A friend of mine just sent me a messaging telling me to check out jott.com.
My initial reaction was that it was very neat. My next reaction was one of recognition that this is really the perfect intermediary step between where we are now - no voice recognition in our lives (training your cell phone to recognize pre- recorded patterns is not voice recognition, it's cheap parlor tricks), and what I consider to be the next major step on the road to ubiquitous voice recognition - voice conversation logging. Ideally, conversations you have would be automatically converted into text and stored in your gmail account just like instant messages, obviously making them searchable. Thus, I believe, assuming Google doesn't already have internal expertise in linguistics, that Google should acquire jott.com, or one of its competitors, and use them to help implement some sort of service utilizing this technology, only, for exclusive application over Google Talk. Obviously, having this capability over gTalk isn't as major a breakthrough as it might otherwise be if using data networks were easier/as reliable/cheaper than cell networks, but when that time comes, this feature could be one of several major factors that tip the scales leading to a significant paradigm shift in the way consumers and businesses use telecommunications. Having the ability to have all of your voice conversations logged and searchable would be, in my view, nothing short of astounding. Now, take this idea one step further - forget text messaging over handheld devices using clumsy little handheld input key pads - how about using the voice-to- text converter to allow the user to conduct text-messaging conversation over google talk where the text you send is input using your voice only, making them completely hands free - much, much faster - forget the key pad - welcome to the new age of text messaging! Talk about the possibility for a jump in productivity! >From what I've read of Noam Chomsky in regards to Linguistics, we're now where we thought we were 20 years ago, which is close, but still not entirely there as far as being able to apply our understanding of how humans use speach to communicate in a way that enables reliable voice recognition. Perhaps Google + Jott could = such a breakthrough in linguistics! I personally don't have much of a use for the services that jott offer right now, but I know a lot of people who might, and I can foresee situations where it may come in handy to have an account set up and ready to use, "just in case the need arises". On a side note - I wonder how jott.com presently makes money. Perhaps their sole purpose is to develop their technology to a point and get bought out. There is also no discussion on jott.com about how their technology actually works, although a few other places have suggested that their voice recognition is actually a blended method of converstion, whereby an automated conversion system does the translation, and then evaluates its own probable accuracy, and if it's below a threshold, than a human is involved to review the conversion - or at least that's how I read it. I wonder how well that would scale, and who's paying for it - maybe there are eventually or already are ads in the e-mails jott.com sends containing the voice transcript? Haha, talk about knowing the context of the ads to be placed in the message - they just finished transcribed the text of your message - they know exactly what you are interested in. Also, talk about a perfect synergy with Google's business model of unobtrusive, context- based advertisements. Hope someone at Google finds this useful - As a software engineer and entrepreneur, I hope to be an employee of Google's one day... Erik --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "google-talk-open" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-talk-open?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
