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jmjanzen's Avatar
Posts: 192 | Thanked: 60 times | Joined on Sep 2008 @ Wichita, KS
#1
i just read this review of the iLane at nytimes.com:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/te...f=personaltech

and i'm pretty sure everything this insanely overpriced device can do, an NIT could do better. in fact, it's very limited in function: read your e-mail to you and reply/reply-all/forward with canned responses or voice messages recorded and encoded on-the-fly as mp3 attachments. oh, and it'll read other things from the web, like news and weather and stuff. the only thing the tablets are missing is speech recognition.

<rant> I'm a bit annoyed that text-to-speech is getting so much attention these days. it's been around since before i was born--more importantly, and it hasn't gotten much better over the years. but i've never actually heard apple's new shuffle try to pronounce brad mehldau, pat metheny, or béla fleck, so i can't be absolutely certain it will botch them. i always get frustrated when a so-called "new" or "cutting edge" technology is actually very old and it's just been re-packaged and overly hyped. sorry, apple; sorry iLane; i'm not impressed. $600 is f-ing ridiculous, and it doesn't even make sense to charge a monthly fee. it requires a blackberry, for crying out loud! blackberry can check your e-mail. someone PLEASE make an app for blackberry that reads your e-mail aloud and save some idiots $600.</rant>

so i just wanted to show my support for anyone who's working on speech recognition on the tablets. it would open up a whole new world of accessibility: hands-free operation while driving.
 

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verumgero's Avatar
Posts: 221 | Thanked: 43 times | Joined on Oct 2007 @ Sendai, Japan
#2
That is truly out of control. And the article is just so ridiculous.

It’s ingenious, polished and efficient
dude, no.

In other words, iLane’s creators have wisely avoided trying to transcribe your spoken e-mail utterances into typed e-mail text. Without any way for you to see its results before sending them, disaster could result.
Wisely avoided? For $600 I would expect it to dictate my speech. You can dictate speech to text through Microsoft Office 2007! Why not on this? Disaster could result? Why not just have the syntho-lady read your message back to you? It might be just me but this thing seems like it falls into the category of "exploit-rich-people-who-want-to-feel-technologically-superior-but-don't-know-better."

Meh. Oh well. Life goes on and there is just another thing that I won't be buying.
 
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