O’ fabulous day, Speech Heads! The good folks down at ArsTechnica have uncovered evidence that the newest iteration of the iPhone OS, 3.0, is going to come with new voice control features. The project, codenamed “Jibbler,” (sounds like a discontinued candy from the 80s) is said to have NOT ONLY voice synthesis-whoa!-but voice recognition!

According to Ars’ sources, Jibbler seems to be SpringBoard application enhancement. SpringBoard is similar to Apple’s OSX Finder app. It acts as a launcher and will support the newly announced 3.0 Spotlight search. Ars has a bunch more details that you shouldn’t miss out on (plus this terrifying picture), but we thought we’d just give our impressions here.

It seems like every little damn thing is getting speech-enabled these days. You may remember our groundbreaking reports on the GirlTech Password Journal, or the Moshi clock, talking toilet rolls, and creepy robots galore, all perfect examples of my point. All these signs seem to be pointing greater mass acceptance of speech recognition. Companies are looking, harder now that ever before, on how to make some fast bucks off getting speech into our daily lives. We’re still, of course, in the early stages where the technology is so new that we get all manner of strange things. The boundaries of what speech can and should do haven’t been entirely defined-at least not out of more traditional applications like IVRs-so people are looking to try and hype anything.

You don’t have to look any further than my brother Adam B.’s recent posts about speech-to-Twitter apps to see what I’m talking about. His two posts on our humble site have yielded a torrential flood of other speech-to-Twitter firms emailing him and commenting on his posts, trying to get him to look at their offerings. This even as Twitter, though popular and finding some legitimate CRM uses, hasn’t found a way to monetize itself. Talk about building a house on a shaky foundation.

If you’ll allow me to wax incoherent through a string of vague journalistic tritery and mixed metaphors, it’s like California 1849 out there and everybody is jumping head first in the pool, just looking for that pot of gelt at the end of the rainbow that stretches over gold-paved streets and promising rags-to-riches fortunes to all comers and investors. But you can’t put a baby in the oven and make it biscuits, unless of course you’ve ground the bones to make devil’s cake. No, no. The business of business is business and the first rule of business, business, business is location, location, location. I guess, Speech Heads, what I’m really trying to say here is that a rolling stone gathers no moss, and golly! Them stones is rollin’!