Voice Control

I was in the garden today with my headphones in, listening to my ipod. My ipod has a voice control feature, I can tell it to play a certain song, artist or album or tell it to tell me what song I am listening too. This sounds extremely impressive at first but once you have used it once or twice it becomes a pain.

The first problem is the recognition, you have to speak in a robotic voice, speaking phonetically so it can pick up every word. I said "play songs by The Buzzcocks" the ipod beeped before replying with "now playing songs by Foals". It doesn't take a linguist to realise that The Buzzcocks and Foals could not sound more different. After another unsuccessful attempt, I took the ipod out of my pocket and selected songs manually. This took less time and was much easier.

The second problem is how ridiculous I would look talking to my ipod in public, saying "Who sings this?" or robotically demanding that songs by Queen are played next into the tiny microphone attached to the headphone makes me look like an escaped lunatic. This is alright in private but I use my headphones predominantly in public, crowded buses and trains especially. I have no desire for strangers to think I am mad, I have to see a lot of them every day. Again, in this situation I just take the ipod out and do everything manually.

Obviously this technology needs to go through these stages in order to progress but it should not be advertised as the best thing since sliced bread at these early stages. Come back to me when I can tell my oven what I want for dinner.