From today’s mailbag:
Dear Mr. Pogue:
Three years ago, my husband suffered an accident and is now a quadriplegic. He can never be alone without a reliable fully voice-activated phone.
As you pointed out in your column this week, with Android, you have to swipe the screen to reach the mike button, and with the first iteration of Siri, you also had to push the home button â€" all impossible for a quad to do. We bought a Blue Ant device a few years back, which worked nicely (sometimes) with his old HTC. When the phone was last updated, that was the end of a beautiful relationship. I spent hours with both Blue Ant and HTC, and both blamed the other and neither had a solution.
So what do you suggest?
While you’re at it: The command to terminate a call doesn’t exist yet. When your call goes into voice mail, you can’t hang up by a voice command; you must physically terminate the call. We have discussed this problem with multiple brain trusts and no one has the solution yet.
My reply:
Unfortunately, I’m afraid I haven’t done any research on this problem in particular. But the Moto X, as I mentioned in my review, is listening for voice commands all the time â€" you don’t have to touch it to start issuing commands.
Among the many Android apps, perhaps there’s one that lets you hang up with a voice command?
I’ll ask my blog readers. Maybe they know of some solutions!
