Due to a genetic curse that has plagued my family for generations, I have impaired hearing (well before natural ageing determines that I should have anyway). It’s probably not the sort of thing (along with politics, religion and relationships) that I should be discussing on a blog site. However, the simple fact is that this growing disability has driven my interest in web and communications technology and, on that basis, has actually enhanced rather than damaged my career so far.

Having seen my father’s career impacted badly by not being able to communicate effectively in an office environment I was naturally very keen to understand how and where things like email, the web and instant messaging could help me, as and when traditional communications such as the telephone became difficult to use.

Similarly, I have always kept a close eye on things like voice-to-text translation. Watching my father and aunt trying to communicate these days would illustrate why. Neither of them has any natural hearing left and even the most advanced digital hearing aids are not much use to them anymore. So they have to communicate using a combination of lip reading and pen and paper – which is not the most conducive way to have a meaningful and useful discussion.

During my time at Lucent, I worked on a couple of projects to help explain and communicate VoiceXML concepts. This is basically the ability to drive mobile phone functions by voice which has been adopted by most operators in some form to help users navigate through multiple options, particularly in hands-free usage.

A few years later, at the hosted services company I worked for, I was promoting the use of SpinVox, a service that converts voice messages into SMS and email and does so surprisingly well too.

However, when I suggested a couple of years ago now that the rise of sophisticated mobile apps might mean people being able to speak content into their content management systems in the future and control its publication via voice – suffice it to say it the idea was met with stony silence.

It’s therefore with both personal and professional interest that coverage of Google comments at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo have focused on its announcement that it believes “Voice search is a new form of search and that it is core to our business” and to support that statement the Google representative, Vic Gundotra said “I get the advantage of looking at daily voice queries coming in and it’s amazing. It’s working. It’s reached a tipping point. It’s growing and growing very, very fast and we are thrilled about it,”

Interestingly its uptake as an iPhone app is being credited with this growth and, as it is one of those developments that improves as more people use it, then it looks like this an area destined for bigger and better things. I can already see the potential for an iPhone type device to give a real time text view of what someone is saying to me, as and when hearing aids can no longer provide any benefit. With 9 million hearing impaired people in the UK alone and an iPod generation merrily destroying their hearing prematurely – it looks like a potentially big market. If a developer’s not already buried in the iPhone SDK doing this already then there’s an idea for free. Just send me a note when it’s ready – don’t bother calling as I don’t hear the phone ring 😉