Friday thoughts…

You can ask your $500 smartphone almost anything by voice

You can ask a $100 Amazon Alexa or Google Home device almost anything by voice

You can tell your $50k automobile to change the station or navigate somewhere (maybe) by voice

But we have $200k-$500k+ farm machines you can’t ask anything?
And they can’t verbally tell us why something quits or breaks either?

I’m not here to say voice recognition technology is perfect. If you’ve asked Google or Siri about a corn variety, chemical name, or machine model you understand it isn’t perfect. If you get your voicemail transcribed into text you certainly understand voice recognition isn’t perfect. But folks, it’s 2017, going on 2018 machine model years. The cabs continue to get quieter, the microphones to use for Bluetooth get (marginally) better, the radio quality is exponentially better. But we still can’t talk to machines.

I can’t think of a machine that talks back to us either. Sure many of us know the sound when autosteer disengages all by itself for whatever reason, but why can’t the tractor prompt the operator by voice, and tell us why. Or better yet, give us a verbal option to fix / re-engage.

I see many middle aged and older folks using voice recognition to send text messages, which is great. I know not everyone can type fast, or at all. I just think there are more uses for voice recognition technology than we are able to utilize.