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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I feel like something has recently happened to Google's voice recognition. Just in the past few weeks, I've found it to be more accurate than ever, especially in noisy environments. In fact, I'm currently dictating this comment 10 feet away from a busy interstate. I've almost exclusively switched over from typing when I won't embarrass myself. In fact, I just had to switch to typing because I got on the BART.

This is the beginning of Google's voice assistant being worth the trouble to me as a user.

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The more you invest in a relationship, the more rewarding it will likely to be for you but setting this analogy or aphorism aside, Google Now is built on some form of deep machine learning and thus the more you feed it, the better it becomes in its job of recognizing your voice and executing your commands.

And yet they can't seem to parse my monthly boardgame night email and add it to my calendar. Every time I have to manually copy/paste the email into calendar and then fix the failures the parser had (ignoring the time in the email in favour of the word "night" in the title to mean 9pm, for example.

Hopefully they'll point this recognition AI in more directions. Seems like it should be easier since it's already text.

Decent AI would recommend boardgames of the same genre - here's a manual recommendation: Risk 2210 is (4 hours of) awesome!

It's deep recurrent neural nets. It has made incredible progress in this area.

For more info: "The neural networks behind Google Voice transcription" August 11, 2015 http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-neural-networ...

somewhere out there, karpathy is grinning

One of the reasons I regret switching to the iPhone. Siri can't hold a candle to Google's assistant.

I found Google Now can't hold a candle to Siri. Neither of these assertions is particularly useful. ;-)

Actually, what I've found under the hood is that each expects to be used in a particular way, and when used the other way, isn't as good at it.

Sort of like the expression that you belong to your cat, the assistant trains you.

Yes, I think that's been the primary issue behind the individual problems I've had with iOS so far. I've started asking other people how they do things to see where my thinking has been "trained" by using Android/Now.

I totally agree. I thought it was because I bought the Nexus 6P but no. It seems that on most devices I tried Google's voice recognition has gotten a lot better.

For some time I've found it to be far superior to Siri and Amazon's Echo.

Wow indeed. Even when I talk really fast and slur or slightly mispronounce my words, it gets it right. This is magic.

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