A voice menu system for iPods, iPhone

This patent application looks at adding a voice menu system to the iPod so you could navigate the menus without looking at the screen (great for driving etc). The Voice menu system can also act like a radio DJ announcing each song (I can imagine that getting quite annoying).

This is a great idea from Apple- often I have my iPod safely tucked away in my bag and want to change songs- at the moment basically all you can do is go next or previous- navigating the menu system of the iPod is impossible without looking at the screen.

Why not have your iPod speak to you with James Earl Jones doing his best Darth Vader voice?

Decent voice synthesis relies on quite a bit of computing power so the patent application suggests that your PC would do the voice synthesis and iTunes would upload it to the iPod when synced (would this work on windows too?)- Songs bought from the Itunes Music store could come with attached voice files. Additionally an iPod could come preloaded with the menu commands. The iPod (or iPhone) they suggest would not necessarily use the boring synthesised voices that currently ship on the Mac but could use ‘Voice talent’- recently a british teleco has been using ‘Dr Who’ to do its email-to-phone service. Getting your iPod to talk to you sounding like Steve Jobs would be worth paying for? :)

Could this also provide a good interface with a stero attached to Airport Express - all Apple needs to do is include a remote for Airport Express. Wireless earphones and remote for an iPod would particularly benefit from such a system.

From Patent Application

In order to achieve portability, many hand-held devices use user interfaces that present various display screens to the user for interaction that is predominantly visual. Users can interact with the user interfaces to manipulate a scroll wheel and/or a set of buttons to navigate display screens to thereby access functions of the hand-held devices. However, these user interfaces can be difficult to use at times for various reasons. One reason is that the display screens tend to be small in size and form factor and therefore difficult to see. Another reason is that a user may have poor reading vision or otherwise be visually impaired. Even if the display screens can be perceived, a user will have difficulty navigating the user interface in “eyes-busy” situations when a user cannot shift visual focus away from an important activity and towards the user interface. Such activities include, for example, driving an automobile, exercising, and crossing a street.

It is noted that text strings that correspond to standard text strings can have pre-recorded audio files. Such text strings may correspond to common user interface controls, such as “play”, “stop”, “previous”, etc., and to common menu items such as “Music”, “Extras”, “Backlight.” These audio files can be created using a voice talent or speech synthesized from the voice talent’s recordings. The other text displayed as part of the media player user interface that is usually user specific, such as contacts and customized playlist names can all be synthesized by building a voice from the voice talent recordings. This provides consistency by having the same voice for all textual data to be presented to the user.