"It’s a secret world, most of which we can’t film, and it operates from an industrial estate in Hereford."
So begins the BBC’s coverage of the "The world’s first fully accurate voice recognition system for mobile phones", built by a I A technology, company which employs just 40 people and normally supplies ejector seats to the military.
Is your snake-oil sense a-tinglin’? It should be. This video further charts the descent of the Beeb from an internationally respected and neutral reporting machine into a populist tabloid of a TV company.
The phone is called the Zumba, and comes in two parts: a giant, flat plastic ear and a rather retro looking box with a pie-chart shaped set of buttons on the front. Designer Dean McEvoy is dyslexic, and so designed the phone to be used without any typing or reading, ever. Sadly, the handset is too secret to even demonstrate. Or possibly, too not-working to show.
More: The phone is a "cloud" phone. All the heavy lifting is done on the company Web site, along with storage of your address book and presumably text messages. This site is apparently "100% secure", a claim we have heard more than once before. As McEvoy points out though, this does have the advantage of making the handset a dumb terminal — if lost it’s nothing more than a brick, free of personal information. Not that anyone would ever steal such an ugly box.
So what does the phone do? It appears that some super secret sauce lets you touch a single button on the earpiece and then speak. Your intentions are recognized and a text message is send, transcribed from your own spoken words. No mention is made of actual calls, but we’d think that this was just an omission from the film.
Do take a look at the video (non-embeddable — linked below). McEvoy has the same look of desperate enthusiasm we saw in Sean McCarthy, back at our last snakeoil extravaganza, the Steorn Orbo perpetual motion machine. Maybe these guys should get together and make a hands-free, automatic phone that never needs charging? I’d buy that. You know, if it didn’t disappear into obscurity after the first, doe-eyed, non-questioning media frenzy.
Glimpse at ‘top-secret’ phone [BBC]
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