Three ideas about text messages | Hacker News Reader

Three ideas about text messages

antirez.com

33 pointssamber30 comments

For me, there are two major barriers to voice-to-text dictation:

1) when I'm writing a message (probably due to laziness), I don't always have the full thing formed in my head. If I were dictating to a person, abortive words and phrases would just be ignored, but when dictating to a machine I have to manually go back to erase / correct mistakes. This can be a lot of work for a long message.

2) I don't always feel comfortable speaking my messages in public; it feels a little exposing. The nice thing about text-based communication is privacy.

I'm pretty sure that Siri lets you give it instructions while dictating, e.g. "delete last word", though I almost never use dictation so I'm not too familiar with this feature. Of course, if the error happened 5 words ago, it can be too much trouble to fix it with dictation.

I've found this pretty hit-and-miss. Sometimes Siri writes out my commands because they aren't actually commands...

I just don't see what the huge improvement would be. It's really not that hard to type compared to have voice recognition for all kinds of languages, dialects and accents. Not to speak of "press button, speak into phone, wait for translation, proof read text, press send, wait for confirmation, wait for response, do it all again".

And while whatapp is nice, it's like five, or even ten, years ago nice by asian standards. The "west" fucked up by trying to protect telecom companies revenues so the networks become fragmented. Imagine if SMS instead was a free secure data channel with pubsub features, there would be huge incentives for interoperability.

All in all I think the post kind of shows the different of mindset in the west vs. emerging markets. In emerging markets people use whatever they can however they can. If you go and visit suppliers in china they often have three phones and two desktop clients open at the same time. With built-in translation and sending files, pictures and money back and forth.

For me the improvement would be when messaging while walking. Dumbwalkers (people walking around with their eyes on their phone screens rather than their surroundings) drive me up the wall. I would prefer accurate dictation so I could walk with some awareness of my surroundings.

Whilst I can (with decent accuracy) type blind on my iPhone, I still have to proofread as the accuracy isn't good enough yet.

2 is the bigger issue for me, but from a courtesy angle: I was raised to view talking on your cell phone around other people as impolite.

For those unmoved by propriety: picture the last time you were on a bus (or other public space) and saw a bunch of people texting or otherwise using their devices silently. Imagine this picture where everyone is shouting into their phones in order to overcome the background noise of everyone else shouting into their phones.

Apropos of etiquette, I'd say it's context-dependent. Even walking in the street I am slightly uncomfortable dictating my messages (maybe it's just a privacy thing, or maybe it's because it makes my speech stilted enough that I become self-conscious).

I'm a private person, and I frequently text things that would be difficult to vocalize. I'm not likely to use speech recognition often, regardless of how good it gets. I also go back and re-edit my messages before sending, fairly often. That would be a pain with voice.

I often use Signal for messaging (same encryption that Whatsapp is now using). It defeats the point of encryption if I'm just sending the audio off to Google to transcribe, anyhow.

As for Whatsapp: I don't have any clear reason to install that instead of Viber, Line, or a half-dozen other messaging apps. Instead, I use Signal for some paranoid friends and SMS/MMS for everyone else. I've tried other apps, but I don't really see the point of using them regularly.

> I often use Signal for messaging (same encryption that Whatsapp is now using). It defeats the point of encryption if I'm just sending the audio off to Google to transcribe, anyhow.

Really good point.

> As for Whatsapp: I don't have any clear reason to install that instead of Viber, Line, or a half-dozen other messaging apps. Instead, I use Signal for some paranoid friends and SMS/MMS for everyone else. I've tried other apps, but I don't really see the point of using them regularly.

I used to think the same about WhatsApp, and just use SMS/MMS and sometimes Signal. But WhatsApp is a really big improvement over SMS/MMS (the group messaging is very useful, you got typing notifications, encrypted calls, etc.) and it's more ubiquitous than Signal.

While I like Signal, it's essentially dead in the water as a mainstream platform [0]. They were too late, the network effects are too great and they didn't execute the user part very well. The technology can do a lot of good for users of whatapp, but if they would have had a different perspective they could have exceeded that by becoming a protocol for encrypted communication. I think the would even have done a lot more good even just appealing to companies and make it a solution for company communication. Not as romantic though.

[0] I think Hemlis were right when they came to this conclusion. [1] While it's useful if you need encrypted communication it's a mess for normal users. Not only is there a lot of confusion what it does and how it works, there's a lot of problems with notifications, messages and upgrades. And usage is extremely uncommon outside tech circles.

I personally am unconvinced that the barrier to voice messaging is the interface. I think it is deeper than that. It is psychological. People are not (yet) comfortable speaking into inanimate objects that do not respond back instantly. I imagine that most people still feel silly speaking 'into' or 'at' an object and waiting. People don't type with their voice for the same reason they ask 'can you hear me' in a video conference or say 'hello' and wait for a response at an automatic gates, door bells that need people at the other end to respond or open, at drive in counters... etc.

That said, I completely agree with the WhatsApp bit. It is changing the way people interact...and it is surprising that it hasn't been as popular in the US.

