Enjoyable voice recognition, is it FINALLY here?

Given today it the release date of the new iPhone, I want to talk
about something else at Apple the really caught my attention -- their
automated customer care.   Last week I had to call Apple to find out how
to get the sales tax removed from a purchase given our 501(c)3 status. 
It was a complicated set of questions I needed to ask -- and yet the
conversation was as smooth as talking to a live person.  It struck me I
was getting a sneak preview of something that is going to radically
transform how we use technology on a daily basis -- FINALLY.

Like a  favorite pair of worn jeans, computing power and the internet
will eventually become an almost effortless part of our lives.  Having
grown up with Star Trek, the Jetsons, and the 2001 Space Odyssey, my
generation has been fantasizing about flawless voice recognition for
decades.  Most gadgets and applications attempting voice recognition,
however, have been downright comical in their performance.  Google voice
search has impressed me numerous times but my experience with Apple
felt like a league above.  Their system recognized the context of my
questions even as I stumbled with what to ask and responded with
sentences and a voice that nearly fooled me into thinking I was talking
to a live person.

Wired magazine had a short piece last year on how difficult it has
been to master voice recognition/response given all the nuances that
come with tone, accents, and competing background noise.  Our brains do
an amazing job at subconsciously interpreting hard to hear words
through an understanding of context and sentence structure and being
able to filter out noises that are not of interest.  We have all had
those calls with automated systems where you're ready to throw the
phone out the window, the interpretation is so bad.  Here is one of my
favorites:

Context: A participate in our Wichita Walkshop left a message on our tech support
hotline, which Google Voice then translated and sent me the following
email:

"Yeah,
this is Ben Foster and I was just want to get a hold of somebody from
that which tell walk shop from this afternoon session that hi up they
uploaded some my photos and they gave me instructions how to get 2
months, liquor, but can't seem to find them..."

Just for the record, my staff is not distributing 2 months of liquor,
hi up, to our walkshop participants.  If you know "which tell" was 
"Wichita" and "get 2 month liquor" was "get them onto Flickr" you can piece together what was really said.

While the next iPhone, and the first generation of the iPad show us
how hardware/software are becoming more and more intuitive in responding
to body movement and touch, adding accurate, effortless voice
recognition, in my opinion, will give us the holy trinity of integrated
technology.  Jason's blog on the iPad highlights some of the many ways location
aware, motion and touch sensitive devices can be used in planning and
civic participation.  Being able to talk to these devices and have
things interpreted accurately will open up another whole new world of
potential applications.  Looking forward to it.

* This blog was posted on PlaceMatters as well.