prog | Jul. 28th, 2003

I spent Friday evening making some initial research into those "smart house" ideas I posted about then. Here's what I came up with:

Mac OS X's built-in speech recognition isn't a freewheeling, parse-everything dictation system like Dragon's software; at any given point, it must have a list of possible words and phrases that the user might utter. Through clever programming (and lots of it) you can come up with some fairly natural "conversation trees", but that's the best you can hope for. You can't "teach" the system new words via voice -- unless you're willing to literally spell them out, which wouldn't make a very sexy primary interface.

The "cleverly-placed microphone" idea probably won't float; SR apparently needs very close proximity to work at all well. I imagine that a <= $100 wireless mic, clipped to collar or dropped in shirt pocket, might do the trick, but it would eliminate the completely "hardware-free" interaction I was envisioning.
I still like the idea of a physically static computer with speakers placed throughout a house, which monitors stuff and makes announcements and proclamations when interesting things float by. Simplest cases: Your favorite weblogger makes a new post, or you just got new email, or the weather forecast just changed. If you wanted to, you should ask -- physically ask -- the computer to elaborate, where it would make a context-appropriate speech; for email, perhaps, it would read the body of the message aloud. The speak-and-listen UI only gets you so far, of course, and eventually you'd want to sit at the PC to use its more conventional, and faster, UI. But, I'm quite curious what life would be like within these sorts of interactive aural cues, and it strikes me that experiementing with this wouldn't take too much work or expense.

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