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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

I'm a text person too, but I suspect we're not the majority, and definitely not the entirety of the smartphone-using population. I recently noticed my wife is increasingly often exchanging voice messages on Messenger instead of text messages, with increasing number of her friends. I queried about this several times, she says they all find it more convenient. It sounds unbelievable to my text-first sensibilities, but apparently it is.

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This is very prevalent in the expat community where I have many friends. I hate it. At least the current AI developments made it possible for messenger apps to transcribe the messages to text (and back, though I haven't seen that feature yet) - we both get what's best for us.

And same with voice calls and voicemail - I mostly don't accept calls and let them all go to voicemail. iPhone transcribes what they're saying in real time and I can decide to pick up.

I'm really looking forward to an AI-first total overhaul of communication UX.

> iPhone transcribes what they're saying in real time and I can decide to pick up.

How does this work? Is it a carrier feature?

On my iPhone, if it goes to voicemail the call is done and the display goes to sleep. I have to go looking for the message in the voicemail to interact with it.

I’m in France and have never seen this on the two carriers I’ve used (Bouygues and Free).

It's US only.

It's not. I'm not in US, nor have any connection to it.

Apple disagrees: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/set-up-voicemail-iph3...

This is not the same experience I have. Mine is much more basic, inside the voicemail app.

Yeah that’s just voicemail transcription. The other one picks up the call and does it live.

It recently started to work on my Vodafone plan. Never even had a voicemail before that. Probably not a carrier-specific feature, at least not the transcription - though passing the voicemail audio data on probably requires some carrier-side support. I don't think it's some backhand deal though, I think it's using some unusual GSM/LTE/5G capability.

Speech to text doesn't require AI. I've had it on my Google keyboard for a very long time. Its always been accurate too.

In my case, it always been garbage. Speech to text doesn't require AI when you do it like Microsoft did it in the aughts; ever since "new, better", cloud-side techniques came along, the technology got worse, and the only meaningful qualitative improvement I've seen in two decades is in the last two years, with new-generation models which may or may not be backed by LLMs now.

Dragon dictate was crappy.

Google keyboard was pretty precise.

Over time its become worse, but all of Googles products have become worse. That doesn't mean it we couldnt do it, we just can't rely of Google to provide it.

> Speech to text doesn't require AI.

*grumpy old man shakes fist at ever-changing meaning of words*

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

https://www.kurzweiltech.com/kai.html

They didn't call it AI previously.

Are we redefining STT as AI?

> They didn't call it AI previously.

"In this excerpt from The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, 1999), Ray Kurzweil describes his work in speech recognition." - previous link

"The ‘80s saw speech recognition vocabulary go from a few hundred words to several thousand words. One of the breakthroughs came from a statistical method known as the “Hidden Markov Model (HMM)”. Instead of just using words and looking for sound patterns, the HMM estimated the probability of the unknown sounds actually being words." - https://sonix.ai/history-of-speech-recognition

"Voice Recognition", title of page 82, "Who's who in Artificial Intelligence: The AI Guide to People, Products, Companies, Resources, Schools and Jobs" - By Alan Kernoff, 1986

> Are we redefining STT as AI?

The opposite, you're redefining it as not AI.

Speech to text exists, they should have stuck to that.

Voice notes are garbage. Sorry I'm in a noisy place, I can't hear your text message.

They're not using voice messages as alternative to typing; most of the time, they have hands free to use the keyboard. They're using voice messages as asynchronous, replayable phone calls.

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