Google Unveils Awesomely Fast And Accurate Voice Actions For Android | Hacker News Reader

Google Unveils Awesomely Fast And Accurate Voice Actions For Android

techcrunch.com

89 pointsedw51962 comments

i switched to a nexus one/android recently for a few weeks. the experience made me really appreciate the importance of the intangibles involved in hardware design.

if i had to break down the iphone and nexus/android into a comparison of features the latter would have dominated for me. the native gmail search, beautiful google voice integration (i make a lot of international calls home which are super cheap on Goog Voice), turn by turn car navigation, reliable and good voice recognition, instant set up via my google account - each of those individually is a killer feature for me. these new voice actions again sound killer.

yet i still found myself yearning for my iphone and i eventually made the switch back. not because there was any one feature i desperately missed but because the overall experience of using it just felt so good. scrolling was flawless. the touchscreen always accurate. switching between apps incredibly smooth. all of these little things added up to a whole greater than sum of its parts (features).

you have to presume google spent a long time testing and developing the nexus and android yet it still lags behind the iphone on the intangibles. clearly getting these things right must be a non-trivial process and i'd come to take them for granted after becoming accustomed to the iphone. i won't make that mistake again.

It's interesting that you say that because I have the exact opposite experience: I've been an iPhone user since the day after the first generation came out and after I got a 3G, I noticed that it would slow down sometimes, scrolling was a pain (the scrolling itself was quick, but when it finished the scroll filling in the newly-invalidated area took forever), voice calls dropped, the physical case was falling apart (mostly because I bought it used that way), and I really disliked switching apps so often.

When I got my Nexus One with Froyo, almost all of that went away: scrolling is immediate and smooth, voice calls sound much better (and I'm on AT&T!), the case is much more solid and not splitting, switching between apps is much smoother (I don't know how I lived without the "universal back button"), GMail/Calendar integration, etc.

Oh, and the day I received it in the mail I plugged it into my (Ubuntu) laptop and created a camera app that takes pictures using the volume buttons on the side, uploaded it to my phone, and use it all the time.

I guess it all comes down to "what do you want to do?" Do you want to be able to do "stuff" with your phone -- anything?

Or do you want to look/feel good while doing some smaller subset of "stuff"?

Ultimately, when improving things, you hit the law of diminishing returns. You can spend twice as much effort making something 5% better than you did getting it to a 90% solution. It's like stereo equipment. A pretty ok system is like $200-300. One that's 10% better is $2000. 5% better than that and it's $20,000. And yeah, most people will agree that the $20,000 system sounds better, even non-audiophiles.

I don't think the Android UI will ever be as good as Apple's. Nobody is. But "good enough" is a reasonable target. Google can either expend the energy polishing the hell out of minor interface quibbles, or they can expand the universe of the things they can do. A device that can do one thing, awesomely, is simply not as attractive as a device that can do 100 things at the 90% "good enough" level.

I guess it all comes down to "what do you want to do?" Do you want to be able to do "stuff" with your phone -- anything?

Or do you want to look/feel good while doing some smaller subset of "stuff"?

A device that can do one thing, awesomely, is simply not as attractive as a device that can do 100 things at the 90% "good enough" level.

Are you comparing it to the iPhone here? Yes, the iPhone has some limitations but it's nowhere near your 100:1 ratio. Actually, there isn't that many limitations honestly. No you don't have turn-by-turn navigation out of the box, but it's available. MobileMe is supposed to offer some of the integration with a Google account.

Sure, you have things like plugging to iTunes, and limitations due to the App Store, but your comment sounds like "an iPhone is pretty and works very well but is very limited, while an Android phone is not as polished but the sky is the limit in terms of what can be done with it". It's simply not true.

Also, regarding "look/feel good", it sounds like you feel that the iPhone is still a status symbol. I think the iPhone is past being a fashion accessory that make people turn around.

edit: one can argue that you're trading some freedom for some polish. Basing your argument on what the various phones can do and can not do doesn't work for me.

