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Talking iPods
chrisb33 writes to tell us the next iteration of the iPod may talk you through the menus instead of just relying on text. The Scotsman speculates on this new technology based on a patent filed by Apple in the US. From the article: "The patent reveals the idea is driven largely by safety considerations. It states: 'A user will have difficulty navigating the interface in "eyes-busy" situations. Such activities include, for example, driving an automobile, exercising and crossing the street." The patent also makes clear that text-to-speech technology is likely to spread to other hand-held electronic devices such as mobile phones and palm-top computers."
Rockbox has had this for ages now. It's a replacement MP3 operating system, originally for the Archos machines, but now even runs on the later generation iPods.
As Creative kindly reminded Apple, having defensive patents to make sure your competitors think twice about suing you for patent infringment is a smart move.
I'm more curious if Apple manages to make this feature a new defacto standard in the MP3 player market. I'm also wondering if this feature will come into play when and if they enter the cell phone market. It seems like a patent that applies readily to that market.
The Rockbox open-source firmware for iPods and various other players has been supporting talking menus for ages. (Sorry, the Rockbox wiki seems to be down for the moment.)
Furthermore, it's free and does not try to lock you out of your music.
So what's up with the patent?
If I whistle to my iPod a few seconds of a song melody, I would like to see it identify the track and then play it! I'm sure it would be impossible, but at least it would be more patent-worthy!
"innovation"
"The ingenious system"
"clever software"
Give me a break!
If MP3's are still arranged in a geometric structure (trees of various sortings) and unless some new metaphor is introduced, iPods will still require spatial reasoning to navigate. While driving, I argue that there is one task and one task alone that should be getting full spation reasoning awareness: driving.
What makes this worse is the translation from spatial to textual. This requires the user to reconstruct the spatial, requiring even more concentration.
How about voice recognition? Call out the artist or album and listen away!
The author seems fairly certain that a patent equals an imminent new feature, but that's not the case. A patent is a patent. Apple may implement this in 6 Gen iPods, they may wait for later revisions, they may never implement the feature.
Technology companies, especially Apple, have piles patented software features, devices, etc that have never seen the light of day. And speaking of piles, one of which is actually called "piles."
As I recall, Apple also has also recently patented several different new hardware interfaces for the iPod. You can bet money they're not all going to be implemented. Heck, none of them may be implemented.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
me > hello, thanks for calling me back_ man_and_dj_touch-tonight.mp3
*ipod changes* playing album: hello my name is q
*ipod changes* The Calling - Thank You.mp3
me > shut up!
caller > what?
*ipod changes* 03-lil_kim-shut_up_bitch.mp3
me > no not you, my ipod is freaking me out
*ipod changes* Ali G Indahouse-Da Soundtrack/14-another_level-freak_me-rns.mp3
caller > you know its weird to talk to that thing right?
me > your driving me crazy
*ipod changes* Fidel Cashflow (2005) - Rap/06-stack_bundles-hustlers_go_crazy.mp3
caller > what ever, forget the job!
me > no, wait a minute!
*ipod changes* ez-rollers/lickable_beats_lp_sampler/09-60_minute
real men dont mark this funny, real men mark it insightful!
Apple is probably doing this to make their devices more accessible to the blind. OS X has a fairly sophisticated accessibility suite, and perhaps their extending it to their iPods. I know a blind person who would love to have an iPod, if it were accessible.
All of that said, I really hope this is something I can turn the fuck off. When I got my mobile phone it made a noise every time I'd press a button, when I'd turn it off, when I'd turn it on, when I'd dial a number, and probably a few things that I never got to. I was glad that I could turn it all off, otherwise I would have had to return it.
There seems to be an obsession with our technology beeping and buzzing to respond to our input. I know when I press a button; I don't need a noise to tell me what happened. The only time my phone needs to make noise is when I'm getting a phone call.
Help I'm a rock.
Think of the possibilities. The ultra cool fashionista who loses all credibility when the iPod annpounces they are listening to Celine Dion for example. Cue a quick grab for the play ans a face saving "No, no, the machine's screwed - I'm listening to the Arctic Monkeys honestly..." Similarly do you really want to know the respectable commuter sitting opposite you is listening to "F**k like a beast"
I REALLY hate it in video games the most. I am capable of reading, yet every game tutorial on earth insists on having everything spoken to me at just the slowest speed so that the average joe can follow what is going on.
One of my favorite games (Battlefield 2) is almost ruined by the constsant spamming in my ears of "Enemy unit spotted!" "ok" "roger sir" "well done team" etc.
Text is easy to skip, but voices arent, we seem naturally designed to respond to a voice, but we can ignore text. any device, application or game that talks to me just feels like someone nagging me. Besides, what accent will it have? pretty much everyone has at least one accent they hate, are people assuming a US accent is univerally appreciated?
Can you *imagine* how much MORE annoying the office paperclip would be if it spoke to you?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Yeah, I actually posted about that 2 years ago when the shuffle was rumored. Can I dig up my old /. post and call it prior art? ;)
Of course, people thought I was nuts then...
Text to speech applyed to menu navigation. Nothing new here.
Indeed. I was playing with that concept some 15 years ago on a Commodore Amiga, and back then it wasn't a new concept either.
If this patent gets approved, it would show once more that the tests for non-obviousness and novelty are seriously broken.
Non-obvious:
Prior art in the form of existing text to speech implementations (Amiga and others) and menus (Mac, Amiga, others).
Known and/or well documented motivation to combine the 2: See any software aimed at making a computer accessable to someone who cannot read the screen for one reason or another.
