Fred Wilson: The Quandary

I agree about voice recognition getting much better.

My business partner's wife is visually impaired, and he wired up his house with a whole-house stereo, mics in each room, and a speech recognition daemon, attached to each mic. He then wrote a huge pile of scripts for things his wife might need to do.

Now she can ask the house about the weather, control the thermostat, check the status of the garage doors and locks, turn on/off lights, open/close blinds, make phone calls, change the music, and a few other things I can't remember.

It's all a tad too expensive to be a commodity, but overall I believe it cost him something in the $40k neighborhood, which is incredibly reasonable for something that makes his wife far more autonomous.

I often take photos of textual signs for use later. Take it to the next level: OCR text from the built-in cameras. A friend suggested OCR from live video was even possible (on an iPhone!) My vision was being able to enter text by scribbling something on a napkin, and OCR'ing the text in.

Another cool method is Dan Bricklin's Note Taker (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997264) Just need to add OCR.

Now, my experiments with OCR algorithms didn't work too well. Apparently the training data is the most important component.

Handwriting recognition is also possible, but still images lack the very useful stroke info.