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Comment by PhantomGremlin | Hacker News Reader

The BB's keyboards are still unmatched.

Yeah, but does that really matter any more? I've found that my iPhone's speech-to-text is pretty darned good, as long as I speak with a slightly staccato cadence to make it clear where the word divisions are. I can do that much more quickly than I can type. Generally I only have problems when the connection to the server doing the conversion is poor.

I've never used Android's speech-to-text, but I have to assume it is equivalent. Can an experienced BB typist really outperform speech-to-text conversion?

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There is more than just creating text. The BB keyboard is also essential part of the UI, you trigger stuff through the keyboard all the time (think of VIM or terminal based apps).

Even if just talk about text creation which involves editing. Speech-to-text is impressive but once you start to edit your text you need a keyboard and perfect cursor control.

I really liked the clicking ball on the T-mobile G1. You used the ball to move the cursor and then could click it to select. It was useful for one-handed operation and fine text editing.

My experience with iPhones speech to text is mixed. It does a good job with short common words if you talk slowly and enunciate, but screws up proper names constantly and struggles with some sentences.

Worse, when it gets something wrong, it can be completely wrong. It doesn't help that editing is kind of a pain on iOS either, with annoying long touches and the still awkward text selection system.

And the speech to text only works reliably if you speak with the right accent, for most of the planet it's appalling.

Hardware keyboards are even more apalling for people who don't use a standard QWERTY US-English keyboard layout.

It's easier to adapt to another keyboard layout than it is to change your accent. Not to mention that you can remap it in software (or at least you would be able to on rooted Android...) and that most latin layouts aren't that different from US QWERTY, at least compared to the difference in accents.

It can be annoying when typing in a Cyrillic-based language (and presumably other alphabets), especially when it's not your native language. It's also rather annoying for kids who are learning to type.

Just saying, as an ex-n900 user, that niche market is much smaller than we think. I wouldn't go back to a n900 equivalent today. Typing accents in French or non-latin characters was pretty annoying.

Did they not produce regional variations? I must admit a friend of mine who's a lawyer in Russia had an old curve with a QWERTY keyboard, but I put that down to the fact that for security reasons the law firm gave everyone French blackberrys that were roaming in Russia rather than Russian provided phones.

I am not comfortable having my email conversations out loud, particularly when surrounded by other people in an office.

My experience with Android's STT:

Accents: Supposedly it works well for US english. I don't speak US english. Trying to force it usually works worse than when I had to force myself to speak Finland-Swedish for my old Nokia phones.

Punctuation: It's really annoying to have to say "dot" or "comma" all the time, and it often seems to get it wrong anyway.

Vocabulary: When messaging I rarely only use "common" words. Gaming stuff gets garbled (I just tried, and it interpreted "raid at 8" as "Friday 8"), and band names or tech-related stuff doesn't fare much better. Bonus points if it's a weird spelling or international name. Good luck getting it to recognize Movits!, Dimaa, or Nekrogoblikon, you'll need it.

Correction: I often say the bad thing, especially when under pressure from the STT timeout. AFAIK there is no way to have it delete the last N words.

Multiple languages: I switch between Swedish and English often enough that I usually forget to switch keyboard. For a keyboard this means getting wrong autocorrections, for voice input this means getting garbage. I know Android STT supports selecting multiple languages, but then it gets confused and switches back and forth all the time.

At this point, I basically only use the voice input for setting bed/egg timers with Google Now. I would use it for navigation home/to work, but I don't have a car and Maps' bike instructions are awful.

I feel like an idiot talking to an inanimate object, I never use text-to-speech. Besides, it's nice to be able to send a text on the bus without being That Text-to-Speech Guy that everyone hates.

Does it work without Internet?

Tbh, I find it kind of creepy to have Apple, Google, Microsoft or Amazon listen to everything I say. I prefer keyboards

Anything typed can probably get scarfed up in a dozen ways, anyway, because you don't know what's going on in the apps, platform, or malware. So speech and kbd are probably around the same privacy.

iOS dictation does indeed work without internet. (Siri does not, however.)

How does it work with code though? I've never used either iPhone or Android stt, but I don't imagine them handling a shell very well

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