Ever since I read about the availability of the Nokia Message Reader app, I’ve been wondering about an app which does the exact opposite! I would love to see an app that would convert speech to text and save it as a note on my symbian phone. The uses of such an app would be endless. A few scenarios to which I can relate with:

• I’m driving and receive a text msg to which I want to reply. Rather than doing the traditional one-handed T9 typing (which everyone’s good at), I could simply start up the Speech-to-text application and dictate the text message it and then choose the option which would allow me to send it via sms.
• I’m in class and the professor is explaining concepts of EV-DO in class. Most of what he says is in the reference book, but there are some valuable points which I want to note down. Rather than writing them (I’m not lazy, I do write them down), I could just start the app and point it towards my professor and voila, the notes are created. Perhaps there’s an option which allows me to save the sound file as well.

There are (obviously) some hindrances, such as the fact that you would need a sensitive microphone, which contradicts with the fact that you shouldn’t put a very sensitive mic on the phone as you don’t want background noise in your conversations (or you would need really good noise cancellation). An obvious solution would be two microphones, one dedicated for such an application. But if a company is going so far as to include a dedicated mic for the application, then why limit it to taking notes? Why not provide voice-based navigation functionality? Its quite ambitious, but voice-based navigation is being introduced into the market slowly (Windows Vista). But this would open up Symbian to an entirely new range of exploits (like the Vista speech-to-text exploit).
I’m pretty sure tho, that the Tech Gurus over at Nokia must have definitely done some research in this area. I am definitely interested in such an application. I’m just hoping that someone from Nokia is watching over my blog!