We received a reply from a post I wrote awhile ago about the Android phone project, from Ivan Uemlianin. He writes:

Re Android: Google seem to have quietly removed the speech.recognition package from the Android API. I say quietly: the removal is noted in the API Diff specification for M3-RC37a to M5-RC14, released 15th Feb, but I haven’t been able to find any more public announcements - for example, it wasn’t mentioned in the m5-rc-14 release announcement.

Google have also not responded to a couple of queries about android.speech.recognition on the android-developers mailing list.

I was also very interested when Android was launched last November, especially with the involvement of Nuance, and the prospect of an accessible speech tech API. However, the speech tech parts of the Android API were never made available and now they’ve been removed. It’ll be interesting to see what the iPhone has to offer.

Is it true? Someone help. Ryan and I are very distressed. Well, as distressed as we can be about this.