Crazy But Able

Drudge is reporting “New television remote allows couch potatoes to use voice commands…” (no link yet.) I fear that this will suffer from the Clapper Effect.

The Clapper Effect, which I first observed in the late 80s, demonstrates the perils of chaining gadgets together. If you plug your TV into The Clapper, it will turn itself off every time there is a loud enough noise on screen, like a gunshot or explosion. This is the funniest thing on earth when you are 9 years old reading a book while watching your father try to watch a western. You can learn some amazing new vocabulary words that way.

Anyway, I can’t wait for the first TV commercial featuring the amazing talking remote: the guy on TV says “Channel up.” and everyone who already has one, their TV obediently goes up a channel.

UPDATE: Well, I feel kind of stupid. The first paragraph of the press summary makes it pretty clear that the engineers already thought of this one: “The Promptu remote is designed to replace a conventional remote control and includes a ‘Talk’ button and a built-in microphone, together with an infra-red receiver used in conjunction with an existing cable box.” Simple solution; I was pictureing something more Star Trek like. And of course, it never occured to me to wonder how in the heck the little tiny remote had enough processing power to do speech recognition. It doesn’t, of course:

The remote control translates spoken commands into speech features that are sent the receiver and then to a small runtime application in the set-top box. The actual voice recognition is performed at the cable head-end on commodity PC based Linux systems. This can be tuned to regional accents and can include a large vocabulary database. The response is returned in around a second, and an on screen prompt indicates when the command has been understood.

That remote is still no slouch though. It’s about the size of a large handheld microphone. Check out the official site for pictures and a video.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 at 10:29 pm and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.