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Comment by Strom | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that while we aren't at 10 GHz quite yet, the functionality that was mentioned in the article [1][2] is here and works even on budget smartphones.

[1] Imagine being able to speak normally with your computer as you would a secretary sitting next to you and have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech.

[2] Imagine logging onto your computer not via a user name and a password but by sitting in front of your display and having it scan your face to figure out if you are allowed access to the computer.

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Is this really the experience of voice recognition people have? I can't get Siri to reliably create appointments... takes about 3 tries for the voice recognition to work correctly.

Siri's voice recognition definitely isn't state of the art, although it got a lot better for me with iOS 10. However even the Google app on iOS has leaps & bounds better recognition in my experience.

The "OK, Google" voice interface on Android, whatever it's brand name is, is amazing. Do try it out. It's able to understand me even with a lot of noise (street sounds).

Also, there might be something wrong with the mic if you're using an external bluetooth mic?

While it is amazing in its comprehension, it feels incredibly slow. Even just saying "OK, Google" takes a bit too long for it to respond, while saying "OK, vijucat" would probably elicit an immediate response.

This is just my experience however on my Nexus 5 with very good wifi. Hopefully others are having a better experience, or there is a fix for the lag, because despite these problems, I use OK Google (Google Now?) quite often.

Definitely. Google Home picks up everything perfectly on the level that I'm really surprised the few times it actually fails.

With Amazo nEcho this was exactly my experience for the first week. Since then, I've learned where it fails and are becoming more annoyed by it. The clear difference between current voice recognition and a real person is that they don't adapt to the way you talk. They don't learn if they misunderstood you once.

As an example, if I ask Alexa to play a certain kind of music and she plays the wrong one, I'll have to specify it further to get the correct music. Next time I'd expect her to get the clue, but she'll make the same mistake again.

Even though the most annoying thing is that chain commands don't really work with any assistant. I'd expect to give 4-5 commands at once and get them executed. Activating it for each command is very annoying.

I have an iPhone now and don't bother with Siri because it's wrong more often than right.

Between Apple, Google, and Microsoft. To me only Cortana is worth using. For example. If I say "text prentice" neither Siri or Google Now can figure it out. But 100% of the time Cortana picks it up.

I do miss my windows phone :(

On Android, it has worked well for me for simple things (e.g. "Remind me to take my laundry off the hanger tomorrow at 15:00"). Have not tried anything fancy, though.

A coworker once told his smartphone, "Tell me a dirty joke". It kind of worked, it opened a web search for "dirty joke". Cortana really impressed me by actually telling a joke; it was about dirty laundry (but I suspect that was intentional to avoid offending people). ;-)

I use it obsessively. Currency conversions, fact checking, basic maths, "what's the tip for $20", sending texts, sending WhatsApp messages, making phone calls, "flip a coin", "wake me up at 7", setting timers, "Add to calendar"....

It works wonderfully well. I use it obsessively to the point that people now joke that if you ask me a question I'll simply ask Google about it.

How did you find out what you could tell it? After the first ten useless Google searches that popped up, I was looking for a vocab list. And then I gave up.

Honestly, I think i've built an instinct on what works and what doesn't. Simple statements do work, as do some simple questions. It's a bit of trial and error but if it's a simple fact check, it's most likely you can phrase the question in a manner that gets you an answer.

E.g. I randomly tried: What do I do when I burn my finger? and it answered. Same for: How do I get ink stains out of my shirt?

Siri is pathetic, really. Try Google Now, or the new Assistant on Google Pixel.

Example 1, if we're referring to the likes of Siri and Alexa isn't thanks to improvements in personal computer technology - said platforms send your speech recording off to a massive datacenter for processing, no need for 10Ghz processors there.

Example 2 requires the use of depth-sensing and heat-sensitive cameras to avoid trivial "show a photo of an authorized user" attacks - that's not really CPU-dependent either.

Not sure if Siri and Alexa (and Google Now) send every recording to a data center - the .NET speech recognition libraries ship with Windows, so all audio data stays local to your PC, afaik. I'd expect Cortana leverages these libraries as well, instead of sending all data to a remote server.

