Will the iPad Follow the Failure of Voice Dictation Software?

[David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions, a storytelling and social media production company that specializes in live event production. He blogs at Spark Minute and can be seen regularly on KQED and John C. Dvorak's Cranky Geeks.]

Thirteen years ago, in 1997, I wrote an article for Family PC magazine (a now-defunct Ziff Davis publication) about dictation software. That was the year programs such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM ViaVoice had turned a critical corner in their respective capabilities. No longer did you have to dictate in an unnatural slow paused pattern (e.g. “Take…A…Letter”).  You could now speak naturally (e.g. “Take a letter”) and the program would seamlessly enter your words with 90-plus percent accuracy.

At that point, myself and many others in the industry thought that voice dictation would be a game changer. The technology and publicity was fantastic. Actor Richard Dreyfuss was a staunch supporter, mentioning Dragon’s software on The Tonight Show. Voice dictation seemed like a perfect technological interface solution for human-to-PC communications. When we’re born, speech is one of the first forms of communications we learn, so let’s train computers to adapt to a human’s way of communicating. It sounded like a slam dunk solution, but there was one problem…

We’ve become comfortable communicating with keyboards.
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iPad: A Question for the Magazine Industry, Not an Answer

[NOTE: I wrote this last week as a guest post for FOLIO, the magazine industry's trade magazine and Web site.]

In the weeks leading up to Apple’s launch of its tablet device Wednesday, a strange fairy tale started to gain currency. It cast the publishing business as a hapless Sleeping Beauty—and Apple CEO Steve Jobs as a Prince Charming who’d kiss the industry out of its slumber with a combination of hardware, software, and services that would instantly restore consumers’ willingness to pay for quality content.

As I sat in the audience at the event, I slowly figured out that it wouldn’t provide a ready-made happy ending for magazine publishers. Apple did reveal that the gizmo includes an e-book reader, iBooks—but as the name suggests, that software is meant for books, not periodicals. It also let the New York Times show off a handsome app for reading that paper. But the only magazine that came up during the event was TIME—and that was when Jobs showed how good its Web site looked in the iPad’s Safari browser. It mostly served as a reminder that it’s not entirely clear why many consumers would choose to pay for digital magazines when the same content is available on the Web for free.

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Saving Steve Jobs

As I left Apple’s iPad launch last Wednesday, someone thrust a pamphlet into my hand. Nothing startling about that–there are often folks handing out literature outside these events, and they usually turn out to be from either small Apple-related companies or organizations that are unhappy with the company’s DRM.

This pamphlet, however, was…a religious tract. From Jews for Jesus, the quixotic organization which devoted the brochure to a particularly quixotic purpose: addressing Steve Jobs directly, comparing the noted Buddhist to Jesus Christ, and arguing that he should accept Christ as his savior.

It’s certainly not the first time certain parallels have been drawn between the co-founder of Apple and the Son of God: Googling for “Steve Jobs Messiah” returns a scary quantity of results, Apple fans have long been compared to disciples, and the iPhone and iPad have frequently been called the Jesus Phone and Jesus Tablet, respectively. But I don’t know of anyone who’s taken the idea as far as Jews for Jesus, which peppers the pamphlet with both obvious religious allusions (Adam, Eve, and the apple) and unexpected ones (telling Jobs that his “NeXTStep” should be to ask God for “a new OS.” I understand that Jobs’ firing by John Sculley represents the Crucifixion, but I’m not enough of a Biblical scholar to figure out whether it’s the founding of NeXT or Jobs’ return to Apple that parallels the Resurrection.

At first, I thought that the pamphlet was a custom job for the iPad event , but it’s several years old, as evidenced by its lack of mentions of the iPhone, let alone the iPad. (The later is a particular shame given the rich scriptural possibilities in the mere notion of Apple tablets.)

After the jump, the flyer in full (as reprinted from Jews for Jesus’s online library of PDFs). It’s the first religious document I’ve run here, and I have a hunch it’ll be the last…

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Whose iPad is It, Anyway?

What’s the single most worrisome thing about the iPad? It’s not the lack of a physical keyboard, or that third-party applications can’t multitask, or even the fact that people are still arguing that it’s unclear whether there’s a market for the thing. It’s Apple’s monopoly on distribution of applications. Absent jailbreaking–and I’m curious to see if Apple has done anything to lock down the iPad evenmore than the iPhone–this is a device that will run the software that Apple thinks it should run.

For lots of people, that’s a dealbreaker on both philosophical and practical grounds. Last August, during the controversy over Apple’s failure to approve Google’s Google Voice app, I blogged about my unhappiness with the situation but also said I thought Apple would decide it was in its best interest to do the right thing with app approval in the long run.

Months later, there haven’t been any further major App Store approval fiascos (at least not ones that we know about). But Apple never did approve Google Voice, and Google gave up and developed a Web-based version. It’s quite good, but not as good as the native one would have been.

