tea, earl grey, hot

I loved the speech recognition and voice control powers on the Mac when it first came out on my PC100. Sure it was a little slow, but it enabled really cool navigation for the Star Trek Omnipedia CD-ROM that came out around that time (circa 1995). Merely by speaking, one could "transport" from place to place on the ship, display enclopedic information, follow hyperlinks within encyclopedic entries, or launch media presentations. And that, I believe, was still System 8. Of course, all computer voice directions would have to be prefaced by "Computer..." to get its attention.

The app would even respond with Majel Barret's voice. If you said, "Computer, tea, earl grey, hot." the computer would respond, "This unit is not a replicator."

About four years ago I set my dad up with his first Apple product, one of the first white iBooks. I knew it would be a struggle to teach him an entirely new computer system in the hour I had before flying back to SF. That, and as gadget-oriented as my Dad is, he is not what one would call "computer literate." Within five minutes I had set up voice shortcuts for all he really needed the computer to do: "check my mail," "online banking," "open my address book," and links to launch various URLs. Voice navigation made it all so easy. (He had tried Dragon's Naturally Speaking software for the PC with little success, but that may be more for his drawl and laryngitis.)

Teaching him to use iPhoto took just a little longer. And he now loves iTunes and has iPod docks in every room of the house.

But outside of those initial games and the occasional voice short-cut, I haven't heard much about voice recognition software since. During the dot com boom I got a t-shirt downtown from a new "TellMe" voice-activated phone service. I used that a lot when I got my first mobile phone, but they changed their business model to corporate phone services (TellMe is the voice service you hear when you all FedEx to track a package, and many other consumer customer service phone banks.) TellMe (just call them at 800-555-TELL) was invaluable with traffic and turn-by-turn driving directions long before personal GPS and Google maps were handy.

But it has been years since I heard anything substantial in the marketplace regarding consumer voice-recognition gear and services.

That's all changing.

Today there are the Microsoft Sync automobile system ads that are getting really annoying, and TellMe has reappeared with new mobile services, some specifically for the Blackberry, and many other services for other phones. You can check if you details for your phone on their Web site.

Wired has a great article covering the range of new services and programs that take advantage of the convergence of voice-recognition reaching a level of reliable sophistication and memory and processors becoming large enough in capacity and low enough in price to be rolled out for consumer purposes.

Other articles have talked about the possible redesign of the DotMac service to be a convergence service for the iPhone, possibly using Leopard's "Back to my Mac" functionality and other services using TellMe software.

The pending WWDC announcements are sounding more and more exciting.