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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

In this day and age of really great machine learning I find that most people refuse to use voice services unless they are forced to do so (usually because of injury). Trying to tap out a message at 80km/h on a 5" screen is pretty fucking futile. But most distracted drivers will attempt to do it anyway.

Here's a neat trick, just say, "Hey Siri* Send a message to $firstname $lastname's $phone. Tell them I'm [on my way, 5 minutes away, picking up milk, buying pizza]"

* Or whatever platform you use. I'm an iOS user.

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Trying to use voice input is more distracting to me than typing. And it's easier to take a break in the middle of typing. Not to mention that voice input almost never works, and i end up typing anyway, which means I'm distracted and angry. Native californian, I mumble, but otherwise no speech pathology; but maybe i try to enunciate too hard because the computer doesn't understand me.

The problem with your solution is that voice assistants excel at practical tasks which aren't at the root of phone and social media addiction. These are people addicted to the dopamine rush of validation and acceptance they get from social media like FB, IG, and Twitter, as wel las personal text messages. It's an addiction like nicotine, small effects repeatedly played out over time. But it gets to the point where they are dangers to all of us when they are driving on top of all the other social costs (worse performances at work and school, for example).

Couldn't you just phone them and leave a voicemail? Use your cars bluetooth so you don't need to touch the phone.

I tried, but Siri is still really bad at speech recognition whenever I try it.

If your accent doesn't match the country you are in, change Siri's language to your native one. As a British person living in the USA, if I don't set Siri to British, she has a terrible time understanding me, but it works fine on British mode.

Not always; if you set it to Scotland, the phone just complains that it can't understand you either in angrily incomprehensible brogue.

I think it's gotten quite a bit better over the last couple of iterations. I use it all the time and works well for most simple tasks.

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