> Are you comparing it to the iPhone here? Yes, the iPhone has some limitations but it's nowhere near your 100:1 ratio.

Don't get too hung up on the ratio.

> Actually, there isn't that many limitations honestly.

Followed by a list of limitations and caveats.

Actually, I'd argue the opposite, the iPhone can currently do many things that an Android can't do...things that I'd really like to do, like play Katamari Damacy (lest you think I'm trivializing, I have a serious soft spot for that game)...I think it's not hard to make a compelling case that in terms of software availability and general quality, the iPhone trumps the Android hands down at present.

However, I think that it's also easy to argue a few other related points, the Android phones are simply shipping with a better out-of-the-box user experience in terms of capability. Sure one can purchase a variety of add ons and pay for some subscription services and eventually bring the two phones to parity at a cost. But that doesn't exactly disagree with that point then does it?

And while there are certainly more apps in the iPhone store at present, the Android Market really is the domain of hobbyists more so than the iPhone app store. This is good and bad, in the Android marketplace, I think it's possible to find more hobbyist style apps at $0 that provide pretty good add-on functionality for the phone for no cost whatsoever. Like the tri-corder app which really is quite cool and has no equivalent on the iPhone. The difference between market opportunity and buyer habit between the two stores is often brought up here on HN. I think the Android platform draws its strength from this in many ways.

However, it has a downside in that the equivalent apps on the iPhone, ones that you have to pay some nominal fee for, really do tend to be of a higher production quality than the Android. And that's normal, professional paid software just tends to be of a higher production quality than hobbyist derived software. Perhaps in there's not much difference in functionality, but if I make money on my iPhone apps, I can afford to hire a graphic artist instead of using much maligned "developer art".

>Also, regarding "look/feel good", it sounds like you feel that the iPhone is still a status symbol.

Not at all, I'm simply saying exactly what I'm saying.

If you'll allow me to make a very labored analogy: A Honda Civic and a Mini Cooper (bear with me, I'm trying to use functionally equivalent cars) perform about the same, but you'll look better in the Mini. However, the backseats in the Mini kind of suck, so I can't really use it for four adults as well as a Civic, and because it looks nicer I probably don't want to load a bunch of mulch or yard equipment in the trunk of my Mini. And the operating costs of the Mini are higher than a Civic, it's less reliable, harder to find qualified technicians, has more specific fuel requirements, more expensive to do body work on and takes longer to find parts, whatever etc.

But (and this is a big but for all the Mini owners of the world) you'll look better while sitting in traffic and the key fob is really cool. The Mini is no more a status symbol than the Civic is in the same way an iPhone is no more a status symbol than an Android phone is. You just get what you want and that's that.

The relative capabilities of the two platforms in terms of software availability is the one area the comparison of iPhone:Android::Mac:Windows falls down. There simply is more and better software available for the iPhone, it's just that it doesn't ship on the device. The stuff that ships with an Android phone simply makes it a more capable phone from the time it's first powered on. And in some cases, there simply isn't an equivalent functionality available for the iPhone (and likely isn't going to be one due to Apple's strategic policies).

I switched from the iphone to android and I agree with your assessment. Android's UX is good, iPhone's is great.

I have high hopes for Android 3.0 (Gingerbread, due in Q4) which is allegedly going to be a major UI revamp.

In the mean time I'll enjoy my flash, portable hotspot, tethering and non-ATT carrier :)

I'm always suspicious of "I switched from Brand X to Brand Y and Brand X was better for reasons I can't fully articulate as they are almost subconcious". It seems obvious that people moving from one thing to another are going to be affected by small differences that someone coming to it fresh wouldn't be bothered by.

The fact that everyone knows Apple has better UI only adds to this, but you can find the same thing in a thousand different Windows to Mac, Windows to Linux, Gnome to KDE or vice versa stories. Some people will get quite irate about how crappy the new UI is, even (somewhat tellingly) if it's a Mac or iPhone that they're moving to after becoming accustomed to something else.

