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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

It's not inherent to mobile, but the form that smartphones have taken.

I remember owning a Treo way back and at that time, a phone was something I could easily compose text and be productive on. Ever since my first smartphone with a touch screen keyboard I've thought of the phone as something to read or play games on. Entering text has become enough of a chore that I stopped thinking of a phone as a productivity tool. It's good at keeping me entertained on the subway or being a music player, but that's it.

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Same phone, same story. The loss of a physical keyboard on my device removed the "input" use of it. Now it's really just voice and ready-only features. If there are websites I find or any other "work" that needs to be done I just forward it onto my computer and do it there.

I'll add too that I think the palm pre was the best form factor I've ever had: small, physical keyboard, yet gives me the full screen look and sleekness. And android still has yet to match it's universal search on type feature.

Do you have an iPhone? I use the OK Google voice search feature all the time on my phone.

People outside the US probably don't find any voice-assisted tools productive at all.

TLDR: They all suck. Terribly.

Assuming your users will fall back to voice-search is not an assumption you should make without having the data to support it.

Yep indeed, French here, it's not even an option currently. Maybe in the future it will improve but for now it only works in theory.

you can definitely voice search in French on Google. Heck.. voice search in Hungarian works pretty well.

Swede here, and yes it works in swedish to, not just works its actually usable. Havent tried to write a swedish sms with it but just saying "hitta närmaste butik" will give me the closest groverystores nearby and so on.

That's not true, I use Cortana in French all the time and it works pretty well. I always use "Hey Cortana, rappelle moi de faire tel truc dans 2 heures" (Hey Cortana, remind me of doing this thing in 2 hours), and it always understands me and creates a reminder.

I'm in the UK and I use voice search all the time on my Android. Who wants to type phrases into a keyboard when it soooo much quicker to just say it?

Plus the voice recognition's accuracy is absolutely stunning for me; even in a crowded bar.

Well, I'm Scottish and I don't have a particularly strong accent (at least by the standard of Scottish accents) and my accent appears to be beyond any kind of voice technology (Apple or Android).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU [NSFWOS]

Not checking the link since I'm at work, but is that .. the Burnistoun lift sketch?

Of course! :-)

Captures both the failure of the technology and the resulting anger!

That's a sketch, but this is real (a funny classic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmWRhhvf60Y

It is better than you think. In my experience Italian, Spanish, and English voice recognition work almost flawlessly now.

I'm also learning Chinese using a mixture of tools on my smartphone, including speech recognition. I can't tell how good this is in general, but it is clear that the transcription works when I pronounce something correctly.

The worst performance I get is when I try to speak in my home (American English) dialect. "It can't see the forest for the trees" becomes "Kansas City forest with trees." So yes you may need to code switch.

A couple of years ago I found the voice search useless, but these days even e.g. searching for channel names on Youtube that doesn't even match dictionary words works near flawlessly despite the fact I speak English with a broad Scandinavian accept.

Looks like you even type with an accept :^)

Same here. I have a pretty thick Spanish accent, but the Google voice search has improved so much that he understand almost everything I say. I still don't use it that often though, giving instructions to your phone still feels weird to me.

>giving instructions to your phone still feels weird to me

And yet, I refer to my phone as "he".

>so much that he understand almost everything I say.

My phone understands my accented English pretty well - the problem is when I don't want to search in English.

I'm not convinced nationality or accents have much to do with it, the overwhelming majority of American English speakers I know also can't use voice tools on their phones. My American English is pretty regular and it certainly never works for me. I suspect the common factor here is that the voice tools are junk, not that groups of people lie outside its area of function.

By contrast, I use VoiceAttack to tie voice commands to keyboard macros on my desktop, and it does what it's supposed to most of the time (but I bet it wouldn't if I had an accent.) Voice control definitely isn't an unsolvable problem, but it sure seems like one whenever I try to use it on my phone.

> VoiceAttack

Thanks for that! Never heard of the program; I'm going to try it at work tomorrow :).

Google Now works amazingly well even with my Indian accent and mispronunciations.

Moreover, voice functions are made so that they require you to be on-line, which cuts down their utility significantly. Also, I can type faster than it takes to say something and then wait for it to make a trip to Google's servers, get parsed and the result (that is just the search string!) to come back.

My first smartphone was an iPhone but I switched away. For minimal text entry like a search term I'll use the keyboard, it's easier than waiting for the voice input interface, hoping it works, etc.

For longer text, voice dictation also doesn't fix the problem. Sometimes it works but often you have to seek to arbitrary points in your sentence/paragraph and fix errors. I preferred a physical keyboard.

I agree, typing on a touch screen is horrible. The android "gesture typing" where you drag your thumb over the keys isn't too bad. I refuse to talk to machines, but that's just a personal thing I guess. I've never even tried the voice response features.

It feels awkward at first, but it really helps with a smartphone. You get used to it. I now use speech-to-text for the majority of the text input I perform on my mobile, including text messages, short emails, and search.

I also do everything I can to avoid the need for a lot of text input on mobile and save it for when I have a real keyboard. I agree with other users that the decline of physical keyboards on mobiles has had a terrible impact on their real-world productive use, but speech-to-text helps alleviate that a little bit at least, if you don't mind homonyms getting mixed in there occasionally.

Sure, but it really, really depends on the user. People with accents seem to have a hard time getting it to produce usable results. I only have anecdotes, but they seem to suggest that foreigners and first-generation English speakers have a hard time getting accuracy out of speech-to-text.

The one thing I'd really like to make voice control less awkward and faster is a push-to-talk button instead of the stupid activation phrases.

I want to just pull my phone out of my pocket, hold a button (or ideally hold a button on a smartwatch) and speak a command. Using the button release to finalise would also speed things up, because the phone doesn't have to wait for silence to know you're finished. It would also work better as a keyboard replacement. Select text box, hold button and speak to type.

It just seems so obvious to me that I don't know why no one's done it yet.

My only concern with voice commands is the tracking and search recording that inevitably takes place when using something like Google Now, Siri or Cortana.

If I don't use regular Google search due to privacy and tracking concerns, why would I use Google Now?

I have traditionally hated voice recognition since it's traditionally sucked. But Android voice recognition has gotten much, much better over the last few years. I certainly use it for search, and I'm even starting to use it for text entry at times. Coding would still be tedious "left paren function right paren", but outside of that, it's become quite usable.

I mourn the loss of my keyboard. The iPhone is a content consumption device and a camera above all else.

I've often wondered how many character clicks have been lost to typos and battling autocorrect on all phones.

While I like not having a physical keyboard, aside from text messages, I loathe typing anything of length on a smartphone.

I also find the UX of the iPhone's autocorrect to be really backward and frustrating; when I type a word, and I get a suggestion, I shouldn't have to lift my fingers from the keyboard to kill the suggestion. If I keep typing -- then keep what I am typing.

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