Jawbone Makers Dream

I saw an interesting article in Wired this week.

It was an interview with Hosain Rahman and Alexander Asseily, the founders of Aliph who make the Jawbone headset. Aliph has done a nice job in the design and marketing of their Jawbone, and have made it one of the most widely recognized and best selling Bluetooth® headsets here in the US. Aliph has just announced the Jawbone Prime which offers a variety of new skin colors with amusing names plus a host of “improvements” that some might call “bug fixes” over the Jawbone II.

I’ve got to hand it to Hosain and Alexander for their well articulated strategy in Wired…it’s a vision that I hold as well. Here’s a few quotes from the article, with my comments:

“Aliph hopes to take Jawbone out of the “yet another Bluetooth headset” category and transform it into a device that could become an “audio gateway” for the consumer. Think news, weather, music or even language learning modules combined with a headset in a way that would bring term ‘wearable computing’ to life.”

This sounds like Sensory’s plans for the BlueGenie Voice Interface. In fact we’ve already implemented these plans with companies like Google and Microsoft to allow a speech user interface to access and dial any business in the US, get stock quotes or stock market updates, get weather information, driving directions, and much more. We expect to add customized entertainment, voice to text messaging, social networking with voice input and more! The BlueGenie Voice Interface enables a whole lot of more features without adding buttons!

“We are looking at wearable computing, which we see an opportunity for us to use the audio medium extensively,” says Asseily. Aliph is currently technologies such as speech recognition as a way to bring more functionality to its headset. The company could take a leaf out of Apple’s playbook there. Apple launched its latest iPod shuffle with speech recognition that tells users what song it is playing, the artist and the names of the playlists. Asseily and Rahman won’t reveal when Aliph will release a device with a comparable speech recognition feature but say they are big believers in the technology.

Oops – The editor got that one wrong. Apple uses text-to-speech, not speech recognition for the new Shuffle, but the technology is actually embedded in iTunes on the computer, not in the Shuffle. As a funny side note, it appears Apple used a very mediocre sounding TTS voice for their Windows PC version of iTunes and a good sounding voice for their Mac version. What’s stored on the Shuffle is an audio file moved over from the computer. Use a Mac and you get a good voice!

My hats off to Aliph for understanding the value of speech recognition in a Bluetooth headset for a “future” version of the Jawbone (it’s not in their Prime)…Of course Sensory has the BlueGenie Voice Interface running on CSR Bluetooth chips with speech recognition, compressed speech, text-to-speech, voice morphing and MORE.  This allows headsets to be easier to use, safer while driving, and have lots more features!

BlueAnt’s new Q1 headset will use the BlueGenie Voice Interface and should hit stores this month!!!!

Todd
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