Voice-driven handheld set to launch this year

L&H has been showing off its prototype voice-driven personal digital assistant called the Nak, versions of which could be on sale by the end of the year.

It's about the size of a mobile phone, with a directional microphone at the bottom, and a pen screen which can be slotted out of sight when not in use. L&H said it expects most interaction with it will be by voice rather than by pen.

Nak, driven by a 207Mhz Intel StrongARM processor, uses L&H's latest Voice Xpress version 5.0 speech recognition software with its RealSpeak text-to-voice converter. Emails can be accessed through verbal commands, with RealSpeak reading the messages aloud. Voice Xpress translates dictated replies into text for sending.

Nak also uses what is being termed "ambient intelligence", a store of information about the user which it can draw upon when fetching information.

For example, if you ask it to find out what the traffic is like and you have told it that you live in Edinburgh, it will find the appropriate local information for you.

The demonstration was impressive. However, the big question is whether the expectant silence that accompanied it affected the results. It's hard to imagine that street noise, or even general office noise, won't make voice interaction difficult, or impossible.

L&H says its directional microphone eliminates virtually all background noise. But whether or not this is too good to be true will only be confirmed when Nak models are released by licensees of the design.