Comments on: Coolest Gadget Ever

By: erik

erik — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 19:12:41 +0000

Good job for Vista! OS X has had speech recognition standard for 6 years now….at least the only kind of speech recognition worth having, which is giving commands like “computer, open window”, “on screen”, “stop program and open holodeck doors”, and “HAL, open the airlock!”

The truth is all dictation speech recognition still sucks. We’re still years away from that kind of fuzzy AI being of any use. You spend more time fixing errors than actually dictating, so unless you’re a quadriplegic, you’re better off typing.

And we’ve all already seen how well Vista’s speech recognition works.

By: Uncle Neil

Uncle Neil — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 18:44:59 +0000

Can the iPhone work with speech recognition to create a document which can be sent or printed?

The Vista Premium apparently has speech recognition as standard.

By: erik

erik — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:33:10 +0000

My father (commenter Paul, above) just called me from his iPhone. Not being a cell phone user, he had a unique perspective on the iPhone. He's been using it to check his email. He said,

It's kind of neat to have a computer that you can put up to your ear and talk into. You just tap a number in an email and put it up to your head.

Kind of like me in my "it's a keyboard attached to a printer" typewriter story, he sees the iPhone as a computer that can also make calls, rather than a cell phone that can also check email and surf the net.

By: sgazzetti

sgazzetti — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:51:11 +0000

Right on. And I think that the iPhone is going to really ramp up the ‘halo effect’, which in our household led from one iPod to pretty much full Apple gearage in a year and a half — and it’s safe to say that I’d be chucking my Motorola if the iPhone were available in Europe. I’d be unable to resist picking one up tomorrow, as we’re going to be in Ljubljana and are stopping at the Apple store there for, um, some other stuff.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:35:25 +0000

The Cingular store called me Monday evening to tell me “my” iPhone was in. I told them I ordered it on-line Saturday morning. “Oh well”, they said. Fifteen minutes later I got e-mail from Apple telling me my phone would ship July 13. Five minutes later the nice fellow on the 800 number was cancelling my order, and I picked up my phone Tuesday morning. They badly wanted me to sign up for their coverage at their store, so 10 minutes later back at home I was selecting “existing” customer, but I suspect I signed up correctly.

It is great, of course, and will be better after I have wifi at home. I am still having a problem with my outgoing mail server. Everyone must be blocking port 25. I’ll lick it, though.