Use for spatial audio idear

I was talking to Paul about the ipod shuffle and he mentioned that he thought that it was hard to have a screen less interface. I quite agree with him and said I wondered why. I have always been intreasted in try to produce an audio interface but would like to get beyond the phone interface of ‘press one for action a press 2 for action b. wait for a long slow list to get to the option you want’. With icons, location and text you can be reminded and skip to the option you want pretty quickly. The subject moved on to Simon’s excellent audio interfance and we came up with the idea of multiple speakers all talking at once.

Imagine you have a pair of head phones, you have a key pad with say five buttons and the machine wants you make a choice from. The idear is that all five voices sit speaking out aloud. Each voice gets its own speech position in space and you use your listening in party auditory system to identify the one you want. So imagine one voice repeating ‘option one to revise your document. option one to revise your document.’
Another voice repeating
‘Option two to create a new document. Option two to create a new document….’
And so on for all five voices.

The spatial audio (position in stereo field) would help which of the appropriate buttons to click/press. The distance to speaker plus variation in speakers (male, female, old, young, accents) would act both as further ways to separate out the voices (perhaps).
Clearly there must be some natural limit to the number of voices you can differentiate but perhaps 4 five would be useful. Worth testing out.