Don’t underestimate the power of voice

"Mr. Spock, you’d make a wonderful computer." – Star Trek

"Lock on to him R2!" – Star Wars Episode III

People talk to computers in the future. It’s the most natural form of communication. One day I would love to carry a phone that was as smart as R2D2.

I can’t live without my Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E61 since it has a QWERTY keyboard. What if I could just talk to my phone? Use my voice as an input device.

"Nokia, appointment, dentist at 5 pm on Friday." Imagine if you uttered those words and your phone was smart enough to know what you said and automatically added it to your calendar? The processing power to do something like this on a mobile phone isn’t there yet.

What can we do today?

Why don’t we make an application that I can launch, hit record, put the phone up to my face, say a few words, hit stop recording and now I set an alarm. When that time comes my phone rings, I pick it up and I hear my little reminder. It’s crude, but for people who don’t have a QWERTY keyboard on their phones they can now setup little todo’s that are a lot more personal. Better yet, these little snippets of sound can be stored as mp3 files on the phone and can be sent OTA to a service like Jott who then provides a transcript. This transcript can now be sent to a "Notes" application on your phone, which is also synced to a server online.

We have the technology; no one is building the solutions.