[edx1]

Grovsnus: Very good points. I didn't realize people were going back to more complexity already, I guess I'm still moving towards the "simplify life" phase. I know for a media based company product, our requests from customers for simplicity out number requests for functionality so we basically have to design a system that can work two ways which is a PITA. I personally think the reason for our situation is people have to spend too much time learning multiple interfaces throughout their life that they don't want to spend time learning a more powerful, but complicated one. I wish the majority of car owners were focused on performance and functionality and not just kid haulers or daily commuters. If there were no speed limits I wonder what car interfaces would be more advanced in...

Is voice technology really at a peak? I agree a car isn't an ideal audio environment but if active noise cancelling is integrated into the system I would think it could remove enough ambient noise to be quite useful. Then if you add a similar technology as used in YouTube for copyright detection I would think even obscure names, phrases and accents could be associated (and at second worst a prompt given for verification and worst a simple text input or vocal spelling request) for user input once and then be usable from then on.