As an iPhone owner, the whole Google Voice saga is still stuck in my craw–especially since Apple’s official stance appears to be that it’s still “pondering” whether to approve the app.

Emotionally and rationally, I want the iPhone/iPad platform to be open. I still believe it’ll happen. But here’s the thing: At the moment, Apple’s closed platform has a vastly richer and more interesting selection of applications than any mobile platform that is more open. An optimist would take that fact as evidence that Apple’s strategy actually benefits consumers; a pessimist would conclude that it gives Apple little incentive to loosen up.

The next big milestone for the iPhone/iPad platform will come when Apple starts to disclose details about iPhone OS 4.0. Judging from last year’s iPhone 3.0 timetable, 4.0′s unveiling may be only weeks away. If Apple announces that it’s formally allowing applications to bypass the App Store and its approval process, I’ll be stunned. But if it has no news whatsoever about relaxing the current constraints on developers, I’ll be very disappointed.

Your thoughts?

Ban Texting and Driving All You Want, But Don’t Expect Results

The latest fad among governments is to pass legislation that ban texting while driving, as evidenced by the growing list of states with anti-cell phone laws. But if a new study just released by the Highway Loss Data Institute means anything, these laws don’t change much.

HLDI found that crash rates are not decreasing as a result of these laws.”The laws aren’t reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk,” the group’s president Adrian Lund said. This isn’t to say that cell phone use while driving doesn’t increase crash risk — HLDI points out several studies that showed an four-fold increase there — but it isn’t stopping crashes either.

It seems as if the group is shocked by the study’s results, saying it expected to see a decrease in crash occurrences. Maybe the findings of this study are indicative that these laws are just unnecessary legislation that really doesn’t do much to contain the problem. This might be a case where good old fashioned education may play a bigger part in solving the problem, no?

“Whatever the reason, the key finding is that crashes aren’t going down where hand-held phone use has been banned,” Lund says. “This finding doesn’t auger well for any safety payoff from all the new laws that ban phone use and texting while driving.”

Seems like the HLDI agrees.

Alex Payne on iPad

Best anti-iPad thoughts so far.

The First Videogame Ad?

I’m digging through YouTube looking for tech-related commercials for a project I’m working on. I stumbled across this one, and while it’s not a good fit for the project, I can’t not share it. Is this 1973 spot the very first ad for a videogame?

The iPad Isn’t Just for Us–It’s for Aunt Bettys Too

Nobody reading this post is ever going to use Apple’s new iPad as his or her sole computer. But there is a group of folks who might: People like my late aunt Betty, who used WebTV to send e-mail. The iPad’s portability and streamlined interface for common tasks make it a compelling device for people–usually older people–who have chosen to opt out of the computer revolution until now.

My aunt never had a PC, and as far as I know, didn’t want one. Would she have been willing to spend $500 on an appliance that she could use in his living room for keeping in touch with her family and reading the paper? Maybe. The WebTV price was set at $329.

I will tell you one thing–Aunt Betty wound’t have cared about how “open” the iPad was as long as it did what she expected. If she could listen to music, watch movies, read, and use it for e-mail and theWeb, she’d probably be pleased with her purchase. The question of whether the iPad could multitask would never come up.

The iPad is meant to sync with a PC or Mac, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t become a fully autonomous, standalone device. It will be interesting to see what Apple does with MobileMe and the iPad.

My colleague Harry McCracken commented that Web TV was supposed to be for young folks, but unintentionally found a market among “oldsters.” It is possible that the iPad could achieve the same success among people who would not typically buy a PC. I’m curious to see the demographics of who ends up buying it–it may not be the “innovators” who you’d expect.

It doesn’t look like Apple is catering to Aunt Betty types, but it should.

The T-Grid: iPhone vs. iPad vs. MacBook

At Wednesday’s iPad launch, Steve Jobs began his introduction of the new gizmo by noting that most of us carry a laptop and/or smartphone, and asking whether there’s room for a new kind of device in the middle. His answer, of course, is that there is–and that iPad is that product. That makes iPad the third distinct class of computing device that the company offers–assuming you don’t consider iPods to be computing devices.

As is my wont when I’m comparing products, I whipped up a T-Grid. This one contrasts the iPhone 3GS, the iPad, and the cheapest version of Apple’s flagship MacBook Pro computer. Check it out for a quick summary of what Apple thinks is important to include in each category of device. The MacBook Pro may be the most expensive and capable of the three, but there are certain ways in which it’s beginning to feel like old technology, such as its lack of built-in 3G and GPS. And I’m starting to wonder how long it’ll be until Jobs decides it’s time to build a touchscreen Mac…

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Microsoft: iPad’s Closed Platform is “Humorous”

[Note: The original headline on this story was "Microsoft: iPad is "Humorous." Microsoft PR head Frank Shaw tweeted that he found that title misleading. After contacting him and listening to his complaint, we've changed the headline to make it more specific.]

