OneVoice
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OneVoice is an impressive assistive communication app for iPad and iPhone
When you think of iOS and communication, you think of Skype or FaceTime, but there's a growing number of people who are using the device to communicate in unconventional ways. One such application is OneVoice from Legend, an augmentative and alternative communication app for the iPad and the iPhone. Designed for non-verbal adults and children, the app has over 100 large, clear icons with recognizable images from your everyday environment. People can click on the icons to build sentences and then hit the speak button to speak. There's also a group of emoticons so people can communicate how they feel. It has a simple, logical UI that makes it easy for people to share their thoughts with others. OneVoice is highly customizable so users can add or remove groups of icons, use their own photos to represent items, and select from two male and three female voices. The latest version of OneVoice also adds support for speech in 22 languages including Arabic, Czech, French, Italian and more. OneVoice is a universal app available for US$199 from the iOS App Store. You can read more about OneVoice on the app's website.
Coalition of carriers, manufacturers settles on voice standard for LTE
As much fanfare and support as it's been getting over the past couple years, LTE's dirty little secret is that there's been no unified stance on how to ferry voice services over the technology; the concentration has been on data alone so far. Sure, the occasional carrier has raised concerns -- and a variety of solutions have been proposed, ranging from VoIP to repurposing legacy networks for voice alone -- but until now, voice has been an afterthought that everyone's been procrastinating on solving. Fortunately, a veritable who's-who of industry players from both the manufacturer and carrier sides of the fence have congealed this week to announce the One Voice initiative, which basically just hand-picks existing 3GPP-defined standards for voice and SMS services over LTE. Strangely missing is T-Mobile, one of the loudest voices in demanding a voice standard for LTE up until this point -- but considering that AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, and Vodafone are all on board along with Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and others, we think they'll have no option but to fall in line in the long term. For consumers, this means we can all breathe a sigh of relief that LTE handsets won't be arbitrarily compartmentalized by supported voice standard, so it's a big win any way you slice it.
My Voice Remote gives your fingers a break
So if you got that One Voice Media Center Communicator when it came out last year, either you fell in love and remained parked in front of your media center all the time, or you gave up on it because you found that sitting so close to your flatscreen was killing your eyes. One Voice must have gotten a real deluge of emails from weary-eyed customers, because the company has just combined the simplicity of a time-tested television tradition, the remote control, and merged it with a microphone -- calling it the My Voice Remote. That way, instead of making your neighbors think that you've gone totally insane by barking commands at your media center, you now can order it around by talking into your remote directly from the comfort of your lounge chair. As if that wasn't weird enough, you can also use the remote as a Skype handset (seriously), which isn't quite at the same level of ridiculous-but-still-cool as Maxwell Smart's shoe phone, but we're sure that's coming next.
