AT&T Testing Voice Web App for iPhone

5:51 am, July 23rd, 2008, Lonnie Lazar

AT&T Research Labs is testing a web based application that will bring limited voice control functionality to the iPhone. The so-called Speech Mashups, based on AT&T’s WATSON speech recognition engine, is a web service requiring high-speed wireless access to the internet in order to allow voice control of certain functions, such as entering text into web forms. The service appears to fall well short of meeting the demand for voice dialing, expressed by many as a must-have feature in a mobile phone.

The lone voice dialing application available on the AppStore appears to be Speechcloud Voice Dialer, whose 300+ commenters have thus far given it a 2.5 star rating.

The AT&T Labs chart below shows the complexity of delivering its web-based Speech Mashups solution, though, with the prevalence of speech recognition capability so widespread among other mobile handset manufacturers, we wonder what it is about Apple’s device that has made voice dialing such a difficult hurdle to clear.

Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Software, iPhone, iPhone 3G | Comment on this article