2008 model year Ford cars will have an interesting option: voice activation for mobile phones and digital music players. Ford calls this option Sync and has a website to promote it. Check out the video on the bottom right to get a feel for Sync.

The technology uses Microsoft’s speech recognition software (just like we do with Project54). The idea is to provide pretty powerful functionality to control phones and music players. Music players are actually hard to control since when you design the interaction you don’t know what music will be on the player (e.g. names of bands and songs, especially future ones), and you don’t know how they may be pronounced. The latter point needs to be carefully addressed even for known artists/albums/songs/etc, if you want to sell the technology in multiple countries where different languages are used (e.g. France and Germany). After all, the French and the Germans pronounce U2 differently from each other.

I’m looking forward to testing this speech interface out soon. I guess I should head over to a Ford dealership!

Andrew Kun

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