ARS Technica: Apple Files for Audio Navigation Patent

[Jeremy Charette]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060504-6753.html' target='_blank'>http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060504-6753.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"In the never-ending trend for companies to out-patent each other, Apple has filed patent for an audio user interface that assists the user of a portable device in navigation. The patent, which was originally filed on November 4, 2004 and released to the public today, describes an audio feedback system where the "device" not only voices the user's input commands (play selection, next selection, previous selection, stop selection) but also sounds out the name of the track that has been selected. The song names would be generated from the ID3 tags attached to each .MP3 or .AAC file, and sounded out using a "text-to-speech conversion engine." Hey, I wonder if we get a choice between "Fred, Kathy, Princess, Ralph, Trinoids, Vicki, Zarvox, Hysterical, and Deranged"?"</i><br /><br />I'm not quite sure why this would be a useful feature. I mean, unless you're blind, you can see the screen, and you can see the labels on each of the input buttons. Why do you need your iPod to recite each input back to you? :?

[jeffd]

You forget about the displayless wonder known as the shuffle allready?

I wonder though, does it say apple allready has gotten it? cause to me, the discription sounds like "closed captioning" for an mp3 player..something that has allready been done before in the past (haha.. oh the days of playing with mirc scripts when mirc's scripting was in its basic form. using a software mouth program, we were writing scripts that would feed the text of a chat room into it. funny stuff.. especialy if you were in a chat room where just about any topic can and does come up)

[sub_tex]

People using the rockbox firmware on their ipods and iriver players have all been big supporters of this feature (rockbox has always had it as an aid for blind users).

I can see it being useful for drivers.

[sojourner753]

Did the patent say that it was limited to portable players?

How about a media center in your home? You could be browsing through music on your media PC and have it read back to you as you flip.