How would you like to use Text-to-Speech?
Yesterday, Nokia press release announced proudly:
“The Nokia 5500 Sport also offers “text-to-speech” technology. Don’t take your eyes off the track or that magazine, just tap the Nokia 5500 Sport and the message is read out to you. In sports mode, the Nokia 5500 Sport reads the status of your workout, allowing you to stay focused on the task, or the excercise, at hand.”
So, we have this cool new technology with lots and lots of opportunities.
Hmmm…
What do you think: how should we use it? How would you like to use it yourself?
I promise to forward your feedback directly to the team responsible of this functionality, although many of them are probably reading this conversation already.
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ps. I tried Nokia 5500 a couple of weeks ago, and I’m really impressed. I didn’t believe that you can do smartphones also this way, before I saw it myself…
I would like my chat (IM and IRC) clients to read out messages and discussion as it is being received.
Of course, this applies to 3rd party SW too. Hence, open API is needed.
For sport mode could be usefull but most users are ignore this feature. I play with TTS on many phones - not usefull in everyday life in my opinion. Just another one extra feature.
TTS for dialling numbers and entrance is usefull, mainly for people with poor eyesight
What it’s interesting to know is if this TTS system works also with SMS language. I mean, I don’t know if it’s the same out of Spain, but here, the language used to send SMS isn’t spanish, it’s smspanish, I mean, you have for example the word “porque” that means because, but young people don’t write this using T9, they have disabled the predictive text system and instead they write “xq” the x comes from the multiply symbol because in spanish it’s read as “por”, so I don’t think it’s useful here as lots of people use this language.
Of course not all people do this, other (including myself) write correct spanish using T9 and for me it could be useful in some ways. If my N80 could do it (I don’t know why it really can’t do now as it has TTS capabilities to say who’s calling you), the best way I’d like it to be is associated to the accesories options so that if i’m using the headset it read automatically the incoming SMS or event alarms and if not connected don’t read it, but all of this user selected.
Having seen the beginnings of this on other S60 3.0 devices when they read out voice tags to you I was wondering how long it would be before something like the 5500 comes along!
As far as extra ideas go:
Another nice touch would be if you could alter the phone’s voice in the settings (Star Trek Enterprise computer’s voice anyone? :P). Mac OS X has something like this.
I’d like TTS to speak out subjects of recent RSS entries while in car etc.
Another cool idea would be to make the phone’s main functions controllable through a handsfree kit so you never need to take it out of your pocket.
Imagine walking down the street with the earphones on and pressing the earphone cable remote thingy button (is there a proper name for that?) and hearing:
I think you get the idea. Perhaps the earphone remote thingy could have a few extra buttons to go forward / back through options since buttons are quicker and more reliable than voice commands. (And those buttons could double as nifty music player controls too!)
How you activate TTS for RSS? I have only SMS Player on my Nokia 5500
Personally, i think TTS can be much bigger. Thank about Podcasting, who needs a huge storage space and long time to download even using WLAN. There is also a very limited content, comparing with text. If i can save a webpage on my phone, and use TTS to read it to me when I drive or have some idle time, it can totally change the way i consume info. I would also love to store a few long docu in my phone, and use TTS app to read it to me when I sit in a cab going to the airport.
I agree with James’ comment. Best way of using TTS is to provide a PIM application. I spend about an hour or two for reading my daily RSS feeds everyday on my Nokia 770 but I have 20 minutes of walking time from home to office. Think about this scenario: you wake up with your phones daily alarm and you push your “morning” button and listen to your daily meetings, latest news and weather info, your unread emails while shaving. Consider using voice commands like “mark”, “details”, “delete”, “next”, etc. Then later, on your way to the office, you listen to the marked items on your car’s stereo or your headphones while walking. Voila.. pretty smart isn’t it?
We’ve been using not-very-smart smartphones for years but I believe it’s time to see some “smarter” ones like 5500.
Witout external sound system it will be very hard to listen something from 5500 or you have to use headset
I use speech for many applications - eg, converting text-toMP3 on my Applemac for use on iPod, and talks on my 7610. I wonder how crippled the speech will be on the 5500. I would love to able to ditch the pricey Talks software which costs £50 per annum to upgrade, as it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut with in my case (I’m partially sighted and use it for backup for days when my sight is “iffy”). Will the TTS on the 5500 be a replacement for Talks, which will read everything - or just a novelty item? The speech samples here are more than acceptable quality-wise.
Really good comments, thanks. We’ll take these into account in our development.
> open API is needed
As far as I know, there is an open API already. It is just that the High-Quality TTS technology in Nokia 5500 makes the speech quality significantly better. Would you want me to share some examples?
> Will the TTS on the 5500 be a replacement for Talks, which will read everything - or just a novelty item?
For your purposes, I don’t know. As far as I know, TTS on Nokia 5500 will initially support only SMS reading and the Sport application. There is an open API, but this does not mean that all the applications would utilize it.
I’ll try to keep you updated about our TTS development.
this is awsome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:):):):)