New iPod Shuffle – VoiceOver

Just yesterday, I was wondering why devices don’t speak to us. Today, Apple announced a new iPod shuffle that… talks to you. Its nice to know I’m on the same page as Apple, even if I am 6 months behind them in thinking.

It doesn’t seem that there is any voice synthesis built into the device – since the OS you sync from will dictate what kind of voice you get. What it seems to be doing is using the system’s text to speech synthesis and recording that into a file and storing it on the iPod. This is evident due to the different voices for the Mac and PC (you can tell immediately that they’re the system voices for each system, I’ve written software using the Windows text to speech synthesis API before, to provide users feedback when doing a task thats not in front of the computer).

Still it seems like a nice little device. Apple had a usability issue – once the iPod Shuffle got sufficiently large, they were going to need to add some sort of control mechanism beyond just playing every song on the device randomly. Now Apple allows the user to use multiple playlists to manage music. Though in another 4 years the shuffle will get sufficiently large for this mode of control to not be sufficient, and they’ll have to come up with a new way to control the device without a traditional user input and display.