Am I getting old or is this common?
No sure how the technology has evolved recently, but that's already shameful enough when a cashier don't understand you, I wouldn't want my phone to do the same in public. My pride requires me to avoid speech recognition nowadays.
Bad news though - some countries like Spain have decided to offer more friendly automated phone service replacing "type 0 to whatever" by using speech recognition. That's a nightmare.
Speech recognition works most of the time, but I often end up with one word that Siri just doesn't understand and then you end up spending more time trying to figure out how the device wants you to pronounce the word than it helps you saving time by using it instead of just typing it out. There are also some funny videos of foreign speakers trying to use Siri when it first came out - that has been exactly my experience with it as well.
Auto-correct is the other annoying one, which can wreak havoc when you're texting in multiple languages. Even if you manage to setup your device properly with all the different languages, it can still cause some problems whenever you mix the languages within a single message. However, the biggest problem I've experienced so far is when you send messages between parties where one of them doesn't have the foreign (latin based) language installed/configured yet. The replies I've received from people on their new phones often ranged from funny to cryptic, where you have no idea what they were trying to tell you. They just typed in the foreign text and hit send without checking only to have auto-correct send you something intangible.
"... and that earned him the name of War Thug ... erase previous word ... War Thug ... erase previous word ... WAR ... THUG ... WAR THUG! WAR THUG! WAR THUG! NOT WARTHOG YOU GODDAMNED PIECE [CENSORED]"
It was the most amusing thirty minutes of the drive.
He ended up not dictating the book on the drive.
It was only later that the thought came to me that he should have gone ahead and cleaned up the text later. I'm not sure how successful that approach would be.
... or, for the sake of argument, the same thing by speech recognition:
Unfortunately speech recognition often produces insulin usable and it might be hard to clean up later can be just you and me I want to tell what you're trying to say.
Maybe my voice sucks, or maybe I should robot it up more, but this is about the level I usually get... it's okay if you're doing a quick search on Google maps and don't mind repeating it 3 times but anything more than that and you may as well start typing.
This is amazing to me because most people I encounter don't do that for me, even though I am not a native speaker and by doing that they could ensure that our communication is smoother and more accurate.
If we're looking at the rest of these anecdotal comments as a reflection of the larger English-speaking (and perhaps American) public, the conclusion is that speech-to-text isn't very helpful but in a completely different linguistic and cultural environment (i.e. Chinese) we see that it is indeed quite successful.
One interesting thing to me is that, with sucessful enough voice-to-text transcription, the need for typing (and writing) becomes moot (in that context). I wonder if we'll see that typing as only a skill necessary for specific trades/occupations.
However, I'm not old enough that I enjoy the tactile experience of handwriting a letter for the tradeoff in speed, though that's because my handwriting is so terrible.
edit: clarification on holding phone
It was super annoying to be around him when he did it; at least it was Russian, if it was English it would be very distracting.
The problem I have with speech recognition is it doesn't allow for contemplation and correction (easily). I can stop mid sentence, go back, change something, and finish the sentence when I'm writing. Much harder to do in speech recognition. Particularly with phone stuff, it's better with Dragon, etc., but for composition, writing is still the fastest way for me to get something completed.
Dictation is a bit of a performance. It's not composition. Although it can make you a better thinker, I believe, if you practice it.
Charles Krauthammer is, in my opinion, a pretty good speaker. Not many pauses, rarely any filler like "uh" "um" etc. I was googling around about him, and it turns out he was asked about this. He's a medical doctor, and back in the day, they would dictate their notes over a phone in the hospital, to a recording that would later be transcribed.
After doing this long enough, he became skilled at composing his thoughts without writing them down.
In my case, I learned that I tend to speak in very quick bursts - get a thought out at a rapid clip, followed by a brief pause. Actively trying to measure comes across as far more intelligent I think, and I have time to think through what I'll say next.
Really hearing how many pauses, contractions, etc. you include in your regular speech helps you improve dramatically
At the end you end up with something that takes minimal effort to get into a readable first draft state. And after that it's just editing.
I only do it when I want to send a message in a hands free manner, such as a text message saying that I am stuck in traffic.
I would try to use it again, but this time not concentrating as much on the speech, and assuming success.
Disclaimer: This works especially well for things like setting timers and reminders, but I don't really use it for replying to texts.
Even in places with loud background noise, its a non-issue considering everything nowadays has two mics for noise reduction. I'm very, very surprised at how well Google voice-to-speech works. When it fails its almost always because I have a poor signal from t-mobile or am saying something that's just too difficult for machines to parse correctly.
Also, one thing that is relatively hard for voice recognition to distinguish is varying between two different languages. I am always cooking and words like, dashi, kombu, and gnocchi are hard to parse. There are uses of words from other languages that don't involve saying "translate x in English"
I find, like some commentors above, that for longer-form composition, I often want to skip around. But for a text-length message the time to compose is drastically reduced by dictating it to my wrist rather than removing phone, unlocking phone, typing reply, etc. And it can be done largely hands-free.
Then I just talk my question as I would have a conversation with a human and I get the answer spoken into the earpiece. Of course, sometimes I need to look up the info on the screen, since it doesn't answer straight.
I can hold a coffee with one hand, see where I'm going with my eyes, and still enter text. It became reliable enough for me to use habitually a couple years ago, and it keeps getting better.
The local language here is not english, but I use english voice recognition since it's better, which adds extra weirdness.
I only use it to set alarms and reminders on google now.
On the topic, something which reads your subvocalizations is really needed, and could even increase the speed!