Voice:
- socially embarrassing
- prohibitively imprecise (when is precision not necessary??)
- low work, but also low quality
- currently popular methods require some outside company handling your audio
- also require a good network connection, which shouldn't be treated as a given
These are all related to my own situation and preferences, of course, and I'm sure that there are some people where your list of positives vastly outweigh my list of negatives. No one's served well by assuming that everyone has the same requirements.
I want to make it clear that I'm not specifically targeting you for this comment, it's more of a meta comment on the whole subject we're discussing.
I find it interesting how people tend to get stuck to the current forms of technology and then become outraged when anyone dares challenge it. Who needs Windows, I boot straight to DOS. Windows N sucks, I'm going to stick with Windows N-1. Blackberry phones are useless and pretentious, I'm going to stick with Nextel. The iPhone is stupid, I need a physical keyboard. Bluetooth is awful, I need my headphone jack. The iPod is worse than a Nomad. The iPad is just a big iPhone. And now, apparently, voice control sucks, I'm happy with my on-screen keyboard.
And as history shows us in nearly every one of those cases, us tech guys are typically the worst judge of how well a new technology will fare in the market and what consumers actually want.
> And now, apparently, voice control sucks, I'm happy with my on-screen keyboard.
Nah, on-screen keyboards suck, I'm happy with my non-mobile devices (when possible). Bluetooth is an expensive pain in the ass, though ;-)
I'm used to my desires not meshing well with the way that markets go (and I'll bet that other like-minded techies are too). Out of the specific things I mentioned with voice recognition, most of them will change with technological improvements and shifts in societal norms. Change is inevitable.
Honestly, I'll still find a way to do what I want, even if most other users are happy to have tech go in a different direction. I'm not deluded enough to think that what I want is what anyone else wants.