> I think it is deeper than that. It is psychological. People are not (yet) comfortable speaking into inanimate objects that do not respond back instantly. I imagine that most people still feel silly speaking 'into' or 'at' an object and waiting.

by "People" I assume you mean "Westerners". Go to China and be amazed at the amount of "People" using the voice messaging in WeChat

I wonder if it pre-dates WhatsApp's voice messaging and it might've been a source of inspiration?

It is also just habit. My aging father can't use the keyboard very well, but he has dictated letters as a lawyer for will over 30 years. I used to hear him sometimes as a child, and it was extremely fluid. It is just practice.

Well, we already have text messaging - it comes with the phone, so we don't need to install another app to do pretty much the same thing.

If WhatsApp was a default install, people would probably use it without thinking or caring about it, if it was named in a way that sounded anything remotely like it's purpose.

Honestly, all the ideas explained in this article have been richly used in China. The excitement and extensive usage of groups with nearly all of your classmates, colleagues, families, random meetups and occasional affairs. You probably will find it noisy when you have to manage tens of groups and hundreds of users in each group. Then, the app is not only for tight connections but weak connections in business and personal interests. This is what happened with WeChat 2 years ago.

Whatsapp is popular outside the US, because many of us pay 10cents per sms.

Exactly. Texts are either free or extremely cheap for almost all cell phone plans sold in the US.

Providers in many other countries are still attempting to engage in rent-seeking behavior by levying absurdly high fees to send texts (relative to what it costs them to send the text). It seems that US providers got over that about 10 years ago.

As a result, people in those areas are simply ignoring text messaging and using WhatsApp instead.

Unsure - texts have been free in the UK for years and the majority of the people I know use WhatsApp. I started using it instead of Apple's iMessage because it's just more reliable and universal.

Texts are mostly free in Ireland (depending on plan etc) and WhatsApp is huge here.

Apple murders this space.

iMessage does all of the stuff whatsapp does regarding groups, etc AND it has a killer desktop client (the mac). Not only that but my non iMesssage text messages are proxied to my mac as well. I can communicate via wifi, on a plane, and talk to my sister in Belgium or my other sister in Argentina for free. I can choose to use text, voice, or video, crystal clear, no hassle, no money, no setup.

However, the killer feature is seamlessly having conversation on my phone, then continuing on my phone, then continuing on my laptop... etc

Theoretically, and providing who you want to talk to has an iPhone.

I use iMessage almost exclusively (with one group of friends on Facebook Messenger for some historic reason), but when a friend switched to Android, and because I don't use WhatsApp, my communication with him outside of work has dropped significantly.

yeah but it totally falls down if you have any friends w/o iphones!

are there any imessage clients for android? apple should just make an official one, and make it good. no immediate benefit, but long term it's always valuable to own the platform, and it's (amazingly) still ripe for the taking in the u.s.

side note: it's amazing how shitty the native fb messenger and google hangout apps are for iphone.

I don't see Apple ever opening up iMessage for any device other than their own. iMessage has some neat features but nothing that is totally unique from things like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, PushBullet, etc. Apple isn't making any money directly off of iMessage, its a feature of their platform. Opening it up would just increase Apple's cost for running it and remove one of the last things that makes an iPhone unique over the other major flagship phones. It's their killer app in a world where all phones look alike and all run near identical hardware specs.

sure, but this was the same argument about keeping ipods mac only, itunes, safari, etc. there's some truth in it, but overlooks the much larger advantages of having more people use your stuff, and, most importantly, of owning a dominant platform.

owning the de-facto messaging platform would be a hugely great position to be in. right now messaging is mostly just that, messages, but there's a ton of stuff that would be quite natural to integrate into and on top of it (look to china as an example).

also, like you say, messaging apps themselves aren't super-rare; it's not like oh-my-god secret sauce selling 1000x iphones.

but it does happen to be, arguably, the nicest messenger that's currently out there. if they opened it up to android, they could become the dominant messaging platform (maybe).

huge wasted opportunity.

"Apple murders this space."

Not really, you just don't know what you're missing because you've never had an ecosystem like wechat and qq.

> iMessage does all of the stuff whatsapp does regarding groups

Well, it can. But it can also be a nightmare. I've had a long running group chat with 2 other people (so only 3 people!) and it frequently fucks up—one person no longer getting texts on certain devices. Random copies of our group being formed and reformed. Receiving texts in one version of the group, and when sending them, they show up in another. The group name is common, so occasionally it gets renamed. Our avatar images getting replaced by random images (I think this is a bug in the iPhone address book rather than iMessages, but it still annoys me in iMessages). And so on. Most of the time it works nicely, but once every few months it's a real pain for a few days.

My theory on WhatsApp is that the U.S. is that the iPhone is more popular here than anywhere else and many of the early adopter types that are needed to help a social network gain momentum use iPhones and have friends who mostly use iPhones, so iMessage is what is naturally used.

I don't understand why phones don't come with a bluetooth ear piece that neatly fits in. How convenient would it be for something like Siri or Cortana to notify you through voice and asking for instructions without ever lifting your phone?

iMessage is the standard messaging app in the US... or at least in my life.

If its not iMessage on someones screen, I see Facebook Messenger get a lot of use in college. I don't see people using WhatsApp that much unless they are texting international or have a dirt cheap/beater phone which makes me think they don't pay for unlimited texting.

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