The Samsung P207 flip phone was released recently by Cingular, and the first review of it's innovative text-to-speech capabilities has emerged. Matt Maier says that "the P207 automatically recognized most words, including proper names and multi-syllabic words such as 'facilitate' and 'consequences'. There were misunderstandings of course, but the software made it easy to remove unintended words, and usually offered additional suggestions for words."
That sounds great. While this feature seems terribly gimmicky in it's current form, as most people will be able to type a message more quickly usingT9 or some other keypad typing technology, and the need to proof-read remains; reducing usability. Perhaps it simply heralds the beginning of a time when all gadgets have some form of useful speech recognition. Undoubtably recognition technology will improve with time: the ideal is to be able to compose (and send) a text message in it's entirety without having to use the keypad / screen.
Symbian really needs to release a speech recognition API; they should not have any hardware problems - I somehow doubt that the P207 has a >240Mhz (read - more powerful) processor... unless the P207 uses some specific extra recognition chip, but there has been no news of that, which makes it rather unlikely.
