In one of my periods of lunacy that I enter into from time to time, I decided to try out the ancient relic known only as “Phoenix”.  Or, really-really-old-Firefox, if you prefer.  Sampling both 0.1 and 0.3, I was impressed, actually; all of the sites I visited had more or less perfect rendering, with only a few trivial sizing glitches (Although more technologically advanced sites such as GMail and Google Pages either didn’t work or loaded a more basic view). However, I did make one interesting observation: Phoenix 0.3 had somewhat better Acid2 compliance than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. That’s right: a 2002 early development release of Firefox still had better standards support in some areas than the latest and greatest from our pals at Redmond.

Take a gander, and ponder this facinating tidbit.  Its actual relevance is questionable as certainly more sites will work with IE7, and additionally Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 is known to more or less pass Acid2, but it’s interesting to me nevertheless.

Introduction

Everybody is talking about it. You know what they’re saying. “Voice activated technology is the future.” Well, I think it isn’t. I see many, many flaws in voice activated technology. Remember the Windows Vista voice-activated security hole? Now, why do I think that voice-activated technology is doomed?

It will fail because…

1) You can’t use it for anything secure.

As the illustration above shows, you cannot use voice-activated technology to authenticate yourself in the traditional sense. You would have to use some other sort of method. Having to grab a keyboard to authenticate yourself, and then going back to voice commands seems a bit odd. You could try fingerprint scanners. Oh wait! They’re insecure too! It’s quite easy to fool a fingerprint scanner as they are designed towards false positives instead of false negatives. CodingHorror has a good post about the insecurity of fingerprint scanners.

There’s also the issue of people hearing what commands you’re saying after you’ve authenticated yourself. Don’t forget that the computer cannot speak secure data back to you.

2) It will be difficult to filter out noise.

Having a bunch of people talking loudly while a person is trying to use a voice-activated interface is like all those people pressing random keys on the keyboard while you’re trying to type. But, in the not-so-recent future, it will be possible for computers to filter out noise. If a human can do it, what is to stop a computer from doing the same?

Until we get to the point where computers can filter out noise like humans, it will be impractical to have voice-activated technology in noisy situations.

3) It would be difficult to navigate through a voice-activated user interface.

You’ve just installed a cool new voice-activated app that your friends were talking about. You get to the point in the installation where you have to agree to the software’s terms of service. Oh boy, reading off that end user license agreement could take a while.

Now, the above example is a little silly. You can’t expect voice-activated applications to behave in the exact same way as traditional desktop applications. However, it shows something that’s difficult with voice-activation. It would be difficult for it to read out large amounts of text for you without you getting bored. The great thing about reading is that you don’t have to read all the words. You can skim over the sentences to get a general feel of what the text is talking about. How are you going to imitate that with voice-activated technology? Have the computer skip over a few words when reading? I don’t think so. When you don’t understand a paragraph after skimming through it, you can read it for the details to understand it better.

You can’t dig through complicated configuration dialogs in a voice-activated user interface either. It’s already easy to get lost in a traditional program’s settings, so imagine how difficult it would be to find one little option to change in a voice-activated dialog.

The only thing that voice-activated tech is good for

Voice-activated technology seems best applied in areas where security is not required and the user interface is simple. In the short term, it will have to only operate in quiet areas.

Still think that voice-activated tech is the new cool thing? Tell me why in the comments.