Actually, I take some of that back. I can think of a couple of uses, although they’re reasonably niche.
First is assistance for people with reduced finger movement or no fingers at all. I’ve done a TT with a guy who only had one arm. I didn’t check his setup but I imagine he was limited to rear shifting only unless he’d configured a Di2 setup for use with one lever. If you lacked fingers, hands or arms then the voice-activated shifting might help.
Second is more general and probably only applies to the finger shifting. On my old Di2 I had a pair of sprint shifters fitted, which were great when I did the odd crit as you could shift while staying low on the drops. With the finger-shift, you could change gear with your hands at any position on (or off) the handlebars. It’s not floating my boat especially but someone might like it.
As an aside, the Di2 sprint shifters were excellent - SRAM not so much. My days of crapping myself in cat 4 whacky races are over so haven’t bothered on the SRAM bike.
Anyway, patents are about the ideas more than the implementation. These look like the kind that are registered so that SRAM can sue anybody who ever actually got the tech working.
