According to PC World Ubuntu 12.04 will feature voice commands. This sounds like an exciting feature for the next LTS release of Ubuntu, but I wonder if it’s a bit premature introducing something new into a long term release? Personally, I’m excited. I remember sitting down in 1996 in front of OS/2 Warp 4 testing out the voice recognition technology. It took a fair amount of training, but you could do some pretty impressive tasks including rearranging parts of the user interface.
I half expected Microsoft to deliver voice recognition in Windows 98, 2000, ME, XP, Vista or 7, but they seem to have felt other aspects of the operating system were more important. These days with the multitude of tablets, cell phones, and other devices, voice recognition technology makes a lot of sense as part of the operating system.
I’ve been looking forward to Ubuntu 12.04 since the release of 11.10. I’m not sure what it is but I always have this hope that Canonical and the Ubuntu community will deliver something better than before – they’ve certainly caught my attention.
