We’ve been waiting for Apple to offer voice controls for the iPhone for some time, and it looks like they may be getting ready to do so. The US Patent and Trademark Office published two Apple patent applications yesterday showing that the company is considering adding voice controls as a standard option in the iPhone, as well as possibly the iPods and even Apple TV.

The document describes the use of a hardware addition to the device; a “voice-to-command analyzer,” that would be capable of distinguishing voice commands from meaningless noise or normal talk, which would save other hardware components the burden of making the translations.

After being sorted, recognized commands would then trigger a macro manager, which would execute actions from a library. One suggested command mentioned in the document is “play irreplaceable”, where “irreplaceable” would be the name of a song or playlist. Voice commands could also trigger a menu or other context sensitive command. The command “tell” in the calendar app might be used to message all of the listed contacts for an event.

More iPhone-specific commands would be used to do things like control the camera or chose what to do to deal with incoming calls or voicemail. It also mentions users using a microphone with the Apple TV to pass commands to other devices, with a speaker to give feedback.

[via iPodNN]

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