Report: iPhone 3.0 may include voice recognition, synthesis features

by admin April 22, 2009 at 5:30 pm

I don’t know about you, but I talk to my iPhone all the time: “Hurry up, iPhone”; “How come I can’t press this button!?”; “Why, iPhone, whyyyyyyyy?” Most of the time it ends in tears—for me, anyway; I suspect the iPhone is silently laughing at me. However, rumors suggest that the iPhone may soon be more receptive to my pleas: Ars Technica reports that uncovered software frameworks in the iPhone 3.0 beta might represent speech recognition and synthesis systems.

Of course, this isn’t exactly out of left field. Both the latest iPod nano and iPod shuffle include speech synthesis capabilities, dubbed Spoken Menus in the 4G nano and VoiceOver in the iPod shuffle, that allow users to navigate the devices without having to look at the screen. In both cases it helps people who are visually impaired use the devices, but in the shuffle it’s also a necessity, since the device has no screen and a potentially confusing control scheme.

Read more: macworld.com