Pebble Launches Dictation API to boost apps with voice recognition

Being an NLP guy myself, I think this is a big BIG BIG deal and was really hoping that it would be Apple that would provide a way to hook into the voice recognition interface back when they were talking about their watch. :-(

Voice recognition has begun to come to our devices in the most unexpected way. The old way of thinking was that voice recognition would come via a powerful process running on a powerful PC, locally (remember Dragon Naturally Speaking?). In fact, if you look up many US patents re: voice recognition, you will see inventors who explicitly say that it's not possible to have voice recognition over a streaming connection.

Today, the easiest way to access free voice recognition is in your Chrome browser, with Google only very recently bringing Speech to Text to the Mac version (they've had Text To Speech for a while, I think). Firefox's bringing it out real soon and MS is... well... I dunno. They've got Cortana and Satya Nadella recently enjoyed using it so much that he probably doesn't want his users to have anything else :-) .

The unintended side-effect of this slow creeping of voice recognition tech into our devices is that it's gonna spawn a whole host of Medium articles on Design and I'm probably gonna have to subscribe to them to have some artist tell me how users would like to use my tech :-(