I have been a strong proponent of s.c. Voice UI, a user interface for mobile device - or any other electronic device - that lets you control features with your speech. In a more enhance version the device will also speak back to you. This would be great for people with loss of eyesight, but also for everyone in certain situations like when driving, washing dishes, fixing a car or doing basically anything where your hands are tied. Also bright sunlight sometimes makes it difficult to see the screen, or typing a long email with T9 keyboard is difficult. Voice based input and output methods will fix the problem.

I've used Nokia's Simone project (nowadays called Virpi) as an example of research being conducted in this area. Now Google has woken up to the same idea. According to MIT Technology Review, Google has added voice search to its iPhone mobile application, allowing people to speak search terms into their phones and view the results on the screen. And it wouldn't be Google if the application wasn't developed by a grid of people contributing to the project. Google set up a free service where people could call in and pronounce the names of places and businesses. This of course helped Google to develop the recognition on different accents and speech styles.

The open way of developing technologies and services is unbeatable. Nokia today announced the completion of its acquisition of Symbian, which is a step towards the open source Symbian Foundation. Let's see how the Google way of developing apps takes off in that environment.