Voice Activated DialingI’ve been thinking about voice activated dialing on cell phones lately. So I thought I’d share my thoughts on the matter. One of the principle complaints of the iPhone is that it does not include voice activated dialing. Indeed, with California being the latest state to mandate the use of headsets while using a telephone while driving, everyone faces a greater need for voice activated dialing. My issue with it is that I don’t think it should reside on the client device. I’ve had voice activated dialing on my phone before. It sucks. You have to train it to understand your voice, and the slightest sound throws it off. The problem is it takes up too much memory and computing power to do voice recognition correctly. That having been said, Goog411 from Google offers excellent voice recognition over a 1-800 number. Basically, you tell it what you’re looking for, and then it connects you. Makes perfect sense; they have essentially unlimited memory and computing power at Google – way more than my client handheld will ever have. So my question is, why doesn’t Goog411 hook into my address book when I dial in? It makes sense that it would. Let Google know my cell phone number, and when it sees my caller ID, it offers to look up numbers from my address book and connect me to those numbers as well. If Google isn’t your thing, then perhaps Apple should offer something similar via their new MobileMe service. Either way, someone needs to offer this service pronto. Tags: Apple, Goog411, Google, iPhone, MobileMe, Voice Dialing, Voice Recognition |
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2 Responses to “Voice Activated Dialing”
June 30th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
ATT offers a service like this.
Too bad, though… it costs $5/month and it requires pressing *8.
So on an iphone, that means, looking for your phone, grabbing it, making sure it’s facing the right direction, pressing the home button or the on button, sliding to unlock, clicking the home button again to get to your apps, clicking on the phone icon to go to your phone, clicking on the icon to go to your dialpad, clicking on * and then clicking on 8.
Kinda kills hands-free by that time. You should be able to press a button on your bluetooth and be connected right away to goog411
July 1st, 2008 at 4:13 pm
FWIW, the only thing I trust to enable me to stay off the phone while driving, is voicemail. But then, I do my best to avoid talking on the phone anyway.
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