The Voice-Activated Grocery List

Here's an interesting announcement from SmartShopper, Inc. on a dedicated device that serves as your voice-activated grocery list:

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060209/20060209005019.html?.v=1

The device utilizes Nuance's VoCon 3200 embedded speech recognizer and allows you to utter items you need to pick up on your next grocery run. The device is also equipped with a thermal printer so you can print yourself a hard copy.

This is an interesting gadget, but why would anybody want to lug around an extra gadget when all the functionality you need to implement the same thing is available on a mid to high tier conventional mobile phone? For example, my mobile phone (~ $299 retail) is equipped with programmable speech technology that can easily and accurately recognize 2000+ grocery items. It also is equipped with a programmable bluetooth radio (JSR 82) which would make it pretty easy to connect to my $200 bluetooth-equipped HP Photosmart printer.

My mobile phone is also a network device, so if I wanted to quickly browse a few product reviews on that expensive bottle of wine I'm about to purchase while standing in the beverage isle, that can be accomplished without difficulty.

In addition to using bluetooth to interface with my printer it could be used to register which area of the store I'm in and automatically display items on my list that are in that area. For example, when I enter the baked goods/deli section the fresh bread and honey-baked sliced ham entries are displayed.