Such an incredible thing. Voice. Humans generally like speaking, to share maybe or just to say something. (ha!).. people write to communicate their thoughts as well, but there are some issues with writing. To being with, one needs to be educated – literate; and then you need someplace to write stuff. Like this blog. You also have stuff written all over the WWW, to find which you need to write more stuff – like in a search box or something on Google. But writing takes effort, if you sit in front of a computer all day long, your hands may start suffering from carpel tunnel syndrome, from all that typing.
How much better it would be then if we can find stuff by speaking and not typing? I don’t think carpel tunnel syndrome exists for jaw muscles, though too much speaking can draw people’s ire and harm you in many ways – you at least won’t suffer from CPT. Several years ago (actually perhaps two years ago) - i had mused on the possibility of having a voice to text conversion software available that can understand my speech and convert it to text – accurately. If you can then integrate this text to your existing applications you can do a lot of things that you have to type to accomplish today. Say, if i want to make a call to someone. Some fellow i don’t call everyday and my phone has limited memory, and i have little patience – so i haven’t set-up voice-tags for all the hundreds of contacts in my address book. So, now what do i do to make that phone call? Well, i open my address book and start typing the fellow’s name. My native cell-phone app searches the address book and displays that number. If now, i can just press a button and say call “Joe”, this “new” utility will convert my speech to text and do the search and make the call. Easy. Doesn’t cost me a lot of time, doesn’t cause me CPT and annoys only people around me. For me, its sweet!
Well, guess what. Someone has designed such an application. Go check out vlingo – a cool app that also powers Yahoo! OneSearch (via GigaOm). For the moment available only for blackberry, these applications are exactly what i had been looking for for sometime now. Two years to be exact. Now, if only i was tech. enabled i could have been working on this and making millions. Like those guys at Vakow! – who recently got invested by Rediff.
But since i am not that guy – just go and read my twitters!
(what’s with that “!” sign anyway.. even Google started with Google! at one time.. sad..)
0_O
