PatentlyApple reports that Apple has filed a new patent for iPhone that indicates that Apple is interested in bringing Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-text converters to iPhone. What this patent basically tells us is that Apple is working on a way to convert a user’s voice into text and vice versa. So if a user is in a noisy environment and cannot listen to the voice of his friend on the phone, he or she could set iPhone to convert his friend’s voice into text and simply read the text (that has been converted from voice) and reply to him by speaking.
In another scenario, if a user is in a situation where he cannot talk on the phone (say in a conference room), he or she can type the words and set their iPhone to convert the text into voice and then send it to the person on the call, so he can listen to what you have typed for him.
According to the patent, if you are unable to talk to someone on a call then your iPhone might also be able to playback a pre-recorded message to inform the the person on the call that you are unable to speak due to the excessive noise at the near end.
Both text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversion features will work on your iPhone regardless of whether the person you are talking to on the phone has a device supporting these features.
This text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversion features are very useful for other purposes too, for example writing an SMS, email, or chatting with a friend on IM, and tons of other uses as well. We hope to get this awesome feature on our devices in iOS 5, or at least at some point in the future, because filing a patent does not mean that Apple is fully committed or willing to bring this feature to their devices at all or in near future.
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