I'll quantify it for you. It takes me more clicks and presses to do the same things on android vs iphone.

This is awesome. Nobody will use it. People feel stupid talking to computers. Remember how you embarrassed you felt the last time you were forced to bark at one of those computerized phone operators in a public place? That's this, only all the time.

Would you not feel like the biggest doofus in the world whipping out your Droid 2 and performing "note to self [note]" in front of people?

You are being shortsighted and silly. Here are some excellent examples to show you that speech technology could be pretty damn amazing! The first one <strike>could</strike> will save lives.

(While driving) "Should I turn left or right at this intersection?"

(While shopping, examining a carton of eggs) "Were these eggs cheaper at the corner store?"

(While coding) "Any meetings soon?"

..... Do I need to continue? The applications are endless, assuming it actually works. People have felt stupid in the past because the conversation would go like this: "note to self"....."I said, NOTE TO SELF not NOTICE ELF you fucking idiot machine!"

The point is...if Google can do it well, it will take off.

Shortsighted perhaps but I don't think he is silly.

The problem is about trust. Do I trust the system to give me proper feedback. What if I am yelling because I am stressed, what if it's noisy etc. What if we are two people right next to each other.

Abd then there are quite a few mental reasons why voice recognition isn't just going to be a consumer reality, even if/when the technology is there.

I clearly stated that speech technology would only take off if it works. If you don't trust it, or it can't handle you yelling, then it doesn't work and I agree that it won't take off.

I'm curious about the "mental reasons" you hint at. What are those reasons? Do you mean something like Uncanny Valley? Or something else entirely?

you can expect a person to ask if something is unclear. no speech recog system has done that yet.

speech recog is orders of magnitude behind humans in accuracy.

understanding is another thing entirely. i don't mean philosophy but the problem of even parsing a sentence. just look at implementations of automatic language translation to get a feeling for this problem.

speech recog has a long way to go because AI has a long way to go.

you don't get human-like machine interaction out of bare speech recog.

I wouldn't feel stupid if I never had to repeat myself. For example, I use iPhone voice dial all the time. Even on really complicated or foreign names, like my wife's for example, it rarely makes an error. So rarely I can't think of an instance in recent times. The search space is really small, but it takes advantage of that in a way that makes it useful.

Android does not do a good job with this. When I use it to do a voice dial, it has two major problems. First, it must be connected to the internet, because the sound or a signature of it is going to be sent over the wire. Especially when I am in a low signal area or on Edge, this is a deal-breaker. The second problem is that it's much less accurate than iPhone's voice dial. It typically will only get one word of the name of the person I'm trying to dial -- the surname. As a result, if I'm trying to call someone in my family, it pops up an alphabetical list of all of their names. So I would never use Android voice dial when I was on Android, because I invariably had to repeat myself or interact with the screen, which if I'm already doing that then why use voice dial at all.

(1) I have an iPhone, but I'd really love this type of functionality. I agree I'd probably feel weird saying this to the cell phone. However, when I'm using my earphones with microphone built-in, it's actually extremely handy to issue a command (like switching songs, calling someone, etc) without having to actually whip out the phone.

(2) It's interesting that they trust the voice recognition so much that you can say "Call X Company" and they will google it and call it. If they get it wrong, you'll end up dialing some really weird place instead. This is a personal problem I have with the voice recognition commands on my iPhone. I've ended up calling completely unintended people because the phone misunderstands me, and I can only imagine adding an extra factor of error may make things worse.

I really hope this type of stuff catches on.

You used to look like a giant dork checking your calendar on a PalmPilot.

I use the voice search in my phone. Not everywhere, because sometimes I would feel like a doofus, but when I'm walking it is so much easier to talk to the phone instead of trying to type into it.

I can see this being really convenient for text messaging. It's not perfect, but accurate enough to be useful.

Considering the number of mistakes I make typing on my cell phone, this could actually be a vast improvement :S

Well, this isn't a totally new thing for Android; it's more an expansion of the voice recognition capability Google's already been adding into the system for some time now.

