Apparently Vista has voice recognition commands. You can speak to the computer and have it do things. Slashdot reported on this article that says websites can play sound files that can say commands to delete files or shutdown your machine. Joy.
As the article says the mac has had speech controls for years. I think many people play with them when they first find out about them and then turn them off. I use them only to turn the page when reading long files with Tofu (an app that simply formats long text in narrow newspaper-like columns to make them easy to read).
Apple hit this problem years ago too and added a configurable prefix word that must be spoken before the command. I just tried it now, having a doc open in Tofu. If I say "Stanley move page right" it moves the page (you have to be really lazy to use this and my machine is named Kubrick). If I use Quicksilver to have the mac say "Stanley move page right", it doesn't move the page, and if I recognize the lights on the control it seems that the voice recognition is disabled while the mac was speaking.
MS should copy the latest rev of apple innovations not the 1.0 rev.
These kinds of problems is why voice controls haven't taken off. They really don't work well when cubicles are involved. The only voice controls I actually like are voice dialing on my cell phone (oddly I don't use them on my home phone).
1 comment:
I've found the most affective voice commands to be, "Get your but out of the tub", "Clean your room", and "Jessica, stop beating up your sister!"
Those tend to work fairly well, and they usually don't cause my kids to reboot.
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