Richard B. Gilbert wrote:

<snip>

> Speach recognition (voice command, voice dialing) is a great idea.
> Making it work, work reliably, and making it work for everyone, seems to
> be beyond the capabilties of some cell phone manufacturers! My Motorola
> RAZR V3m is supposed to accept voice commands and do voice dialing.
> Maybe it does for some people but it doesn't work for me. I can say
> "check status" twenty or thirty times before the phone finally
> recognizes it. In fact, the command "check status", when I say it,
> frequently results in my phone starting to dial my next door neighbor!!!

Yeah, sometimes the voice recognition works perfectly on my V325i,
sometimes I get so frustrated with it than when it says "Say a Command"
I respond with "you suck." What does work reliably is "digit dial" and
"redial." Sometimes when I say "name dial" it redials. Sometimes when it
recognizes the name and there are multiple phone numbers and it says
"which number?" it doesn't recognize the answer and comes back with "no
match found." The older voice-dialing system which required that you
train the phone with the name and your voice worked much better than the
current Motorola technology.

I think that Apple probably wanted voice-dialing on the iPhone but
either a) couldn't find someone to license the firmware to them, b)
tried to do it themselves but couldn't get it working in time for the
iPhone release, or c) ran into some legal issues with patents on the
technology. I can't imagine that they won't have it in the next revision.