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Hey guys, quick question for some of the techies: How far out do you think we are from having true voice control for our BBs? An example of this would be: I'm working at my computer and realize I need to send a message to a friend. Without touching the phone, I'd say, "Blackberry listen. Text such and such this message....." From that point, everything is completed while I continue whatever I was doing. What do you think?
Well, let's see.
30 years ago, that technology was just about 10 years away.
20 years ago, we were nearly there, just about 10 years out.
10 years ago, it was on the horizon, just about 10 years or so.
So I'm going to guess that we'll have that in a about 10 years.
I think the real challenge with doing that right now is battery life. You could build a phone that could do it, but keeping it on constantly to monitor the microphone and do voice recognition would kill the battery.
This is possible now. There's a jailbreak tweak for iPhone that allows Siri to listen for a phrase like you suggested such as "Blackberry listen".
The problem, as mentioned above, is that it absolutely destroys battery life. The phone would have to be constantly recording and attempting to recognize your voice for when you speak the actual command.
I see....so there really is not hope for this until some progress is made on batteries! Man, that's gonna be very cool when it happens!
Not if you want it to work with any kind of consistency. Voice recognition is still horrible.
It's not difficult to periodically check the mic level and simply do nothing. You know, like how voice recognition software has half-worked for ages. It's not the constant recording that kills battery life, it's the network connection. Taking a few samples every 250ms when idling, waiting for a command, isn't exactly an expensive operation! Compressing and sending that out to a server somewhere, that's expensive.
Like idiots, we traded 30 minutes of training for data use. Even then, the mystery servers don't seem to do much better than Dragon on an old PII. The next revolution in voice control is going to be a move back to handling everything locally. It's not like the phone can't handle it.