i’m biased. i don’t like the idea of voice-based general purpose browsing. i get freaked out enough by people walking around apparently talking to the air, but which upon closer inspection reveals itself to be a super-duper small microphone. it’s just not right. imagine, if you will, planes, tranes and automobiles filled with people talking to inanimate objects. what do you get? chattering, incomprehensible chaos. no sirreee, bob. i don’t want no part of that future. and besides, it slows you down:
“This study compared voice browsing with traditional mouse-based browsing. It attempted to identify
which of three common hypertext forms (linear slide show, grid/tiled map, and hierarchical menu) are well suited to voice navigation, and whether voice navigation is helped by numbering links. The study shows that voice control adds approximately 50% to the performance time for certain types of tasks.”
[via write the web]