Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X1 – the appropriately abbreviated SEX1 – can do most everything. OK, it’s struggling slightly on watering the garden and I must confess that I had to help it out slightly with explaining what steps Jacob Zuma can still take to avoid seemingly unavoidable prosecution for being naughty with money. But aside from horticultural dampening and the legal minefield facing our President in waiting, it’s pretty awesome.
Thus, when it was suggested to me that it could possibly be made to be slightly more awesome, I snorted in a rather rude and derisory fashion. Aside from a hosepipe attachment, this was surely as good as it got, right?
Wrong.
Step forward, Microsoft’s Voice Command 1.6. I’ve been having the time of my life since I popped this little app on my phone. Because yes, I know you can get phones with voice dialling, but this is a bit different.
Users can go beyond today’s limited voice options by using speaker independent phonetic speech recognition and text-to-speech technology. Instead of requiring users to pre record all of the names of their contacts, the software is designed to recognize the commands users say without any training, resulting in effortless, hands-free communication.
So yes, it’ll call the wife if you ask it to. But then, you can ask also it what time it is, what date it is; it will chat to you about your upcoming appointments – even tell you who will be in your next meeting or you can ask it to play Favourite Worst Nightmare by Sheffield’s finest Arctic Monkeys* and it will launch into Fluorescent Adolescent recorded live at The Leadmill.
Which is pretty cool.
There’s a lot to learn on the X1 and I don’t think I’m getting anywhere close to complete knowledge just yet, but every step I take, I’m getting more impressed.
Now, does anyone have a beta version of Sprinkler for Windows Mobile?
* by literally just saying “play Favourite Worst Nightmare”…