I'll be perfectly honest -- my gut reaction is to agree with you. That said, I've been surprised by how many people I've encountered that talk about how much they love using voice-to-text for things like sending SMSes while driving.

I just updated my phone with it, cant w8 to be driving and be able to use my phone's functionality without pressing buttons and whatnot

I wonder if you can modify the action commands. I'd make the note to self command a self referential 3rd person "note to elblanco".

That is a novel solution to the issue of malicious, or at least irrelevant commands.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-04-24/

(while searching for that comic, I found coverage of a MS speech recognition issue, whereby malicious sound recording could speak commands...)

Did you just copy and paste a past comment of yours?

I can say that I absolutely will be using it. Frequently.

Typing on a touchscreen keyboard is not enjoyable, and this makes the device far more usable for casually looking up restaurants, getting directions, etc. Android already had a wide range of voice recognition, but this (from at least a cursory set of tests with it -- experiences might sour trying to use it in the real world) seems to be a HUGE improvement.

Do I think people will use it in public places or at the workplace around peers? I certainly hope not. But in the car, in your own house or office...this is a killer application.

Speech recognition has been stuck at a high but not good enough plateau for some time. 90% accuracy sounds nice, but is actually totally useless. 99% might be good enough, but no one is there. More likely, 99.9 (for some number of repeating 9s) might be necessary for people to really trust these systems.

I read someplace that human speech recognition is around 90%, I think for speech recognition to be considered "useful" it has to be super-human. I agree something like 99+% is required before it really gets accepted.

One problem lots of speech driven systems have too is the lack of discover-ability. There's no interface you can inspect to learn from unless the system gives you a long list of command choices.

Is the voice recognition better than what google voice offers in its transcription service? Because I've found that to be horribly inaccurate.

The voice recognition better than with google voice ohh for cynics transctription service because i've found that to be a horriby inaccurate.

(Your question, spoken by a norwegian, transcribed by the new Google Voice Search)

"is the worst recognition better than google voice overs"

(Same question, spoken by a Finn)

I just tried it out, and I have to say, yes. It's remarkably good. I only tried about 6 phrases but they were all exactly right.

I've tried more than 6 and it has been flawless, I'm probably talking like a robot to my phone though.

Edit: Spanish streets/cities etc with proper pronunciation don't fair quite so well

I tried it once or twice on the drive home (while waiting for long stoplights) and noticed that it is very sensitive to external noise. Things like the A/C fan motor, the radio, and how far away you are from the microphone all play a big part in recognition quality.

I have spent two sessions experimenting with the iPhone voice commands. Both times ended with me with tears of laughter, literally. I have never, not once, during one of these sessions gotten my iphone to do what I wanted to or call the right person. I find it genuinely hilarious though ... and adorable. "My wiiittttlle iphonie wonieee. Are you learning to talkiee walkiieeee?"

I wont believe that it is as accurate as the video portrays until I see it with my own eyes.

if you have a british accent it doesn't work. really really doesn't work :(

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt-DWr7208A

The Youtube auto-transcription (press the CC button to view) of Glaswegian on this BBC Scotland comedy show is hilariously bad, though I'm not sure how most non-Scottish humans would do either.

examples: "not a care in the world" is repeated twice in the audio and translated as "the attack killed a lot of them" the first time and "months of camelot of" the second.

I had exactly that impression, but having tried it -- it really is that accurate. They did speed up some of the segments (cutting out the "processing" bit and the confirmation delay sequence), but it was very honest about the accuracy.

I've had a G1 for about a year now... I really want to upgrade at this point.

yet another reason to lament my inability to install android on my nokia. Android software + nokia hardware = best of both worlds

I think there was some progress on the n900.

There's increasingly mainstream coverage of apps which are incompatible with almost every android phone out there - requiring 2.1 or even 2.2 like this does. I wonder how long it will take for manufacturers to take upgrades seriously? Some of them are still abandoning their handsets as soon as they go out the door.

