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Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I must be reaching the "get off my lawn" phase of my life, because I can't even comprehend a situation where I'd ever want to talk at my browser... maybe when I'm at home alone and, couldn't type for some reason? Certainly not in the office. Am I missing a use case, or am I just old now?

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Actually, people who are very deep into the "get off my lawn" phase of their life, that is old people, are generally not the greatest typists. For them, the ability to talk instead of type, everywhere and not just in google search (which already has this) seems like a huge help.

I'll never use it. It's completely useless to me. But if my grandma actually did anything else than Facebook on her computer I'd show this to her.

> that is old people, are generally not the greatest typists.

Well.. and we're just fine with it. Simple works better somethings and why be in such a hurry sometimes. I look at these young whipersnappers who fly around the computer with windows attacking from all directions. They just seem to make things complicated without actually meeting the goal any faster.

Lots of people are faster at speaking than typing. Or maybe you're reading from a document (or pill bottle) and don't want to type with one hand or whatever. But what I usually use it for is if I'm having a conversation with someone and we want to look something up. It feels more anti-social to type silently for a while than to make the computer part of the conversation.

I work in the online learning industry, mainly with higher education institutions. One of the top features required by instructors is the ability to provide audio feedback to students. And this is really a huge benefit for them because most instructors are not fast typists and they have hundreds of assignments to review every once in a while.

Faster than typing would be great. What's not so great (or so fast) is trying 3 or 4 times by voice and having to go type it anyway because the accuracy's not there. Sooo, like my old-aged ancient geriatric friend in the parent, I too still preferentially go to the keyboard, since I figure I'll probably end up there anyway. If it's a social situation I usually preface the typing with some variation of "All right let's see here..." which sounds like I'm trying to figure out something hard or ask something of the Great Oracle, but really it just means "I'm about to type."

Maybe once speech recognition advances a bit more...

But it's only for searching after you've already navigated to a search engine, right? You'd have to be extremely slow at peck-and-hunting for it to save you much time (especially as search strings are so short) - and in the video you have to click "submit" to even do the search (and then presumably navigate normally with mouse). I can't see many instances where this could be worth it. Maybe I'm actually too young to see why it's useful!

Maybe the search engine is your homepage, or you just have to hit "g" and enter to get there, or it's bookmarked. Maybe you don't have hands, but you have an easy way to move a mouse around and click. Maybe you're eating a sandwich with one hand and don't feel like putting it down. Maybe you won't use it for a short query like "weather", but you will for sentence-long queries. Maybe you want to search "linux won't recognize wireless keyboard".

It's very easy to think of instances where this will be helpful.

There are many use cases for this, among them:

* Mobile version of Firefox. It might be easier to talk to fill a form on mobile than type on glass screen.

* Accessibility. There is a huge under served demography of people who will welcome this as typing might be hard for them.

You may not be on any of the groups above but that doesn't invalidate the features.

In fact, mobile Firefox already lets you speak to fill in the address bar (which doesn't automatically launch a search).

"Firefox! I've fallen and I can't get up!"

Just to clarify these features are not yet on the release.

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