We can all expect another feature to hit the iPhone 3G soon–speech recognition. 
Now as exciting as that sounds, don’t get too excited yet. This is not speech recognition in the normal sense of the term. No, you can’t say “Mom” and the iPhone will automatically dial your mother’s number. Not going to happen. And the reason why is AT&T is developing the feature to run as a web feature. So when you speak, the data is sent to a remote server, then comes back to perform an action on your handset.
The service, called Speech Mashups, is web-based, so iPhone first gen users will probably be out of luck if stuck with using the EDGE network.
And even though voice dialing won’t work with this brand of speech recognition, it will work for a few other nifty things. There’s a video online showing a man dictating a city and type of business in YellowPages and how Speech Mashups does all of the footwork for you. Pretty cool, but voice dialing would be even nicer!
Why not just download the free app for voice dialing and check it out. The app is SpeechCloud Voice Dialer. Enjoy…
Let me guess…another $10 a month? AT&T is about as inventive as a dung beetle with mono, they just keep rolling around the same piece of shit hoping no-one will notice.
“Hey instead of releasing a proper APPLICATION that can run natively ON your iPhone, we’re going to make some half-assed web app that might work, if your lucky enough to maintain your internet connection long enough for us to run back and forth to every server on the continent (and through that little closet with all the government spies listening in) before finally returning it back to your iPhone…so we can crash it back to the home screen. Oh, and no, you can’t use it to dial phone numbers. That’ll be $10 please.”
For a recent review of iPhone speech recognition status see:
http://speechanalytics.blogspot.com/2008/09/iphone-speech-recongiotion-status.html
windows mobile has excellent voice dialing, and has for years. your can say “Call mom” and it will. you can say “What are my appointments today?” and it will read them to you out loud! Even over your bluetooth headset. No training is required. I have 2500 entries in my address book in outlook and it finds and dials most often just fine. If there are multiple phone # for an entry, it will ask which one I want to dial. Makes for much Safer driving. Don’t even have to look at the phone.
This post is bang to the money, so much so I just tweeted it to my pals.