Speech to Text and Text to Speech

Just downloaded and tried out vlingo that allows you to carry out web searches, pinpoint a map location, dial a number, and most usefully update your social network - all voice controlled on my iPhone. Lets face it keyboards on mobile phones have been moving quickly from real physical keys (think Blackberry) to virtual keyboords (think iPhone and new Storm Blackberry). The next step is surely to make them vanish entirely. What can replace them? Well until Emotiv (see earlier blog) make thought control an everyday appliance, then speech to text is the next stage of the revolution. On a similar topic, all articles on the always readable MIT Technology Review are now available via iTunes as MP3s. They use a company called AudioDizer to turn text into listenable audio files and although these are obviously bots with cute voices - they did not put me off listening to a few of the articles on the go. I listen to over 40 Podcasts a week in my car so this sounds like a great idea. What if we did it for all our (regular news) Intranet articles by default and loaded them to an internal iTunes server so people could subscribe to them? Or if we made all training files available in written or audio formats - the learner can choose whatever suits their lifestyle. This opens up some interesting and exciting learning possibilities.