Got to think of it, screen readers and such seem to implement menu to speech interfaces and have been for at least some 2 decades.
So.. the novelty part should be clear.
Text to speech applyed to menu navigation. Nothing new here.
Ahhh! But it's now being done on a computer!
Oh wait.
May the Maths Be with you!
So now when i'm travelling to work on the train every morning, not only do i have to put up with excessively loud music coming from peoples headphones, and people talking on their mobile phones, but *now also* people talking to their ipods. Great, just ******* great. -_-
Anyone know where i can buy a portable, re-usable EMP device with say a 50m range?
this is because you might be vaporized by killer robot if you dont keep an eye out.
I'm afraid you'll have to wait a few years for those. Expect to see them in Korea or Japan first.
Untill then, cars and trucks happily take their place. Those employ kinetic energy to compress instead of vaporizing you but the result is not much different usually.
You got that wrong. It should be:
"Ahhh! But it's now being done by Apple!"
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I expect what they will patent is the system where the computer does the text-to-speech and then loads up the created files to the player along with the actual songs, then the menu system plays them as appropriate.
So a bit more than just a text-to-speech menu system.
I think I have talked my mother through using interfaces over the phone at least 1/2 dozen times. Last one: "Ok mom, open firefox No go to piratebay.org. uh-huh, yeah you can find music. Search for American Idol. No you are not downloading the music. You need to use a bittorrent client to download the music. Ok, lets get you a client. . ."
I'd like to believe this, but frankly, Apple has been letting their TTS and STT features languish since they were introduced to Mac OSX.
Speakable Items (speech to text commands) are a very simple arrangement: the engine is listening for a finite set of strings at any given time, so error rates are low. Fortunately, the set of strings is gathered from a set of filenames, so it's super-easy to make new strings and organize them by application. Unfortunately, most of the newer applications that are bundled with OSX have no hooks for automation nor sample scripts as speakable items. The speakable item must be an AppleScript or .app, for no discernable reason; I would love to be able to have voice-activated shell scripts without going through some ugly hack of a wrapper script, since it's "Unix" and all.
VoiceOver (text to speech prompting) is also fairly straightforward, but there's limited support and somewhat inconsistent controls. Many of the blind folks I've seen using voice prompts on other devices want their voice prompts to be very fast, even so far as to blur the words together into abstract "earcons." The AppleScript-invoked speech does not honor the OSX talking speed preferences, so the words just ramble on taking forever to finish. The talking is not a separately controllable volume channel, so if you turn up the iTunes, then the TTS voice will start yelling at you to compete, or worse, not be able to escape the iTunes mute control.
This is just a rumor, but for the sake of those who like or need good voice features in their interfaces, I hope it signals a new drive to finish what they've started here.
[
While driving, I argue that there is one task and one task alone that should be getting full spation reasoning awareness: driving.
I agree in principle that just reading off menu items to us is adding a level of abstraction, not simplifying anything. We haven't really seen how this would work, but it sounds like nothing much new. (Pre-OS X Macs certainly did this too.)
The thing about cars is, radios and cells phones are also distracting. When each of those came out people said they distracted from people's driving, and despite our unthinking acceptance even radios really do that, you know? We're not just talking about spatial reasoning to figure out where on the dial we are left to right, we're talking about a device that deliberately obscures the sounds of traffic. Those shuddering bass-heavy cars thumpa-thumping at intersections can't possibly hear an ambulance. Let's not even start on cell phones.
If they had to choose one thing to concentrate on, and okay obviously they don't, I'd tell Apple engineers to work out the stupid line-to-my-car-stereo thing. Yeah, I know there are options, and they're all too expensive and cumbersome. In reach with an easy hookup, please. In general car interiors get a ton of attention and still suck. It's amazing how the cup holders are crucially important to drivers, and turn out to be flimsy and awkward in so many cars. Just turn a little of that Apple attention to making things simpler there.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
must... stay... awake...
If Apple didn't patent this for the iPod then someone else would come out with an mp3 player and then sued Apple for putting it into the iPod.
I'm surprised all of those companies that make car radios and CD changers are still in business. Speaking seriously, the best interface would probably be a 5-button remote.
(1) Play/Pause
(2) Next song
(3) Prev song
(4) Next playlist
(5) Prev playlist
I may add that the buttons should be *big* to allow their use while wearing gloves - the profusion of many tiny buttons is one of my peeves about newer cars!
-b.
Star Trek... that's the one with the laser swords, isn't it?
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Not that i'm saying this isn't a bad thing to have audio instructions, but if they are endorsing using your iPod while you are "eyes-engaged" i think they'll be looking for trouble.
if they really want to be safe, they should advise you to familiarize yourself with the iPod before driving, and only use the iPod while stopped.
-IMHO
Rockbox has had this exact capability for quite a while already. Since 2004-03-14 I believe. You can generate speech files for every mp3/etc. file on your device, and it'll get played back when you scroll through lists and menus. Menu items have their own pre-synthesized files, and if there's no file available, it'll spell out the letters of the song.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Phatbox, an mp3 hard-drive box for the car, has had audio menus for years.
It plugs into a CD changer interface and using the buttons on most head units, you can go forward/backward through playlists, genres, artists, albums, etc.
It tells you where you are in the menus, so you don't have to look at it. (Another good reason is that the CD changer interface is not sophisticated enough to show that data on the head unit...)
I think there's some alternative/oss text-to-speech sw out there, too.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
I swear iPods have been talking to me for years. Every time I go to the Apple Store, I hear voices saying, "Buy me!"