iPhone 2.0 - What did you say?
Posted by Daniel October 5th, 2007
My Dad made a comment the other day about the iPhone’s google maps application.
He commented that it’s all good that it shows you when and where to make turns to get to your destination, but you’re still going to be fiddling around with your phone (no doubt whilst still driving) to check out the next turn you’ve got to make. Such a distraction whilst driving will likely render you and your car dead or at least really really awake, sooner or later (as happened to me the other day!!.. Another story for our next podcast).
So it makes a lot of sense to have your iPhone read your directions out aloud to you. The iPhone runs some form of OS X doesn’t it? And OS X on our computers contains the Speech function doesn’t it?
Select a bit of text, go to Services in the applications menu and hit Speech, Start Speaking Text, and a lovely man or woman reads your text for you, with an air of Stephen Hawking, but less intelligence. Just you ask the Speech application to cook you up an egg in a black hole for you! Only Stephen supplies the goods, whilst out on a camping trip. (Is that an inappropriate joke?)
So you’re driving along and, “Oh oh! Where to now?”. You hit a button on the iPhone, and a voice reads out your next direction… You one step ahead of me? Let’s run that scenario again.
So you’re driving along, with your 2nd gen iPhone sitting attentively on the passenger seat next to you and you think, “Oh oh, Where to now?”. You speak out loud “Next direction”. Voice recognition goes “Oh shit! Umm, Speech thingy! Read out next direction.” And Speech thingy does it’s work. You now know to turn left at the brothel, 500 metres on your left.
It’s old news i found out (speech recognition that is). In 2006 Apple had a U.S. patent approved for speech recognition technology. Read about it here.
In fact all this seems so obvious now that i’ll be disappointed if they don’t add speech recognition and talking into the next revision of the iPhone (along with video recording capabilities etc etc etc).
What else do you think they would be smart to add to the 2nd gen iPhone, that hasn’t already been banged on about?
October 5th, 2007 at 9:33 am
By the way, before any iPhone geeks say anything? I’m aware that the speech would be produced from the speaker down the bottom of the iPhone, not where i’ve got the speech bubble coming from
October 5th, 2007 at 10:59 am
I gues an illustration of that would have made it look like it was talking out of its arse.
I’ve never been a stickler for GPS, but like you, now that I’m beginning to rely on the Maps App I can really see where a GPS would work as part of the phone!
Right now, however, faster access to Maps (3G) would top my list.
And then at least some way of saving draft SMS’s.