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Comment by minouye | Hacker News Reader

Speech-to-text seems like a technology that suffers from the 9x effect[1]. Creators overvalue the impact of voice transcription, and users overvalue their existing input options.

Even for the desktop, speech will be roughly 2X faster than typing, but I have no desire to buy a copy of Dragon because I like/overvalue my keyboard.

[1] - https://hbr.org/2006/06/eager-sellers-and-stony-buyers-under...

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I think it could catch on.. if speech to text worked correctly every time.

If I hit a key on a keyboard, it works correctly every time. If I make a typo, it take a fraction of a second to hit backspace and correct it. Mistakes are cheap to correct.

In comparison, if I talk to my phone, it makes a significant number of mistakes.. making me talk slower/louder/differently to use it. And when it does make a mistake, it's more costly to correct.. I either have to start over, or pick it up and hit backspace. So I disable it and never use it.

This is the issue I have with speech to text systems as well. None of them have an intuitive, reliable way of making corrections that I don't have to painstakingly learn. Also, Google's keyboard (like SwyfteKey) is far far faster than typing normally. Amusingly, it also suffers from poor correctability...

It will not catch on unless a privacy device is made so that people in office enivonements csn do it without disturbing their co-workers.

> It will not catch on unless a privacy device is made so that people in office enivonements csn do it without disturbing their co-workers.

The privacy device is called "an individual office", and its pretty important for people in "office environments" to be effective, independently of use of voice recognition.

They've been around for quite a while, but their popularity goes up and down periodically.

So we just need the Cone of Silence from Get Smart.

In the future, I could see a device that picks up subvocalization filling that role.

Next someone is going to suggest that we all learn to program by voice:

https://www.extrahop.com/community/blog/2014/programming-by-...

I cannot find the article at the moment, but there was one discussed on hacker news recently that mentioned a privacy device for telephones before the 1950s that achieved the same effect as cupping your hands over the receiver so that others in the room could not hear what you were saying into it. If programming by voice takes off, I imagine such a thing would be a necessity to keep office environments sane. The same goes for regular text input by voice.

I'm sure the device you're thinking of was the Hush-a-Phone, which was also important for competition policy history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...

> cannot find the article at the moment, but there was one discussed on hacker news recently that mentioned a privacy device for telephones before the 1950s that achieved the same effect as cupping your hands over the receiver so that others in the room could not hear what you were saying into it. If programming by voice takes off, I imagine such a thing would be a necessity to keep office environments sane.

Or maybe we'd all get private offices with decent sound-proofing.

Hmmm … that's not going to happen.

Well, that person suffers from RSI, so there's a certain group of people who would benefit from it. Here are a group of resources if anyone is interested:

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/progra...

Never tried to program with voice, but I did set up Dragon and macros so I could dictate javadoc. That worked pretty well. Since a lot of the language in javadoc is fairly regular, I could work pretty quickly.

I can't talk as fast as I type. Is that 2x figure for some untrained "average user"?

Edit: Yep, looks like I completely missed my estimation of talking speed.

According to Wikipedia, a "comfortable" speed for audiobooks is 150-160 wpm, whereas the "average professional typist" achieves 50-80 wpm [0]. So 2x seems to be fairly accurate for the average user. Real-time transcriptions in court rooms etc. are usually done with stenotype machines [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype

Are you comparing the polished output (audiobooks) to raw input (typing)? That's about as unfair a comparison as you could possibly make: I'm positive (from experience) that the audiobooks undergo massive retakes and sound editing. What you hear is not a person narrating the whole thing in a single take; the raw input rate (number of words / time spent in front of the mic) is about 20 wpm, if you're really really lucky (you will throw away a lot of material). And halve that for edits, which are unavoidable. Plus the recording happens under ideal conditions, with full and perfect focus on pronunciation.

TL;DR: audiobooks are almost completely unlike voice recognition, you're comparing apples and oblique angles.

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