Voice recog­ni­tion.  All the way.  Sure, it could get expen­sive, but pre­sum­ably not more so than WAP would be (well, okay; it would be, but if any value at all is placed on time, then call­ing a num­ber and dic­tat­ing ownz try­ing to type into a mobile key­pad anyday!).

It’d mean I could walk between build­ings and blog as I go, not in a crappy wi-fi enabled kind of way (although, admit­tedly, if SACS cov­er­age extended to the vicin­ity sur­round­ing the school, I’d prob­a­bly have bought a wire­less card by now and had a hack at mak­ing it work), but in a flu­ent, hands-free, talk-into-phone-and-content-appears-online kind of way.

How cool would that be?!  Never again would there be a com­plaint of “you haven’t updated your blog since last time I checked a few hours ago!”, because not an hour would pass with­out a phonecall and a voice-enabled update of the website!!

Well, okay.  An hour would pass.  In fact, many hours would pass.  But it’s a cool idea, don’t you think?  Still, sev­eral phone calls a day (let’s throw three in the air as a ball­park fig­ure, not count­ing at-home updates) would add up.  Let’s do the maths, shall we?  Okay.  So, let’s say an Orange phone server­side, so I get free five minute phone calls from my baby Sam­sung.  Let’s make it pre­paid — not as though we’re mak­ing calls from it.

A charge­able call must be made within a 12 month period, or the ser­vice will get narfed.  Okay.  That’s cool, I can setup an SMS gate­way online and use that occa­sion­ally.  Bonus.  Cost?  Assum­ing I keep the calls under 5mins, noth­ing to con­nect — there’s a limit on the amount of free Orange-to-Orange time I can have a month, but it’s pretty ridicu­lously high, so I’d not worry about that too much — and the cost for the pre­paid?  Well, between $33 and $90, depend­ing on the expiry length required.  So if I go for $90, that gives me a year to use the credit.

At what rate?  $0.18/message sent, and of course, reciev­ing calls is free.

So let’s say about $50 a year, plus ini­tial hand­set cost.  Let’s face it, I’m not really one for both­er­ing to login to a web inter­face to send mes­sages most of the time — I’d use it, but not incred­i­bly often.

All this is of course ignor­ing the tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­ity of using tele­phony as a voice-recognition medium — not only do cur­rent sys­tems strug­gle with micro­phones already, this is also with­out the other con­di­tions imposed on mobile lines!  The soft­ware side of things (i.e. inter­fac­ing with web panel/directly with MySQL) also presents a lit­tle bit of a chal­lenge, although not pro­hib­i­tive — it’d be a bit of fun, to say the least.

This’d make me blog more, though.  A lot more.  That said, I blog more when pro­cras­ti­nat­ing, or when hol­i­days are on — the sim­ple solu­tion?  Give me more hol­i­days (or assessments:|)!!!

Over­com­pli­ca­tion of a sim­ple prob­lem rocks.