Super-small Voice-controlled Wireless Phone

Noah Bergevin writes: "While web browsing one day, I ran across a little gadget at a favorite e-tailer of mine, and fell in love with it at first sight. It's a super-small cordless telephone that you hang on your ear, and which uses voice-recognition instead of a physical keypad to do the dialing. It's from a company called ArialPhone. They have only been around since January 2001, and the phone has been out for about a year." Read on to see what's good and not-as-good about this phone with the rest of Noah's review.

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.

Slashdot welcomes reader-submitted hardware reviews.

Comments

This..

[iONiUM]

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.

Re:This..

[Anonymous Coward]

We actually had this phone demonstrated at our office. It was a joke. It took the sales guy an average of 4 tries to get the thing to dial simple local calls. The demo really went south when he passed it around to others around the table. It couldn't understand some people at all, despite the "speaker independent voice recognition".

What about the health risks

[tcd004]

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

But does the speech recognition actually work?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Unintended consequences

[Embedded Geek]

'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)

Not made for the following.

[Eddy Johnson]

This would be a really bad phone for those who are:

• Valley Girls.
• working out math problems aloud.
• trying to memorize pi.
• telling someone their social security number.
• telling someone their credit card number.
• teaching their child what to do in case of emergency.
• Muppets on Seasame Street.
• algebra or calculus teachers.
• hearing voices in their head.
• Slashdotters reviewing their karma scores.

Re:Product or add-on

[MaxVlast]

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.

A couple questions

[Jester99]

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?

X10

[spacefrog]

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...

Try Bluetooth and a mobile phone

[Cato]

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...