Ideal weblog application
26 Jul 2004Voice 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.