Fortunately help appears to be at hand, quite literally, as there are new an innovative ways to interact with our computers available and in general use already.  There’s the recently introduced Siri from Apple, which while it might be a version 1 product and in need of some improvement (especially if you’re Scottish) seems to work rather well for voice interaction.

Then there’s the now venerable Kinect, coming soon to Windows to help us to all pretend to be Tom Cruise throwing his windows around Minority Report style.  Touch screens are opening new opportunities too and new types of keyboards.  Sadly a wholesale move to touch technology can only guarantee that the next worldwide health scare is a pandemic of repetitive strain injury and nobody needs any of that.

But slowly and surely we are moving away from using keyboards and mice to control our computers and to communicate with them.  This has led me to wonder exactly how we’ll be doing this in the future?  Clearly the outsider has got to be voice.  With so many languages, dialects and words to learn we’re still many years from the processing power needed to produce reliable results, and do you want to explain to your boss that you had said “brick” in that email but the software misunderstood you?

Then comes touch.  RSI issues aside we can still use them to read natural handwriting.  This technology has now been around and working reliably for a decade, the postal services around the world have invested huge sums in computers that can read the words we write.  Alas this is a slow process and writing out a long email instead of typing it in under half the time just isn’t suitable for the demands of modern life.  This brings us then to the Kinect which is great for throwing things around but pretty useless the first time you actually try and do precise work with it.

This means there there’s a gap, sitting somewhere between what he have and what we don’t and I thought I’d throw this out for you to see what you think will be the control methods of tomorrow?  Will we will use keyboards and mice so much, or will the mouse go in favour of gestures and will basic keyboard controls be taken on by voice control instead?  In short, will be resort to using all of these technologies simultaneously to control our devices?

I bring this up because this has all really taken off just this year.  2011 has been a tremendous year for new ways to control computers with some of the most amazing technologies put into practical and widespread use for the first time.  2012 looks to be even more exciting with swipe gesture control coming to Windows 8.  We may not want this though.  For many a keyboard and mouse are just fine and they’ll want to keep things like that.  What do you think?  Do you think there will be an outright winner and do you even think that ten years form now we’ll have any choice in what we use?  Why not tell us here.

Back to Google. The new voice search option is currently being rolled out to google.com visitors who open the search engine’s website in the Chrome browser.

A small microphone is displayed next to the search form if voice search is available. Users need to click on the microphone icon before they can use their voice to search Google. The only requirement is a connected microphone and the Google Chrome browser.

Take a look at the following video that introduces the new feature.

The feature is rolling out, and it may take weeks before all Google visitors get to see the microphone on the main Google page.

Probably the biggest usability issue is that you have to click the microphone before you can start speaking and searching. This slows down search noticeable, especially when compared to searching with the keyboard. It is also necessary to click again whenever you want to search anew.

We have not been able to test the feature yet, but have a few concerns. It is likely that text in the search form gets erased whenever the microphone is used to submit a new search to Google. It is also unlikely that there is an option to correct words with your voice, which means that it may be necessary to use the mouse and keyboard to do that.

It will also be interesting if the speech recognition algorithm will be able to identify English words from users from all over the world correctly. While that’s probably difficulty enough for the different English accents, it is without doubt even more difficulty when foreign users use the feature.

It currently places an icon in the Firefox status bar that, when clicked, sends the selected text to the Vozme service in a new tab that is opened automatically. An audio player on the page will then play the selected text to the user.

The voice quality is good and clearly understandable most of the time as long as the text is written in the English language or one of the other supported languages. The Vozme service supports other languages such as Spanish, Hindi and Italian as well and those seem to be also supported by the add-on.

It would be nice if the developer would find a way to include the Vozme application on the same page so that it is possible to see the text and hear the voice at the same time. It can only be done manually currently by switching back to the last tab as soon as the Vozme page has loaded in Firefox.

Text To Voice is available from the Mozilla website. It is compatible with all Firefox releases up to Firefox 3.7.

The freeware that I’m speaking of is called MP3 My MP3 Recorder. After installing the application you specify the source from where you want to record the audio from. You may select from the following sources: Phone Line, Microphone, Line In, CD Player, AUX, SPDIF, Stereo Mix and Mono Mix. Stereo Mix for instance should be a great selection for most purposes. Once that is done you should fine tune the recording level for best results.

To do so take a look at the bar on the right side of the program window which should not peak into the red area at all times.  Once that is done click on settings to specify the bit rate for the sound that will be recorded (between 32 and 320). You may also set a time limit for the recording but the default is to record until you stop the recording.

If everything is set the way you want it to be you click on the (red) recording button to start the process. The buttons to stop and play the already recorded songs will become active once that process has started.

I think this is a great tool if you want to record audio fast and easy. The quality is pretty nice as well.

Once that is done a new window appears that is giving you information about the Stress Level of the person you are talking to. It needs some time to calibrate but once that is done it displays the Stress level in a graph. I’m not sure how reliable this method is, I tested it with a friend and it seemed to display rather strange results. You should also note that the person you are talking to will receive information in the chat window about the plugin that you are using.

It seems to be free to use for now, not sure though how long this will remain. It looks more like a nice gimmick at the moment than a serious application. Let me know if you have better results using it.

I would not say that Skype made a big step forward, can’t see many other changes yet. Sure there are some new emoticons and stuff like that but this is not that important I think. In case you do not know Skype I decided to list the main features of it.

• Support of Windows, Mac and Linux
• Talk or chat with your buddies using Skype and a microphone (for voice chat)
• Video chat
• Cheap calls to (mobile) phones worldwide
• Send files using Skype
• Conference Calls

I’m using Skype mainly to see when my buddies come online. I know that instant messengers do the same but I never got used to one of those.