Monday, November 29, 2010

Need New Voice Control features

Apple iPhone - Poll: Need New Voice Control features

I have managed to mount my Griffin iPhone mount nicely to the top of my airbag, using just Velcro strips to hold the uppermost part of the Griffin mount. Works a treat!

But now that I have a nice hands free mount that I can Voice control dial and receive incoming phone calls (top of airbag on the steering is a perfect distance), I started to wonder how nice it would be if Apple would extend the Accessibility text-to-speech feature (which is clear and fast) so that a setting would cause incoming text message to simply pop up as they do but be immediately spoken. And even better if tapping the SMS ballon would cause it to repeat the spoken text. That would be a practical compromise allowing much safer messaging than being tempted to read a text message, which we all know is unsafe. There's no way to really avoid messaging completely but it needs to be safer and not require mental focus on the phone. the audio focus seems to be acceptable, like having someone talking in the car.

And I think the same technique could be applied to mail, but with some means for selecting which email folders that would use audio to reduce clutter, (my boss and my wife, for example). I'd like to see the audio enabled email folder opened, the email spoken and the email headers in that folder used to cause any mail to respoken by tapping the header.

This minimal level of physical interaction with the phone seems acceptable to me.

Any one with ideas about this?

iPhone Voice
What we can do with Apple iPhone Call
Have you considered what will happen if the airbag is deployed. It will be implanted somewhere in your body or become a flying object that might kill a passenger.

-----
Besides the legal ramifications (hands-free or not, some police officers are likely to write a ticket for texting while driving where it is not allowed), mounting your iPhone or any device on the airbag is incredibly dangerous. If the airbag inflates, that iPhone (or other device) is going to slam you in the chest with a LOT of force.

-----
The whole point of the post is to suggest an audio based way to deal with incoming msgs, unless you disable SMS every time you get in the car. I've found that car mounts which are fixed at an uncomfortable distance are a greater hazard than what I described and a terrible distraction because of the visually intense nature of the iPhone.

No comments: