I truly feel like cameras have constantly been at war with smartphones in a way that isn’t possible for them to win. So instead, cameras have become better and better at making their image quality outdo that of a phone. Beyond that, they’ve developed different tech to make them even more competitive as devices with things like scene recognition, machine learning, etc. But smartphones still do something that no camera does: voice commands. I, like most other folks, don’t want my devices listening to me all the time. However, think about how many people use voice-to-text all the time. Why can’t we just tell a camera to take a picture for us? Here’s more of what I mean.
This article is partially inspired by a woman named Jodie, who wrote to me asking for help for her son. I’m one of the few highly accomplished journalists in the photography world who’s legally blind — and I’m proof that perseverance can help make photography accessible to more people.
Camera manufacturers have had various ways in the past to shoot an image without using the shutter button. One of the most prevalent is the touchscreen. But many years ago, Sony had a tech that let you wave your hand by the viewfinder to make the camera shoot an image. That tech was part of the Sony App store, which the company killed off. It’s quite sad too becaue they had the potential to be the single most creative camera company in the world.
What I think could be very cool is allowing cameras to do certain things via voice controls. Said controls can be activated using the touchscreen after being enabled in the menu system. With voiceover controls, a camera could possibly do things like:
- Shoot an image
- Change shutter speeds, apertures, white balance, ISO, etc.
- Setting the drive mode
- Adjust the screen brightness
- Change the scene detection mode
Those are some of the most basic things that voiceover control could do for us. Truthfully, I don’t always want my camera listening to me and processing everything. However, if the camera were in airplane mode and it only did these things via very specific commands, I think that I’d be much happier. The way that I ultimately see this working is by basically having an “if this, then that” set up of some sort. For example, if you customize the camera to shoot a photo after you say, “snap,” then I think that so many other cool things could happen as well.
Of course, stuff like this existed via Triggertrap many years ago. Using that, you can do stuff like lightning photography pretty easily. But we still wonder why it can’t just be done in-camera.