Small talking iPod shuffle finds a voice

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 11 March 2009 19:03

Your IT - Entertainment

As if an iPod does not do enough already, someone at Apple obviously thought it was missing the ability to talk. But not any more.

Apple has been hitting the new product announcement button rather a lot of late. There were those way too expensive for some Mac mini, iMac and Mac Pro updates for example.

There was also the much better received new Safari 4 web browser. And now for something completely different which is sure to get everyone talking, including the product itself: the iPod shuffle finds its voice.

Yep, Apple has just announced the new iPod shuffle. Available immediately, according to Apple it is the smallest music player on the planet at just 1.8" tall and 0.3" thin.

The design team achieved this tiny miracle by relocating the controls from the shuffle to the earbud cord, which you will either find really cool or really annoying I guess. I'm in the cool camp, as the cord controls are now where they always should have been.

Another cool or fool contender is the VoiceOver functionality which is the real star of this particular Apple launch in my opinion. Here's why: if you are listening to a song and want to know the title or artist the iPod will now dip the music volume and tell you.

What's more, it will tell you when your battery is about to go kaput and what the names of your playlists are making it a breeze to switch between multiple lists without looking at the shuffle itself.

Want to hear your shuffle tell you a song name in French? No problem, this thing is multi-lingual and can speak fluently in no less than 14 languages. In fact, the iPod will select the most suitable language for the track being played using intelligent algorithms.

When it recognises a Spanish artist and song, it speaks Spanish. Your iPod doing foreign language accents, how cool is that? If your answer is not cool at all, then you can simply tell it to speak English all the time.

The new 4GB speaking shuffle costs £59 here in the UK where I am based, your price mileage may vary depending upon your location.