Car Command
I ride Microsoft pretty hard for poor design decisions in their products. I really don’t care much for them as a company. However, I am occasionally surprised, and quite pleased, when they do something right. Judging from Mark Phelan’s article in the Seattle Times, they have indeed done something worth applause.
I don’t expect to ever own a flying car. Thanks to efforts such as DARPA’s Grand Challenge, I may eventually ride in a car that drives itself, but that is still many years away from mainstream adoption. For now, I’d settle for being able to tell my car what to do. Microsoft and Ford have collaborated on a speech recognition system that allows you to control music players and phones, including iPods and the iPhone. Press a button on the steering wheel and speak the name of a song. The system finds the song and starts playback. You can answer phone calls and listen to the car read your SMS messages without removing your hands from the wheel or your eyes from the road. Perhaps most surprising is the the speech recognition actually works, even with a Scottish accent and road noise. For a more detailed description, read Phelan’s article.
While the current feature set is certainly useful, you can be sure that this is just the beginning. For now, you can control devices attached to the car. In the not-to-distant future, we will be able to control windows, door locks, air conditioning, cruise control, GPS route planning, and a good many other functions simply by talking to our cars.
But will they fire back sarcastic one-liners?