Here comes Android, the 1.5 early-look version of their SDK brings official support for voice recognition. That’s something Linux distribution may really want to grab and re-use.

Update: Four Feet‘s Chris Hager has been kind enough to point out that the speech recognition in android is based on the proprietary technology of Nuance. Nuance technology is well known to be effective and real-world proven (I even heard about US courts using it to transcribe their recording of the trials). Unfortunately, I see no chance of being able to have it on Linux. Not for free at least.

Update2: this article claims that the speech has to be sent over the internet to be converted to text. That shed a new light on the matter, and contrasts with Chris opinion.

As highlighted by this post, unofficial support was already available in Android SDK 1.1., with code being as easy as:

Intent intent = new Intent("android.speech.action.RECOGNIZE_SPEECH");
startActivityForResult(intent, 0);

and:

@Override
	protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
		...code for checking resultCode and data intent...
	ArrayList results = data.getExtras().getStringArrayList("results");
	}

You could call your pc by name (let’s say called it Kubrick) and:

– Lying on the sofa and watching a movie. Suddenly, the phone rings
me: Kubrick STOOOP !
computer: (the stop multimedia key action is triggered, the movie stops)
me (after carefully explaining that yes, I really liked her new shoes, really): Kubrick PLAY !
computer: (play  multimedia key action  triggered, the movie resumes)
Everything without having to stand up to to reach the computer.
– five minutes later, the phone rings again (oh shit !) … to be continued

Another use case may be the netbooks, where the keyboard and trackpad are so costrained that may be more easy to launch programs by name than digging the menus or pressing hotkeys.

Comments welcome.