On June 8, Apple introduced the new iPhone 3G S with improved speed and performance and hands-free voice control, and many other features. The company sold over one million units in the first three days it was on sale.

A Voice Control screen with an iPod now-playing screen in the background iPhone 3G S includes the new iPhone OS 3.0, Apple's latest mobile operating system with over 100 new features, including capturing and sending audio recordings on the go with a new Voice Memo app. (Is speech-to-text transcription on the horizon?) New iTunes features available with iPhone 3.0 software include wirelessly downloading movies, TV, and audio programs. The iPhone 3G S models include a 16GB model for $199 and a 32GB model for $299 (with a new two-year AT&T rate plan). The new phone was available to consumers June 19.

Voice control

The voice control feature in iPhone 3G S supports hands-free operation for both iPhone and iPod (music) functions. Nuance is strongly rumored to be the source of the core technology used by Apple, although Speech Strategy News couldn't get a formal confirmation from either company. (If this is the case, it puts an interesting twist on a recent quote in mid-June of Timothy D. Cook, Chief Operating Officer, Apple, in the Wall Street Journal that the company liked to own all its core technologies.)

Voice Control supports spoken commands into the built-in microphone or a headset microphone to:

-    Dial by name or number. Voice Control recognizes the names in the Contacts list automatically. iPhone repeats your voice commands to confirm them.
-    Play favorite music by artist, album, or playlist and activate Apple's Genius feature by saying "play more songs like this." Voice Control automatically knows the music on in the iPod feature.
-    Tell iPhone to pause the music, play the next track, turn on shuffle or ask, "What's playing right now?" (This feature implies text-to-speech functionality to voice the song name.)

Apple has done a good job in making the voice control natural, doing the right thing without requiring a manual for using the feature--a typical Apple objective. Early reviews of the feature were mostly good, unusual for a speech recognition product or service, given the propensity for reviewers to have fun advertising a strange misrecognition. Larry Magid, a columnist for the influential San Jose MercuryNews in California's "Silicon Valley," gave the iPhone a good review, noting "I'm falling in love with the Voice Control feature in the new phone."

Voice Control supports the languages: Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (Mainland), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch (Belgian), Dutch (Netherlands), English (Australian), English (UK), English (U.S.), Finnish, French (Canada), French (France), German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Accessibility through VoiceOver

Voice control alone makes the iPhone 3G S more usable for visually impaired users to make calls and use other functions. In addition, Apple has added VoiceOver, a screen reader that speaks what appears on the iPhone 3G S display, enabling owners to read email, browse web pages, play music, and run applications. VoiceOver speaks 21 languages and works with all of the applications built into iPhone 3G S.

VoiceOver further features a virtual control called the rotor. Turning the rotor--by rotating two fingers on the screen as if you were turning a dial--changes the speed at which VoiceOver reads the screen. Choose the Character setting, for example, and VoiceOver reads the screen character by character for proofreading or editing text. You can even use the rotor to browse web pages by header, link, form elements, images, and more.

VoiceOver includes a gesture-based screen reader. Instead of memorizing keyboard commands or pressing tiny arrow keys, you simply touch the screen to hear a description of the item under your finger, then double-tap, drag, or flick to control iPhone. iPhone 3G S also supports Mono Audio which combines left and right audio channels so that they can be heard in both ears for those with hearing loss in one ear.