The Moshi IVR (Interactive Voice Responsive) Alarm Clock is a chatty one. Instead of those perfectly reasonable physical buttons which have been providing us with additional five minute segments of sleep since time immemorial, the Moshi IVR wants to talk you through your morning. To activate a command, just say "Hello Moshi." Moshi will most likely mutter something threatening under its virtual breath, and then ask you "Command Please," to which you can instruct the clock to tell you the time, set the alarm, inform you of the temperature and a bunch of other things. Sounds great, and we doubt Moshi will be able to murder you in your sleep without any life support systems or pod bay doors under its dominion, but we still fear the prospect of attempting to reason with a too-smart-for-its-own-good alarm clock during one of those dreaded "before noon" hours of the day. Moshi IVR is available now for $50.

We can't deny the usefulness of a voice controlled iPod at the gym, while running or snowboarding, or when overcome by the fits of extreme sloth more akin to our eXistenZ. Hell, Apple has recognized the importance of hands- and eyes-free text to audio translation and audio navigation in a number of patent applications. But seriously DirectVoxx, the price of the accessory can't cost more than the device it accessorizes. Meet the $159 muso, a voice recognition dongle for the iPod nano (which starts at $149). Muso requires zero initial setup and training yet is said to understand natural language commands like, "play me some Led Zeppelin," or "gimme jazz." While a muso voice control application from Apple's App Store seems like a given, DirectVoxx says that, "the iPhone does not allow programs to access the iPod portion of the iPhone." Shame. The muso is iPod- and English-only for now and expected to ship in December. See it in action after the break.

Otherwise check the $100 voice control solution from Accenda expected in September.

Update: DirectVoxx responded to our concern with the price. While they won't be offering any discounts they've at least offered an explanation which we've posted in whole after the break.

Read -- DirectVoxx muso
Read -- Accenda

Anyone who's used the stylish, compact, voice-isolating Z9 Bluetooth headset from BlueAnt knows that while the unit itself performs satisfactorily, remembering the thousand-and-one unintuitive button combinations (three-second push to end a call?) can be a real pain in the ass. Well thankfully for fans of that somewhat flawed product, the Australian manufacturer will be back as CES with yet another dual-mic model, the V1, which drops the Z9's awkward input method in favor of almost complete voice control. The so-called BlueGenie Voice User Interface promises to operate the full suite of headset functions with the use of but a single activation button, which -- if it can actually work in real-world situations -- should definitely help give this new model a leg (or six -- ha) up on the competition. Stay tuned to our CES coverage for more details, along with pricing and release info.