Saturday, May 6, 2006
ARS Technica: Apple Files for Audio Navigation Patent
Posted by Jeremy Charette in "NEWS" @ 12:00 PM
"In the never-ending trend for companies to out-patent each other, Apple has filed patent for an audio user interface that assists the user of a portable device in navigation. The patent, which was originally filed on November 4, 2004 and released to the public today, describes an audio feedback system where the "device" not only voices the user's input commands (play selection, next selection, previous selection, stop selection) but also sounds out the name of the track that has been selected. The song names would be generated from the ID3 tags attached to each .MP3 or .AAC file, and sounded out using a "text-to-speech conversion engine." Hey, I wonder if we get a choice between "Fred, Kathy, Princess, Ralph, Trinoids, Vicki, Zarvox, Hysterical, and Deranged"?"
I'm not quite sure why this would be a useful feature. I mean, unless you're blind, you can see the screen, and you can see the labels on each of the input buttons. Why do you need your iPod to recite each input back to you? :?
I'm not quite sure why this would be a useful feature. I mean, unless you're blind, you can see the screen, and you can see the labels on each of the input buttons. Why do you need your iPod to recite each input back to you? :?
