User input has always been a pain on mobile phones and always will be. I mean everybody wants to carry thinner and smaller when it comes to mobile phones. There is no way to incorporate a decent UI mechanism without sacrificing the size. Actually even in the moderately sized PDA touch screen phone with full expandable qwerty keypad that I carry (Cingular 8125), it is absolutely no fun when it comes to pulling out the stylus(or keyboard) and trying to input, say a userid/password combination.
This is exactly where the voice input comes into picture. It is so natural for one to speak into a mobile phone rather than try and type something into it. The critical factor ofcourse here is the processing power of the mobile phones - unfortunately no where near what it takes to run an efficient speech recognition system right now. Given the "size" factor mentioned above and the "battery life" factor it probably will never get there. However voice recognition is perfectly do-able on server side. With the appropriate tech on the device side to reduce the sampling rate thereby keeping bandwidth usage within limits and a sophisticated server side VR system probably with an add-on personalization engine, voice enabled apps could be definitely the next big thing in mobile space! Maybe voice enablement could be offered by the service providers to application providers - or there could be third party voice gateway providers similar to SMS providers. Or it could be application provider hosted just like regular VR gateways (secure apps would probably need to do this). There are tons of possibilities out there.
I wonder whether Google’s latest voice search patent has anything in it related to this.
