Friday, March 20, 2009

Mobile Device + Subvocal + Twitter = "Mutter"

Lately, I have been considering how I might make use of Twitter. My most immediate use would be for sending notes to myself in the form of a dedicated private (https) log - an improvement over emailing myself.

The ideal configuration would be:

Mobile Device + Subvocal + Twitter

...this, I have dubbed "Mutter".

Before getting a cell phone, I was amused by the notion of carrying a calculator that I could put up to my head, not only to camouflage the act of talking to myself, but to fully indulge in it. These days, the hand gesture alone would probably suffice. If only I could talk to myself and send those words to a repository when 'we' arrive at a conclusion worthy of note.

Subvocal technology is ideal for accuracy (not picking up other sounds), privacy, and practicality. For example, a listener might better note their own questions or reactions when listening to a phone conversation or business meeting without interrupting or distracting.

There are apparently two recommended speech-to-text solutions for mobile devices:

MyCaption for BlackBerry: http://www.mycaption.com

vlingo for BlackBerry and iPhone: http://www.vlingo.com

Upon googling, I did find this link which is currently dead - perhaps something to watch out for in the future:
https://explore.twitter.com/subvocal

Speech recognition notes from wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition:

"The improvement of mobile processor speeds made feasible the speech-enabled Symbian and Windows Mobile Smartphones. Current speech-to-text programs are too large and require too much CPU power to be practical for the Pocket PC. Speech is used mostly as a part of User Interface, for creating pre-defined or custom speech commands. Leading software vendors in this field are: Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft Voice Command); Nuance Communications (Nuance Voice Control); Vito Technology (VITO Voice2Go); Speereo Software (Speereo Voice Translator).