Quote:
Originally Posted by Kyuu
Voice activation had been around for a while. I remember one of my second IBM PC (literally by IBM), with Windows 95 having some kind of voice activation thing. Of course, it did not work very well; and I did not use it at all. But, I knew it was there. Here we are in 2013... now, it'll be more readily available. Soon enough, such devices will be comparable to Smartphones (currently) in price.
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Part of the problem with voice activation was that you had to buy your own microphone. These days, it seems like every device have a microphone built-in (with the exception of desktop computers - but some monitors have them). The microphones are quite decent compared to the cheap ones we could buy back in the days of Windows 95, too. With more microphones in consumers' hands, there's a greater incentive to create things that use it. I just saw on some tech news that Google Chrome has been updated to provide support for some voice-based API on webpages. Neat stuff.
I like the idea of Google Glass. Beyond consumer applications, I can think of a lot of uses for it in science research and clinical medicine. It'll probably be a while before it receives adoption in those areas, though.