Google Talking Shoes Tell You About You - Do We Need More Criticism?

Using as a backdrop the South by Southwest multimedia arts and tech fair in Austin, Texas --- the launching point over the years for an array of high-tech innovations, such as Twitter and Foursquare --- Google has unveiled the talking shoe.

But, that was already done, you point out, on 1960s TV with Maxwell Smart, otherwise known as Agent 86 on the campy nod to the James Bond franchise, "Get Smart."

Well, no. That was a shoe-phone.

The modified Adidas basketball-style shoe model Google sacrificed for the mission can't take calls, but does have an embedded accelerometer, gyroscope and pressure sensors that can relay audio data about a wearer's level of activity to a smartphone, Bluetooth device or via conical speaker affixed onto the shoe's tongue. In fact, the shoe is constantly measuring what one is or is not doing --- and then pointing that out.

Google said it isn't planning to market the automated shoe anytime soon, if at all. The talking footwear was cobbled together to draw attention to "Art, Copy and Code," the Internet search giant's new interactive ad campaign.

"Art, Copy & Code is a series of projects and experiments to show how creativity and technology can work hand in hand. Some of these will include familiar brands like Volkswagen, Burberry and Adidas --- projects developed in partnership with their creative teams and agencies," says a campaign backgrounder posted to the company's Website. "Others will be creative experiments with innovative filmmakers, creative directors and technologists to explore how brands can connect with consumers."

The idea is that the shoe would function a lot like many of the fitness gadgets out there today that attempt you to motivate a user, Aman Govil, lead of Google's advertising arts team, told ABC News.

"If you put what the shoe knows through an algorithmic logic engine, it can translate it into copy," Govil explained. "Now if you give that copy to an interesting copy writer, you could give the shoe personality. One shoe could be the trash-talking shoe."

That means if a certain shoe wearer has been sitting for more than an hour, the Google talking shoe might yell at them to walk around.

That type of one-on-one is enough to prompt tech analyst Russell Holly from Geek.com to write, "It could just be me, but I've got a feeling that there's not many people out there who want their robotic shoes to cheer them on...The first time my shoes decide to tell me how great that last run was right after posting the details to Google+, I think I'd probably just take them off and leave them."

Talking Shoe IMAGE Here