Why hasn’t anyone called Steve Jobs on his DRM letter?

With all the hubbub over the launch of AmazonMP3, Amazon’s DRM-free music store, I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Steve Jobs’s open letter to the music industry from back in Feburary. In the letter, Jobs claimed that DRM was forced on iTunes by the music companies, and that

If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Well, it seems Amazon has pulled this off. The rub is, of the big four companies, Amazon only has EMI on board, the same EMI that earlier in the year allowed Apple to sell higher quality, DRM-free music on iTunes for $1.29 a track, a $0.30 premium over regular tracks. This move seemed contrary to the spirit of Jobs’s letter; if EMI was letting iTunes sell DRM-free tracks, why did they cost more, and why were there still DRM tracks being sold? The big difference in Amazon’s approach is that they have created a DRM-free store, not added a DRM-free premium like Apple did. Additionally, some of the Amazon tracks are only $0.89 each, a $0.40 savings over the DRM-free iTunes tracks.

In his letter, Jobs claims that the iTunes deal was revolutionary at the time, and he’s right. However, the Amazon model is going to crush the iTunes model: in it’s first day, it was already snagging customers from Apple. As the store catches on (and it seems likely to), the other major music publishers are going to get on board, and when they do Apple is going to have to make good on Steve Jobs’s DRM letter.

Speech-to-text using your cellphone

Read/Write Web has posted a review of Jott, a mobile phone service that allows users speech-to-text functions such as dictating email messages. They have just released a service called “Jott Links” (and an API) that allows users to interact with websites like Zillow and Twitter using voice commands and speech recognition.

On the one hand this seems like a no-brainer, the perfect application of this technology. I spent a summer during college working for Speech Technology Magazine, and back then speech recognition software was mainly marketed for people with motor disabilities and those who liked to dictate their texts. With the proliferation of cell phones, it seems like this deployment of the technology should be a perfect fit for most people’s lifestyles. However, the limitations of the technology make me wonder how it will work. I could be hopelessly out of the loop here, but the speech recognition programs that I was familiar with back then depended on creating profiles of individual users, slowly learning how to decode the user’s speech through a trial-and-error process that required a lot of feedback in the form of corrections. Will Jott’s service do this, or has speech recognition evolved beyond this problem? If not, it could be a serious drawback. If a user wanted to post a message to a public service like Twitter, he or she will certainly want to make sure that message doesn’t contain any embarrassing malapropisms.

It will be interesting to see if this feature catches on. There have been some significant developments in interface design lately, most notably the huge response that Apple has received for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which was just released today. Perhaps they will coexist, and we will get used to an everyware-esque situation where our interactions with computing devices will fit much more naturally in our everyday actions.