I suspect many of the early adopters are now including this in their purchasing decision when they upgrade.

Not almost every Android phone.

More than 62% of Android phones are either 2.1 or 2.2.

http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...

That's very interesting - 3 months ago it was just 27%, and Eclair has been out over 9 months.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/only-27-3-of-android-phones...

That's a pretty huge jump. Maybe we're seeing an attitude change for manufacturers already? I suppose some of them are now pushing their third generation of android handset and learning lessons from the second.

Just noticed the historical chart at the bottom. It seems that practice of releasing updates is definitely increasing - at the beginning of the year, the average version was actually _decreasing_, as already obsolete 1.5 and 1.6 phones were presumably being sold faster than updates were being released. However, it does look like you're still likely to be left in the cold if you've got something other than a HTC or Motorola (particularly an LG - suckers!) or in some cases even if you live outside the US.

Also, that's a survey of the android market, which will be slightly skewed towards newer handsets (i.e. people who've had their android for a year probably have every app they might use already)

60% is 2.1, however, and both of these new Android features are only supported in 2.2. I have an Eris that went on sale less than a year ago, and chances are my phone will never be updated to 2.2.

Every day I regret buying my mytouch 3g instead of waiting for the nexus one on the same network at the same price.

My guess is that most phones that are still on 1.5 or 1.6 will never be updated to 2.1 or 2.2

If the phone is 2.1 now, it will probably get 2.2 by the end of the year.

HTC started the rollout of 2.2 for the Desire last week. The Desire is selling well in Europe. I presume they're also rolling it out for the Legend, which was heavily mass-marketed for the last 3-4 months. I have the impression HTC is the main Android vendor in Europe at the moment. Just this rollout will push 2.2 deployment numbers up, I think.

As far as I know this is the first mainstream upgrade of phones from 2.1 to 2.2 (apart from the Nexus which is, imo, niche). Or did I miss any?

2.1 users should check out Edwin. It does a lot of this stuff, it's free and its made by a HN reader.

My Verizon Droid just updated to 2.2 yesterday.

Can I ask what city you're in? I've been refreshing System Information like a madman waiting for my 2.2 upgrade to come in.

I'm in Helena, Montana. Though, as of this morning, the other guys in my office with Droids haven't been upgraded either.

You're right... unfortunately most of the mobile device manufacturers out there are still in their mode of creating tons of devices one after another, forgetting about the older ones.

They're all scrambling to compete with Apple, but they're completely missing this. Follow the In-N-Out philosophy... do one thing really well and then keep doing it. So many handsets these days are utter garbage. They're all more or less leapfrogging each other with a few pixels there, a few GHz there, +1 MP on the camera.

Of course the carriers aren't helping. They all just want to sell units. It's a mess.

I'm happy with my Nexus One and T-Mobile for now :)

> They all just want to sell units. It's a mess.

Actually, they want you to buy a 12 or 24-month plan, The unit is just the bait.

In this scenario, it makes sense to build non-upgradable phones so that users opt to get locked in for another year just to get a "free" new phone.

I am very glad, that I can just buy separate SIM cards in Europe.

You can do that with the Nexus One in the US, but people don't. Possibly because the carriers try their damndest to make sure nobody knows about it.

Most of the handsets on the market are gonna get 2.2. Myself, I couldnt wait so I installed 2.2 myself and I'm loving it.

What handset are you using?

HTC Incredible on Verizon.

So I'm definitely one of the people who laughs when people on tech forums yell about the carriers loading phones with bloatware and crippling their functionality. The only thing on my phone that wasnt on other SenseUI devices (even before root) was the Droid boot animation and a Verizon tab in the Android Market. And no functionality was crippled. I could always install non-market apps.

Yep. I have the Samsung Moment that was released last November on Sprint, it got 2.1 but has been officially abandoned. It's my last Samsung phone, failing to maintain the OS is not excusable unless there's a hardware restriction that forces it.

Root it. Or just manually upgrade?

I am rooted. There is no 2.2 release for it.

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