There are features that get in the way, and those that don’t bother you if you don’t use them. Some people love to tag their photos, and they upload them all to places like flickr where that’s important. For them, tagging when shooting might be very handy. I agree that it should not be designed to get in the way of the ordinary shooter, and I can’t imagine why it might, other than adding another entry to some menus.

Voice tagging, on the other hand, can be done without menus, though you do need a way to turn it on, or perhaps indeed yet another button to hold down while talking — though many cameras already have this. But beyond that button it need not impinge much on the UI. The main difference is to have the camera (or even the post-xfer software) understand that the voice annotations are not single blocks of audio, but rather a list of tags, with tags in common among many photos.

Of course I’m the sort of shooter who uses the optical viewfinder, so speaking to a mic while shooting would be easy. For those who hold the camera away from their head to shoot, having to bring it up to get a good audio recording might not be so natural.

What people want as a grail is to just shoot ‘em, transfer them and have them organized with no effort or little effort. I am a big fan of things that can help with that (GPS and compas in camera, face recognition after the fact, automatic groupings by shooting session etc.) but also like things that can organize with minimal effort, as voice tagging might entail. Speech interface on cameras actually could have many applications. They have the CPU for it, but CPU takes battery power.