What happened to OS 9's Voiceprint?

[Will Cheyney]

This is a question I've asked myself a couple of times.
It appears to be one of those 'things' that was lost during the OS 9 > OS X transition.
Most of the missing features have eventually made it back (i.e. scheduled startup/shutdown), but Voiceprint is one of those things that has never been reinstated.

I'm not saying it was particularly brilliant, I just remember Apple being pretty proud of it as the time and it's odd that such a nifty feature hasn't been developed.

[Will Cheyney]

A complete mystery then

[strider42]

I think it was a pretty underutilized feature and they didn't think it necessary to spend the time recoding. I mean, did anyone actually use that stuff as the standard way to get into their machine? Seems like more of a hassle then just typing in a password. It kind of reminds of the infraredport that was on the original iMacs. It was there, no one used it, they quietly got rid of it.

[CharlesRobinson]

Didn't they reinstate the IR thing with front row?

I thought the voice thing was awesome. I always wanted to have the quote that peter watts used on millenium to get into his computer ("My God, it's full of stars") but I didn't have a microphone on my computer when I used 9.

[Laser47]

Ive read somewhere awhile back that OS9's viocce print feature was not very secure and that after saying the password a couple times you could get in the system. They probably ditched it to improve security within the OS.

[dr_lha]

Originally Posted by CharlesRobinson

Didn't they reinstate the IR thing with front row?

I thought the voice thing was awesome. I always wanted to have the quote that peter watts used on millenium to get into his computer ("My God, it's full of stars") but I didn't have a microphone on my computer when I used 9.

That quote is from the movie 2010 originally BTW.

(EDIT: and from the book 2001, before some smartass replies!)