[watersb]

About 10 years ago, I used a basic flip phone, vendor locked to a $15/month Verizon plan.

The Wal Mart page for a similar device is still up at

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Verizon-Wireless-Samsung-Gusto-3-...

Among other things, it had limited speech recognition -- you could say "Call" followed by a name, and it would match that against the address book on device.

We live in strange times.

[wildzzz]

My 2006 Infiniti had voice commands for calling people in your address book. Road noise trashed the microphone quality so it only really worked well when you were at a stop.

Handsfree mics in cars still suck and Bluetooth handsfree audio quality sucks too, not sure why this is still a problem. I get backwards compatibility issues but is good compression that difficult in newer devices?

[kragen]

i had a sprint samsung sch-6100 flip phone with a similar voice recognition feature at the end of last millennium, but it would only match the name you told it to call against names you'd previously made training voice recordings of. that is, it wasn't trying to do speech-to-text or text-to-speech; it was just trying to discriminate among the particular recordings you had made previously

i didn't use the feature very much because to activate it, iirc, you had to either flip the phone open or press a button on a hands-free headset. but obviously this wasn't a bluetooth headset, and the phone couldn't play music, so you wouldn't walk around with it in your ears all the time; unless you'd just gotten off a different call, you'd have to get it out, put it in your ears, plug it in, and then you could use the speech recognition feature

so unless you were a secretary or something, making one phone call after another for hours (to a small number of people), you might as well just use speed dial

[selcuka]

Yeah, even 24 year-old Nokia 3310 had some form of voice dialling [1].

OS/2 Warp 4.0 (1996) came with speech recognition and dictation software [2]. The CPUs it supported back then weren't much better than a 10-year old phone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3310

[2] https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php?title=OS/2_Warp_4:_%...

[kalleboo]

In addition, way back in 1993, Apple released speech recognition with the original AV Macs (which were outfitted with 55 MHz AT&T 3210 DSPs in addition to their 25+ MHz Motorola 68040s) which was then also supported on the PowerPC Macs released the following year (that started at 60 MHz)