The VOCO Voice Commander "personal voice assistant"

If you're ready to enter that snazz 21st century we keep on hearing about and start using your voice to control your entertainment, VOCO has your back with their handheld "personal voice assistant," the VOCO Voice Commander. When bundled with a Vzone player, which can hook up to a stereo, you create a "Vzone" which can pump out the music you request with your Voice Commander, Sonos style. You can also get news, stocks, and sports info on your screen, with everything flowing over WiFi. You could of course be boring and just use the buttons to get the same results about twice as fast, but what's the fun in that?

[Thanks, Mark]

[Duane @ Jan 13th 2006 8:57AM]

Way back in 1999 I was part of a project launch that saw management get Palm Pilots (back when it was just Palm Pilot, not even Pro :)) and the engineering team got these tiny little PDA voice devices about the size of a box of matches. You'd train it with some basic vocabulary and numbers, but then you could say things like "tomorrow at 10 a m, call the boss" and sure enough, the next day at 10 it would beep at you and replay you saying "call the boss." Pretty cool concept, but the voice recognition was still fuzzy enough that you'd have to repeat yourself too many times in any realistic noise situation. But it was the first time I ever experienced a voice-only device of any meaningful functionality.

[Jeff in DSM @ Jan 13th 2006 9:13AM]

Any news on pricing?

Looks like the video part of the system only is displayed on the handheld voice commander unit. What would really be cool is if the content agent info (sports, weather, etc.) and music information would display on my television screen kinda like a combo of the new Griffin iPod dock controller and the ability to go out and leverage these info agents....

[hassan @ Jan 13th 2006 9:29AM]

anybody knows of a good voice recognition software for handhelds?

something that can work in a rather noisy environement (such as a warehouse)