Noticed the new HTC "Wildfire" when I popped into CPW in Oxford this afternoon.

It brought a huge smile to my face, I thought for a moment that HTC had bought the rights to the old Wildfire Inc voice recognition software & answering machine service (as previously supplied on Orange) and incorporated it into an Android application. My happiness was swiftly knocked back when the member of staff said it was just the name of the device...

So Disappointed! I really do miss Wildfire, she was lovely.

Yup, it was the phone HTC allowed people to vote on for the name, obviously went for the snazziest one.

Slightly misleading thread title - thought you were disappointed with the actual phone.

I don't remember much of Wildfire. Was it not just a glorified voicemail system ("hello Wildfire", "listen to messages")? Or was there more to it than that?

With Google Search by Voice and the various voice recognition protocols within Android, I think we'll see a lot more 'voice command' stuff in the coming months. I must admit I did feel a bit like I was in a futuristic world a couple of weeks ago when I picked up my phone, pressed a button and said "navigate to whittlebury hall near towcester", and lo and behold got guided there perfectly!

"Glorified voicemail system" - yes. But a lovely friendly one that was quite intuitive. She'd always listen into a conversation until you said her name and she'd jump in and give you options.

If you were leaving a message, you could ask her to "make it urgent" and she'd automatically put your message to the top of the queue.

Would recognise names for outgoing calls and use the most popular number for a person as a default unless you said otherwise.

You could also ask her to

"Do me a favour" - #What kind of favour?
"What does a cow say" - #Moo
"I'm depressed" - #You're depressed? I live in a box!

Orange eventually turned her off as the equipment it was running on (low powered pentiums) was ageing.