The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey

dgan brings us a NYTimes piece about the development of speech recognition for common gadgets. Companies such as Vlingo and Yap are marketing their software to cellular carriers to give consumers a hands-free option for tasks like finding directions and text messaging. Quoting: "Vlingo's service lets people talk naturally, rather than making them use a limited number of set phrases. Dave Grannan, the company's chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs), for the location of a local bakery and for a Web search for a consumer product. It was all fast and efficient. Vlingo is designed to adapt to the voice of its primary user, but I was also able to use Mr. Grannan's phone to find an address. The Find application is in the beta test phase at AT&T and Sprint. Consumers who use certain cellphones from those companies can download the application from vlingo.com."

Comments

heard it all before

[debatem1]

I maintain great skepticism about speech recognition as an interface. It just isn't much faster than typing, even on a cell phone- and its not that it takes so much longer to get an ideal rendering, its that even a minor error in translation results in about five seconds of prompting followed by reentry. Until they can get that figured out, or get accuracy up to a point where someone unused to giving dictation can use it, its just not that great a technology.