Butterscotch Tutorial Special

iPhone 3 GS New Features Overview

Part two of five: Voice Control

Sean Carruthers: Hi I'm Sean Carruthers and welcome to part two in a five part series on the iPhone 3GS. Today we're going to talk about voice control. Now using your voice to control a phone is nothing new, other phones have had voice dial for a while. The iPhone, this is the newest generation and this is the first it's actually had this and it doesn't just control the phone itself. We'll give a couple of examples here. So to access voice control on the phone you have two options, you have the button at the bottom here, you just press and hold it or if you're using the headset that comes with the iPhone it has a center button on that and you press and hold that instead and you'll press and hold it until it engages. So we're going to press and hold until you see the voice control icon pop up, it'll beep and it'll listen to what we're saying here and we're not saying it recognizes at the moment so it's going to fail on this, but we'll try again in a second.

Dial 416-555-1212. So you can dial a number just like that. I'm going to end that call, because it's going nowhere. You can also go back to the main screen and press and hold. Dial Matt Harris mobile. Once again we'll dial through to him. Actually going to cancel that right now. Now that's what you can do with the phone itself. Now it's not just the phone as I mentioned, you can actually control your iPod with it. So you have a few ways that you can do it. Same way to interact with it, you press and hold, but you say different things. So we'll try this. Play album junior. So this is doing now is it playing Norwegian band called Röyksopp, I'll play it in the background here so that you can actually do other things or just continue to you know leave the phone in your pocket and walk down the street while you listen to your music.

Now if you're playing something like this already and you're not sure what it is, you do have options again using voice control. So again press and hold. What song is this? Okay it'll identify it for you. The same sort of functionality that you see on the new iPod Shuffle where you can press and hold and it'll voice over what you're actually playing, but now you actually specifically ask for it. And one of the other nice functions is you can press and hold and you notice if you don't press it long enough you'll actually the Spotlight features, so you have to press and hold. Play more song like this. So it'll take song that you were playing and asked to play more songs like and it'll actually create on the fly other songs in your play list that are like that and will play them all to you in a row.

Anyways there you go, that's the new voice control feature on the iPhone 3GS. Stay tuned for more episodes in this series where we'll talk about the camera, the compass, accessibility and more.

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