Toshiba Debuts Bluetooth-Based Headset

Toshiba unveiled on Tuesday a headset/microphone combination that contains an embedded Bluetooth chip, enabling the user to send voice commands wirelessly to PCs, home appliances, and audio devices. The new product will be sold commercially later this year, Toshiba says.

The headset is equipped with a voice-recognition engine, which converts what a user says into commands. These are then sent to electronic devices such as PCs and home appliances over a Bluetooth network using low-power radio signals to allow wireless communication between electronic devices at short distances.

At one of the demonstrations, a person wearing the headset said "work" into the headset microphone, causing a Bluetooth-enabled air conditioner to turn on. When he said "strong wind", the air conditioner started providing strong wind and so forth. Because the headset itself converts voice into commands, it can directly send data to the device.

"There has been a Bluetooth-embedded cell phone that enables a user to transfer voice before, but this is the world's first headset which sends digitized data," says Yoichi Takebayashi, director of Toshiba's R&D center.

Other demonstrations included a dictation function; words spoken into the microphone were automatically typed on a PC. The keyword spoken to the microphone was sent to a database server, which found the information requested and sent it back to the designated device's browser. An audio-replay function enabled music stored on the PC to be played back on the headset at high quality.

Betting on Bluetooth

Toshiba, one of the nine founding companies behind Bluetooth, considers it a technology for the personal end of the networking spectrum, Takebayashi says.

"The expectation towards the spread of Bluetooth was high at the beginning, but it has slowed down a little at the moment," he says, emphasizing that not only the device makers but the software developers' cooperation is essential to promote the technology.

The company hopes to develop Bluetooth-embedded products in various fields, Takebayashi says. As a start, Toshiba is trying to load Bluetooth modules on all of its PCs as standard, then on home appliances and mobile devices, and eventually to other products such as automobiles, he says.

The headset, the company expects, will be a trigger for such new markets. At this point, the company expects demand from medical practitioners, who would use the dictation function to record medical symptoms in a written format, and from consumers, who would like to listen to music wirelessly.

For commercialization, further developments are needed on the headset's battery life and weight, Takebayashi says. So far, the company has achieved its goal of reducing the weight to under 100 grams. But the company hopes to extend battery life to at least 5 hours compared with the current life of under 1 hour, he says.

Toshiba hopes to put the product on sale in time for this year's holiday season at a price under $76, and to cut that price by half at a later date, Takebayashi says.