You can build basic functionality into a speech bot in Powershell ("PowerShiri, what time is it?" "PowerShiri, what is the weather?") as a weekend project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663029

At least with Google Now, you can go into your Google Account and listen to recordings of everything you've ever asked via voice search:

https://myactivity.google.com/item?product=29

(If the Product 29 parameter doesn't work, click on "Item View" in the left and filter by "Voice & Audio".)

Cortana sends it off to a server like everyone else. Those libraries are probably not Microsoft's latest and greatest.

Modern speech models are quite big, not so big that you couldn't load it on your desktop, but big enough that you would notice. Couple that wih the fact that search/or a service is going to happen on a server anyways, client side processing doesn't make sense beyond a few functions.

Alexa can only recognize the keywords. Which is also why you can only choose between 3, because the device isn't able to detect anything else. After that, the command will be analyzed in Amazon's datacenter.

I don't know of any smartphone or similar device that would interpret voice commands locally.

Android has had face unlock built in for some time. A naive way it mitigates the "unlock with photo" vulnerability is an option requiring you to blink. Not as robust as 3d, heat sensitive cameras but it's at least not a trivial as showing a photo to beat it.

The impressive amount of processing power available on many smartphones today certainly contributes to this being a practical unlock method.

You're right, you also need to sweep across the eyes with a pencil to defeat that. In case you're interested in more detail, Google starbug's excellent talk "ich sehe, also bin ich... du" (there's an English translation).

Is face unlock fooled by video of a person blinking?

Siri sends data to the cloud for processing what you're asking for, but the actual speech-to-text can work locally these days. Try it - out your iPhone in airplane mode and fire up dictation - works like a charm.

Can I ask what you would dictate that doesn't need an internet connection? A note or a shopping list come to mind, but that's it for me.

Actually I hate the fact that google sends my voice over the network , not because of privacy but because I have to pay for the additional Data sent.

How much do you pay for data, and how much do you dictate, for this to be an actual gripe?

I assume Google encodes the data in something like iSAC [1], requiring 32 kbit/s for good quality speech, so an hour of dictating is 3600 x 32/(8 x 1024) = 14 MB.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Speech_Audio_Codec

Dictation in iOS9 and later can be used without an internet connection on newer iPhones.

RE example 1, there is offline voice recognition, though.

The functionality existed on desktop computers at the time, so it's not really a prediction.

I certainly don't remember anything of usable quality being available to end-users. My Windows 98 machine could barely play 360p videos and didn't even have a camera. The voice recognition that I do remember trying was of very low accuracy.

Do you remember any specifics of where & how exactly these features were available?

State of the art for dictation was probably Dragon Dictate / Naturally Speaking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking

Windows had an API for basic command recognition, in late 90's giving the ability to navigate through telephony menus, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API#SAPI_1-4_...

Oh yeah, very practical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec

It was completely usable at the time, but did require a relatively beefy PC. Doctors and attorneys very commonly used it to dictate letters.

And for context "beefy PC" here means less CPU power and RAM than the cheapest smart phone today.

That's a lot better than the results I get from Google voice today. Writing code isn't what it's optimised for though.

We had people in the office in the late 90s with repetitive stress issues who were using Dragon NaturallySpeaking pretty effectively.

But where have the repetitive stress issues gone?

Ageism, if your wrists are toast by age 40, but no one gets hired over 30, or whatever the exact numbers are, it doesn't matter much as long as A is higher than B.

Dragon Dictate worked pretty well in 2001 from what I recall, if you were willing to train it.

I remember around 2007/2008 Sony VAIOs had facial recognition login. I freaked out on how decent it was, then thought about the DMV and Facebook being able to use this and really freaked out.

Not sure about the software but webcams were available from the early 90's. I think there was an old amiga magazine that came with some facial recognition demo ware.

For voice there were things like dragon that could do reasonably accurate full voice dictation. IME it was more accurate the google voice is today because it was trained.

Moving these to the cloud is more about controlling data than it is about lack of local computing power.

Also interesting is that modern speech and image recognition runs on NVIDIA GPUs using neural networks, with the Intel CPU relegated to playing a supporting actor role. GPUs also face the same Dennard scaling problem, and don't run anywhere close to 10GHz, but their microarchitecture makes better use of the available silicon/power for parallel numerical computing problems.

> have your computer accurately and quickly take notes from your speech

Well, about those accurately and _your_ computer parts… :)

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