Ask Slashdot: Is There a Useful Voice-Activated PC? (dailycaring.com)

An anonymous reader writes: My elderly monther-in-law misses her computer. Her mind is okay, but she cannot use a computer because of her Parkinson's disease.

I am not all that impressed with Amazon Echo. Seems you can ask the Echo for the time of day, or the weather outside, but it will not do anything useful -- like send an email. A voice controlled PC would be great, even if it only did a few simple tasks.
The original submission ends with a question: "Is there such a thing?" So leave your best thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Is there a useful voice-activated PC?

Comments

Re:Dragon NaturallySpeaking

[arth1]

open thunderird
write now email
---dictate to address
---dictate message
send email

works fine for me

That "works fine for me" is the problem. What works for one person won't work for another. You're technically savvy, with a mind working well enough to remember those specific commands. Those who would benefit the most from such a system might not be.

Some won't remember the exact statements, or their order.
Some won't have a clear enough voice, or one that works in the specific frequency and amplitude range the machine needs[*].
Some can't put on a headset properly.
Some can't see the screen well enough to know whether the computer understood.
Some won't have the patience to go through so many steps.
Some will say other things in-between which throws the voice recognition off.

All those "somes" add up, and it won't work for a large portion of those who would be the most helped if it worked.

[*]: I give up on most voice controlled phone and car systems. My voice is very deep and very soft, and what little makes it past the high-pass filter is frequently misunderstood. It gets really frustrating when the systems have an option to say "human" to speak to a human, but the systems can't even understand that you say "human". Especially if it then tries to throw up a simplified yes/no guessing game, but can't even understand when you say "yes" or "no".

In short, expert systems in general and voice recognition in particular is today a "works for most" that creates an even bigger divide between conformant majorities and minorities that actually need more help.

Re:Any PC or Mac with a microphone.

[Master Moose]

I'll be willing to bet the first androids we get will be centrally controlled. Why make their processing self contained when they can use the excuse that they need the processing power only available in their servers to control them.

I'll be willing to bet that very soon most "personal" computing will be centrally controlled with very little processing happening on a users device and most of it being pumped from the vendors servers.