There are plenty of iPod cradles that let you remote control the device, some built-in to cars, but Direct Voxx has come up with the Muso that lets you do it by voice. It's an interesting bit of kit that doesn't require training to understand you, and lets you demand particular tracks, scan through playlists, pause and resume playing music just by speaking in natural language like "play California Dreaming by the Mamas and the Papas." Check out the video to see it in action.

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Having third-party apps fill in the missing holes in iPhone's functionality seems to be a genius idea, since Fonix has done the voice dialing legwork for Apple with their iSpeak app. The app consists of "a run-time engine that sits on the phone," which says always-running app to us, that can listen for names on your contact list and dial them. Also, you can look for songs in your music library by saying the name of the artist, song or playlist.

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We don't care about the Ford Sync car this commercial's trying to sell you, but we find its depiction of balky voice-activated devices all too realistic. Knowingly chuckle along with us as these tools/fools who think they've mastered voice commands get their comeuppance. If this Ford Sync is like our Honda Civic Hybrid, its voice activation might still suck. It's just too noisy in a car environment to work well. Anyway, the idea of telling machines what to do and actually having them carry out your orders is compelling, but we've noticed far more situations where those systems don't want to do what you say. Maybe someday. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. [bb Gadgets]

Those crazy Brits are flying voice-controlled helicopters now, using a Direct Voice Input system by QinetiQ that lets pilots fly their Gazelle helicopters by simply yelling at them. So far the makers claim 90% "effective speech control" of the helicopter's "non-safety critical avionic functions," but we're just wondering what avionic functions on a helicopter aren't safety-critical. And let's see—to shoot the guns, you yell "bang!", right? The system is speaker-independent, so it doesn't need to be trained for each pilot's particular voice or way of speaking. Now this means that backseat drivers can actually have some real power. Let's just hope carmakers aren't tempted to try this shit. – Charlie White Speech recognition technology allows voice control of aircraft systems [Gizmag]