"Computer, is it the future yet?"

Remember the computer from Star Trek: The Next Generation? While there were touch screens in every room and corridor, most people interacted with it by talking. "Computer, where is the captain?" "Computer, increase lighting by twenty percent." "Computer, who won the 1989 world series?" What a cool idea, right? We use speech to communicate with other people, so as computers get more and more sophisticated (read: more like people), we'd eventually start talking to them as well.

So why aren't we talking to our computers yet? Good question, given that the technology is already there. Remember the Motorola Razr? I remember my amazement when I discovered that pressing one of the buttons on the side caused my phone to prompt me to "Please say a command." Even more amazingly, it could usually understand what I said. I'd show this to other people and they'd be surprised that my fairly basic phone could do something so "advanced."

I had a similar experience when I started using a comic book reading app called FFView. It turned on the speech recognition software that apparently came with my mac, and allowed me to control the app by speaking to it. Not only that, but if I wanted to create a new voice command, all I had to do was type in the word and it would be able to recognize it right off the bat! No training or calibration necessary! Of course, this led me to explore this feature more, and I discovered that macs have a lot of voice commands built in, and creating new ones is very easy, as long as there is an associated key command. Check it out for yourself: just go to "Speech" in the systems preferences. Mac help can tell you everything you need to know to start using this feature.

So why have I never heard of anyone using this feature? I'm guessing the main reason is this: the people who would poke around enough to find it are usually computer-savy enough to already use keyboard shortcuts to do the same things, so they have no use for it. Shortcuts, after all, are faster, more precise, and easier to find.

I wonder though: what about people who are not that computer literate? Could this help them? I've got a good guinea pig in mind; I'll let you know how it goes.