VR is not an exact science; at-home VR with a good microphone and controlled environments is spotty. VR with background noise & limited RAM (seen how much RAM the average PC VR package takes? Often it's 64M+ just for the VR, plus a 300Mhz or above CPU) is much more of a challenge. As for shouting at your car to play music while you're not even in it - this is practically star trek. The VR mics needed for reliable in-car operation cancel out any noise that doesn't come from where the driver is sitting (roughly) so this would never work.

Shipping in-car systems often use an attention button just because otherwise it gets to be a much harder problem - like the Jaguar system.

The VR system we've been evaluating is pretty simple (less chance for it to get stuff wrong) and has a basic tree structure which defines what order words can appear in. There are single-word commands for player control (play, stop, tuner, mp3, etc) and you can play voice-tagged playlists by saying "select " but the speaker-dependent bits (ie the playlist names) seem to be very hit & miss, and you're limited to a maximum of about 200 of them.

We're looking at alternatives too, but we've been very busy on non-mk2 stuff (still empeg stuff, just not a product we'll be selling ourselves) for the last 5 months so please bear this in mind. On the positive side, Mike's got real shuffle (as requested) in there plus some other cool stuff for the next release of the car player software.

Hugo