Thu, Oct 16, 2008 17:25 EDT

Computer Mouse Follows Voice Commands

Posted by: smcalearney in Best Practices

Topic: Applications

Current Rating: Comment: 1

New technology—in the form of a sound-driven computer mouse—hopes to aid disabled computer users.

As someone who isn't disabled—but absolutely hates to type—I'm fascinated by anything that frees me from a keyboard (even if it's a really cool keyboard) or something that saves me time. However, not all such technology advancements are actually timesavers. If anyone out there has experience trying to train voice recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking, you know what I mean.

Created by the University of Washington, the "Vocal Joystick" software allows users to vocalize particular sounds—instead of words—to move around the screen and perform various computing functions.

Somewhat similar to the "eep, opp, ork, ah-ah" lyrics to Elroy and Judy Jetson's contest-winning love song on The Jetson's cartoon, these mouse commands include "Ahh," "Ohh" and "Ooo." (Go ahead. Practice right now in your office. Nobody will notice.)

Physorg.com blogger Richard Seven writes, "To make the cursor do a circle or figure 8, let vowel sounds bleed into one another, like eee into ahh into aww and so on. You can make it hurry or slow by regulating the volume of your voice. To open a link, make a soft clicking sound."

Happily, this technology doesn’t need fancy hardware. Seven says it "requires only a microphone, a computer with a standard sound card and a user who can vocalize."

It's a cool piece of technology, and hopefully it will help the disabled, but this iteration doesn't appear to be all that useful for those of us who can use a regular mouse. It gets points for being interesting, but subtract a few for not appearing to be intuitive.

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Wed, Nov 12, 2008 15:32 EST

Nice Jab

Posted by: brettbum
Rating:

When it comes to transcription Dragon Naturally Speaking can be trained these days in about 7 minutes out of the box. The analogy only works if you used a version from 3- 10 years ago, back then it could take a week or better and still not work. :)

DNS also has the ability these days to move a cursor via a voice command, although if you have a perfectly good mouse and the capability to use it, you will probably want to do that. (a wireless mouse pointer can probably work from a distance better too).

Now, all that said, the coolest thing I've seen in this area was an EEG device at CES last year that enabled you to move a video game character (harry potter at the show) based on your brain waves! That was very cool, and your joke about sounding like a jetson song in the office is well made. Things will be much more likely to evolve when we don't have to make audible sounds any more.

When do we get jacked in to the matrix???

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