Apple has released a new iPod shuffle. Besides its design a remarkable feature is called VoiceOver. I don’t own one, yet, but I assume it’s a built-in text-to-speech engine that reads out artists names, song titles and the name of your playlists. Controlling the iPod shuffle is still up to pressing tiny buttons, so it’s a one-way speech interface merely providing feedback to the user.
I wonder whether this move indicates that we might see a “fully” voice enabled next iPhone release this summer.
Don’t expect too much. The speech synthesis is not done on the iPod but on the host computer (an additional mp3/aac file is created during sync). Therefore you get different results in speech quality on OS X than on Windows. So it really is not even a one-way speech interface but a two mp3-files mixing interface.