It’s an understatement to say that Apple’s iPad generated a lot of chatter when it was announced on Wednesday; the scuttlebutt actually slowed down the Internet. Even Microsoft couldn’t help but weigh in, criticizing the iPad for being a “locked down device.”

“It is a humorous world in how Microsoft is much more open than Apple,” Brandon Watson, the director of product management in the developer platform at Microsoft, told me in an interview yesterday. With Microsoft’s platforms, developers can build whatever they want, and target a broad array of devices using the same skill set, he added.

Watson claimed that many developers of applications for the iPhone OS–which the iPad uses–are not making money. Developing applications for the iPhone and iPad is expensive, he said, because iPhone OS uses the Objective C language rather than Microsoft’s more pervasive .NET platform. And Apple’s control over the platform has alienated some people that make software for its products, he said.

It’s certainly true that there has been some griping about Apple’s development policies, and not every app is a winner. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt famously protested against the control Apple is exerting over its hardware (he is now praising the iPad), and argued that Apple is setting a “horrible precedent.” The Free Software Foundation protested the iPad on Wednesday for being an “unprecedented extension of DRM” into a new class of computers.

I think that the FSF’s argument may have merit, but Microsoft’s criticism misses the target altogether. What Apple has envisioned with the iPad isn’t a traditional PC–it’s more of an appliance. You don’t tinker with your television; you turn it on and consume services. The iPad’s Apps are like services. And despite what Watson said about iPhone developers failing to make money, some are clearly doing exceptionally well.

When Microsoft released its Tablet PC back in 2001, it grafted handwriting recognition onto Windows. That capability extended Windows into new (such as engineering and medical services), but the Tablet PC was still essentially a PC running Windows. Windows 7′s multitouch enhancements create a more natural user interface for PCs, but a PC is still a PC.

The iPad isn’t a PC. I’ve gone on trips to Boston and Washington DC over the past several weekends, and spend hours riding Amtrak and on Wi-Fi-enabled busses. I didn’t bring a laptop with me, because I didn’t want to lug one around, and didn’t really need to have a full fledged computer with me. My iPhone provided me with entertainment along the way. Truth be told, I would rather have had an iPad with me to surf the Web, listen to music, watch movies and read. If the price comes down even further, Apple’s got a winner.

With Technology, Abstraction is Inevitable

I swear I have no plans to dedicate this blog to links to John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, but he has another nice post up on the iPad and its implications. It’s worth reading whether you’re as giddy over the device as he is or are taking a wait-and-see approach–or even if you’re profoundly skeptical about the whole idea.

Gruber talks about the abstraction represented by the iPad–the way its interface shields the user from the minutia of the fact it’s a computing device in a way that no traditional computer does. He uses a car metaphor:

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

[snip]

Eventually, the vast majority [of computers] will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.

If he’s right–and I think he is–the change is going to be less revolutionary than evolutionary. With computers, interface changes are nearly always about abstraction.

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The Nexus One Two?

Get ready for another Google Phone–from Motorola.

Will there Be an iLine?

Yet another iPad question: How hard will it be to buy one of these things?

When the original iPhone went on sale, there were thousands of people willing to wake up at the crack of dawn and wait in endless lines to buy one. Same thing for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, although in all three cases much of the madness would have been avoidable in an utterly rational world–it was possible, late in the first day of sale after the throngs had dispersed, to stroll into an Apple Store and pick up a phone with little or no wait.

With other Apple products–not to mention 99.99% of products from other tech companies–this doesn’t happen. I don’t recall it happening with iPods even when they were at the height of their popularity.

Right now, the blogosphere is awash in debate about the iPad, deeming it as everything from the next tech revolution to a big yawn. Massive lines on day one to buy the thing won’t be a definitive confirmation of the gizmo’s worth. But they will be one data point regarding the level of interest among real people. (And yes, I’m aware that it’s in Apple’s interest to whip up as much frenzy as possible for debut day–which we know will be in late March, although the company hasn’t specified the date.)

Maybe the “A” in “A4″ Stands for “ARM”?

I’m not a chip geek, so I can’t really judge this story. And I persist in thinking that it’s too soon to judge the Apple A4 chipY inside the iPad, period. But the article I’m linking to says the A4 is mostly existing technology from venerable chip designer ARM, not innovative new stuff from Apple. (It also ends with some angry ranting which doesn’t do much to increase its credibility–but like I say, I’m not in a position to judge…)

iPad Crushes Net

Among the iPad’s amazing features: It can single-handledly bring the entire Internet to a crawl…

Hey, I’ve Felt That Keyboard Before!

As I spent a little hands-on time with an iPad at Apple’s event yesterday morning, jabbing away at the on-screen keyboard felt oddly familiar. It wasn’t a familial similarity to the iPhone keyboard–the fact that the iPad’s keyboard is so much larger gives it a completely different personality. But my fingers seemed to be telling me that they’d had a similar experience before.

This morning it dawned on me: The iPad keyboard feels a lot like the one on the first computer I ever bought with my own money, the Atari 400.

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