The last couple days have seen big news in the iPhone app world. On Monday, Google officially announced its Speech To Search iPhone app. Yesterday Ocarina reached number one on the list of top paid iphone apps. While neither program is truly a killer app, both represent a glimpse of big things to come.
Google’s foray into internet searches powered by speech recognition is interesting because it pairs voice recognition with Internet data. The idea of retrieving important information by command has enormous potential.
The problem, beyond the technology not being accurate enough yet, is that voice recognition is not suited to the phones (or smartphones) we have today. There is not much value in offering spoken commands into a phone that you have to hold while speaking into it or seeing the results on it. In other words, for voice recognition like this to go mainstream, the system has to be able to either speak back to you, or display data to you in a hands free manner.
We’re several years away from seeing products capable of doing this in a useful manner, but you can get a glimpse of what this may eventually be like in a cutting edge new technology called Jarvis.
Ocarina, the second iPhone application from Silicon Valley based Smule, is far less practical or productive, but it’s also more impressive. Ocarina is perhaps the first significant new musical instrument for the iphone. While people have tinkered and played with creating new electronic instruments for years, the iPhone makes the cost of creating and distributing these instruments virtually zero. It is, in effect, the digitization of music instruments, and Ocarina will surely not be the last.
Looking forward, Ocarina (or an app just like it) will probably offer downloadable “karaoke” songs at some point, a la Guitar Hero. Having these cues as you listen and play along with songs would be an amazing tool for to help people learn to play it. This functionality will also undoubtedly accelerate adoption.
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