Input Device: Speech Recognition

I've just purchased a new mobile phone, namely the Nokia E65. I have always wanted to keep an up to date phone, with modern features. I can remember around 5 years ago I had mobile that had voice dialling. It was reasonably poor, allowing only 10 names to be stored with voice tags, with each tag having to be saved by the user first. After taking time to attempt to match the sound just spoken with the one saved would invariably return an error.

Upon closer inspection of my new phone, I found the speech recognition feature when accidentally pressing one of the smaller buttons on the side. It presented the message "speak now", so I said the name of a friend in the room. The phone then proceeded to call that friends phone. Amazed, I looked up the information regarding speech recognition in the handbook. The software allows me to say the name of anybody in my phone book, and call the corresponding number with around a 80-90% accuracy. It can also be used to open other features on the phone such as Blue-tooth and conference calling. The thing that surprised me the most about this capability is that it is speaker independent. This means not only can it process anybodies voice, it also requires no 'training' or previous input.

This got me thinking about how this kind of technology could be used in our product. If this software is capable of recognizing any kind of name in a phonebook, why shouldn't we use it in our virtual shopping experience. At the very least, even just simple commands could be used, for example "show shopping list" or "go to checkout". At a more advanced level, it could be used to specify individual products, for example "show all brown bread".

Since the technology already seems reasonably advanced and already in use, it would seem to be a good design decision to include some kind of voice recognition. The underlying concept of our product is to make a familiar and accessible shopping experience, and technology like this would surely benefit elderly users.