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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Looks like you even type with an accept :^)

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 :).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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