Samsung have announced at the mega expo, Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a speech to text feature on their Samsung SGH-P207 handset. It’ll be launched in Korea and then the US within a few months.
Basically, the idea is you dictate a message into your handset, which it translates into text and then sends it as an SMS. There’s a QuickPhrase version allowing a limited number of words/phrases, but also, remarkably one with a vocabulary of 50,000 words – hopefully in English as well as Korean.
Meanwhile, the Samsung ACH-720 does the opposite – turns text into speech, with varying degrees of success and “human-ness”.
Very clever, I’m sure, but are these yet more examples of engineering-led innovation, or is there any evidence of real user demand for this kind of thing?
Obviously, SMS is huge worldwide, though there’s a danger of user backlash in the US where the user pays to receive messages, thus making kids wrack up huge debts to the operators who implement this kind of madness. I’m not one for bashing operators for the hell of it and have been known to praise as well as criticize. But guys, that decision is frankly moronic. I think you should pay back your salary this year if you were involved in that one.
Anyway, back to the speech to text product – will it take off? It’s a brilliant idea obviously, just like speech to text voice recognition was for PC’s. Why has that never exploded like it seems that it should have done? It works pretty well and has done for some time, at least after the first couple of “training” days.
Like many people, I’ve tried then abandoned dictation on my PC, despite being a pretty slow typist. I can’t explain exactly why, but it just doesn’t seem to feel right. So back to the keyboard I went.
My gut feel says the same thing will happen here. Kids will carry on using their mobile’s keyboard with their specially evolved thumbs. Manually inputting SMS is as natural to them as scratching their arm or picking their nose, so this won’t appeal to them. Besides, there’s peer kudos in mastering fast and dirty SMS.
Older people will continue to use voice and voice mail. Leaving us all scratching our heads and asking why speech to text hasn’t ever worked, alongside MMS, Push-to-Talk and all those ever fiendishly cunning innovations.
In the meantime, my own memory of attending a CES event was the stun gun area of the show. A stun gun vendor was displaying their products (as you do) and an attendee strode onto their stand and decided to demo one of their products on themselves.
Now, there’s a clue in the name “stun gun”. Note it’s not called “euphoria gun” or “sex change gun”. Therefore, when you demo it, you get stunned. This means you fall over and loose control of your body, albeit temporarily.
This is indeed what happened to Mr Stupid. After it was clear that he was actually OK (if a little “stunned”) it was pretty funny. Especially when Mr Stupid II did the same thing half an hour later. Indeed, when it was clear (after Mr Stupid V) that this was going to continue, the company had to find a way to disable their products.
Doubtless, Mr Stupid VI would then turn to his friends and be able to say “Huh. Call this a stun gun? It don’t do nuthin’. Hey, let’s check out those revolvers over there, fellas”. Bang.
Original story: Popgadget.
—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo
Recent Comments