technology to just press buttons, which is what we do now. Now that technology is advancing again, we can just say "Call Tom Smith". It's not that dialing phone numbers the rotary phone way is difficult, but instead that just saying the person's name is even easier, takes less time, and prevents us from having to remember long, unnecessary phone numbers as many phone systems in the US move to ten digit dialing and blur the lines between local and long-distance calls.
>as having the phone actually right next to your ear like that all the time would probably give you cancer.
Well, first off, the radio radiation given off by cellphones is extremely small, to say the least, and because its so small its extremely difficult to prove that there's any link between cellphone use and cancer that actually involves the use of the cellphone, and not the lifestyle of people who can afford cellphones.
Next, a portable phone like this would probably come under the sub 100 mW transmission laws in the US. Cellphones transmit 700 mW to 3000 mW of power, which means that if (for example) 1 sq in. of your face were exposed to the radio waves, you would have to hold the cellphone over 3 inches from your face. This makes a huge difference.
So don't worry about getting cancer from your portable phone. It just isn't powerful enough to matter!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
When you said voice control for your X10, my first thought was "Take clandestine video of teenage girl undressing and then pan really slow"....
Damn popup ads...
There are now quite a few Bluetooth headsets for mobile phones (meaning you have much less radiation close to your head, by the way), and many of these phones have speech recognition. I use the Motorola Bluetooth headset with an Ericsson T68 and it works well. The speech recognition is OK indoors but quite unusable on the street. One good feature is that you can keep the keypad while listening to IVR prompts for 'press one' etc.
And of course I can do GPRS, which is very useful for small web pages and email, even though I've clocked it recently at just 10 Kbps when doing a timed HTTP download...
This occurs to me every time the topic of voice activation comes up... do you really want everyone within earshot hearing who you're calling, or worse, what number you're actually dialing? Picture it... you're in parking lot of your office and say to your phone, "Gloria Stitz, call". Maybe no one knows that Gloria is your beautiful, lonely neighbor, trapped in a loveless marriage, and no one would be able to put two and two together, based on the fact that you're calling her in the middle of the day, when the kids are at school and your wife is at her Pilates class. On the other hand, though....
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Somewhat interesting product. Fairly weak review.
When this is applied to cell phones (yes, "wireless") it will really be interesting. I foresaw this as an inevitable result of voice recognition and cell technology miniaturization a couple years ago and have been waiting for it ever since. Guess I'll have to wait a while longer.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again