Voice Activated Remote Control : Shiny Shiny

I hope you'll all forgive me, as I'm about to go all "old fogey" on you for a moment. When I was a child, our television sets had these numbered knobs on them, which we used to manually change the television station. This meant, if you can believe it, actually standing up and walking over to the television set when we wanted to change the station. If you wanted to change the programme without having to get up off the sofa, you had to do something drastic like having children, so that you could order them to get up and do it for you.

Nowadays there are remote controls for our televisions (heck, there are remote controls for nearly everything), and so long as we can find someone to bring us food from time to time, we need never interrupt our TV watching time by needing to move out of our little cushion groove.

You'd think the minimal amount of energy button-pushing takes would be a luxury - but no - someone (specifically, InVoca) has invented a universal remote that responds to voice commands; which means the only muscle you need to move when you watch TV now is your mouth. I haven't decided yet if this invention is genius...or if it heralds the end of humanity as we know it. I am guessing it's a little of both.

The InVoca remote uses rechargeable batteries, comes with a charging base, can recognise up to four voices and can perform complex commands (that is, if you can muster up enough energy to give them.) It is available from Brookstone for $50.

Read [via OhGizmo!]