Though voice will open up many aveneus but we are still far from making it a product that can be used practically. But I still feel that voice has immense potentioal in merging markets.

Even telcos who are struggling to retain their voice ARPU and increase their MOUs on the network are eager to support any such solution if devised.

Yahoo need to find out better way of delivering product to the user isntead of blindly copying what the competition is doing

A few years back I rarely texted. Now it is a daily practice. Remember, texting is as addictive as cigarette smoking. Once you get the hang of it, it is the preferred method of communication, whether it be SMS, web email, or tapping an address into a browser.

Voice recognition systems are nice, but also extremely frustrating. How many times have you yelled back at an IVR system “NO, I SAID ACCOUNT BALANCE” and finally gave up and hit the “0″ button to be connected to the operator. With text, this is not a problem.

“Is voice recognition for mobile devices a US-only phenomenon, driven by our car-centric culture? Seen the usual hype around it this week, but it still doesn’t resonate with me. I can’t imagine walking down the street, barking commands at my phone, or dictating texts in public. Part of the attraction of mobile is the discretion it allows.”

Good point about Spinvox Alfie. I was thinking about how they fitted in when I was writing and forgot to mention them. If you’re not not from these parts, Spinvox translates voice mail into an sms. However, it’s a little different, as while it is using voice, it’s self-selecting as the person leaving the message has already decided to leave a voice message. But agree it’s a great idea.

James – let’s just think about this, for fun. We’ve been using our hands as tools (opposable thumb and all that) far, far longer than we have been using speech. While the estimates vary, tool-using has been going on for about 6 million years (when we diverged from chimpanzees) and maybe a long time before. Whereas speech started between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago.

So we’re actually “programmed” longer and far more thoroughly to use our hands.

Either way, I actually think that some other inputting technology will come in and change everything and both voice and keyboards will be curiosities. Something like direct brain commands, a way of moving your jaw or waving the handset in a Wii-like way.

Watch this space.

Russell

As animals we’re not programmed to type, we’re programmed to speak. Millions of years of evolution thwarted by this decade’s crappy speech recognition? I don’t think so.

Yeah, yeah, it’s Jetsons stuff, talking into your watch to interact with others and pull up information. But it’s obvious that’s how the mobile experience is going to end up being.

That curious Generation Y of dudes that learnt to type quickly on little keyboards should become a strange anomaly, in the grand scheme of things.

Once mobile devices are an order of magnitude more intelligent and integrated (read: embedded) on the HCI level then I *do* think voice (sub vocalisation) will be the key input/output medium, but we’re talking at least 10 years away.

Voice to text on the other hand is right now both pragmatic and has all sorts of easy to implement bottom line saving functions, hence for examples Spinvox’s extraordinary success.