i do not understand you.

when i was maybe ten years old, i was driving in a rental car with a cousin and a family friend who is known for his practical jokes. this rental car had a new feature: volume control on the steering wheel. my family friend decided this would be the perfect opportunity to tease my cousin in the back seat and he excitedly told nathan about the VOICE ACTIVATED volume.
"volume up." he would say and then sneakily turn it up while still driving.
"volume down." again sneakily changing the volume with the steering wheel controls.
my cousin sat in the back seat in complete and utter disbelief. this was too good to be true. how could a car really know what you were saying and adjust the volume accordingly??? he was truly amazed until we broke the news to him that there was no such thing as voice activated music. sorry. it was simply the grand invention of volume control on the steering wheel.

well, my friends, ten years later there is such a thing as voice activated music and cell phones and everything.

although, i must say, i am not a huge fan. maybe it's just because i have bad diction, but it seems that all these voice activated controls really stink at understanding what i'm saying.

for example, my friend has a car where you can hook up your ipod and then you have to talk to the car to tell the ipod what to play. you CANNOT use the ipod controls. now, while this may seem great in theory--fewer accidents because people aren't as distracted trying to navigate the car and the ipod at the same time--in reality, it was quite the pain. driving to the grocery store and back we tried, without success, to make the ipod play our favorite song. but the voice commander lady just kept saying "i do not understand you." really? really voice activation lady? isn't that kind of your job...to understand me and play the song i desperately NEED to hear whilst driving to the grocery store? now maybe it's just me, but i think that the voice activation lady not being able to understand me is just as much of a driving hazard as controlling the ipod manually. can you say road rage? okay, maybe that's a little extreme, but the fact that the lady couldn't understand me was quite frustrating and "frustrated driving amy" is probably more unsafe than "manually controlling ipod while driving amy."

...

i don't know. i guess i just think the whole voice activation idea is great in theory and truly an unbelievable concept (at least at age ten), but it has not been implemented so well, so far as i can see.

but like i said, maybe i just need to work on my annunciation.