I want Siri + Infocom

[hargle]

On my 4 hour drive to visit family over the xmas holiday, my mind wandered to my Infocom games, in particular about how I actually want to play one when I got back home. Then it struck me. I'm basically trapped in my car, driving on a boring interstate for several hours. Why can't I play an Infocom game while I'm driving? I don't mean actually reading and typing while I'm driving- that would be dangerous and stupid.
I'm thinking more along the lines of having a device such as my phone speak the text to me (especially thru bluetooth over my car stereo!) and then for the device's voice recognition to be able to parse my commands and enter it into the game. This could be a great way to make a solo roadtrip fun, as well as bring about a new set of users to interactive fiction.

I poked around on the apple app store and I can see the Frotz has been ported to iOS, so I can get Infocom titles on my phone, but there's nothing about speech translation to/from the game. Has this been done anywhere?

 

[krebizfan]

It will probably be just as distracting talking to and thinking about Infocom games as talking would be to someone on the phone. Bad idea when driving.

I don't know the iPhone infrastructure that well but it should be easy to run Infocom games with the various audio mechanisms designed for those with difficulties reading a screen on any current computer. I would have to dig up a microphone to test it out though.

 

[SiriusHardware]

Agree that this is a good idea in general but a bad idea when driving.

It certainly would be fascinating to see if an aurally / orally playable version of any Infocom game could be created using commonly available accessability / disability tools.

Unfortunately, I tend to play Infocom games in fully verbose mode so that I get the full location description every time even when I'm just passing through. Just a visual glance at it is enough to remind me where I am / reassure me that I am where I thought I was but it would work very badly if you were having the entire description read out to you every time you stepped into it. I (personally) also need to have a big notepad with a hand scribbled map and notes, but maybe that's just me: I envy those who have tidier minds / better recall and are able to play such games with all the locations (and the locations of all objects within those locations) entirely in their heads.