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Vocal Joystick uses voice to control your mouse, just shout “ah,” “ee,” “aw” and “oo” at it!

We’re getting lazier, we have been dreaming that we could only use our voice to control our computers. Just yell at it if you feel your laptop is too slow to respond to your instruction – “Move faster fatso, or else I’ll break you!”. Yeah, how you wish this could come true soon. But, I guess it’ shouldn’t be too far from now.

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed something what has been in your dream for so long. It’s a simple, intuitive piece of software, called Vocal Joystick, which allows you to control computer applications by using your voice only. Vocal Joystick detects sounds 100 times a second and instantaneously turns that sound into movement on the screen. Having it, you can move your mouse by your voice, and it’ll find its way to open your browser to let you surf the Internet and also interact with any other applications.

To use the Vocal Joystick to control your mouse, what you need is to memorize the special vowel sounds. For example, the “ah,” “ee,” “aw” and “oo” and other sounds move the cursor into one of the eight directions. You can transition smoothly from one vowel to another, but what I like most here is louder sounds make the cursor move faster. So, when you’re out of patience with the slow response of your laptop, just shout out loud with the appropriate sounds.

Of course, Vocal Joystick is meant for people with disabilities, not meant for misuse by the impatient ones. It’s got couple of versions, including for browsing the Web, drawing on a screen, controlling a cursor and playing a video game. A version also exists for operating a robotic arm, which could be further developed for controlling electronic wheelchair. Lastly, Vocal Joystick is fairly easy to implement on the computers, what you need are a microphone, a computer with a standard sound card and of course, the user must be able to make vocal sounds!

More details and video links of demos on using it for playing games etc.

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