The latest Apple patent that has caught the attention of the public deals with the iPod's menu navigation. Currently the iPod navigation is exactly like iTunes navigation, and it works great… so what could Apple add to it to make it better?

The answer is a simple one, audio assisted navigation. For those thinking that you will be able to just tell your iPod what you want to listen to, you can rest assured, that will not be the case. The patent details a system where the iPod gives audio cues to help navigate the music collection when not looking at the screen.

The system described by Apple is very similar to the text to speech that has been available for ages now. However, because the iPod's processing capabilities are too limited to be able to conduct a decent sounding text to speech operation, Apple's patent describes a method through which the system will use the processing power of the computer the portable device is syncing with, to generate the speech information. This makes it different to existing devices that do have the processing power to actually do a text to speech translation on the fly. Also, logic dictates that if the iPod is not powerful enough to do a text to speech translation, it is also not powerful enough to do a reverse, speech to text translation, meaning that even if sometime in the future the iPod does come equipped with a microphone it will be unable to play what you tell it to unless the brains of the device also receive a bump.

Another great thing about Apple's approach is that it makes handling a massive amount of metadata for a library easy, by only updating or adding the information to the songs that are being synced, and using the computer to do all the heavy lifting.