Show HN: We brought iOS dictation to Windows | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We brought iOS dictation to Windows

myechoapp.com

82 pointsshanselman17 comments

This post set off HN's voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN.

Please don't ring-vote posts, though. It's against the rules, makes it likely that your post won't be seen (I only caught this one by accident), and will eventually get your account dinged.

What does it mean to "ring-vote" posts?

A voting ring is a group of people that all upvote each other's posts. But most of the time, it lacks that level of organization -- usually, ring-voting just refers to having all your friends upvote your post for you.

One really easy way to trip HN's voting ring detector is to send your voters a direct link. However, in my experience, this acts less to detect voting rings than to weed out HN newbies. All my friends just post on facebook with something along the lines of "go search the New page for <x> and upvote, please!"

Ah, so are you (and is @dang) saying that tweeting or facebooking a link is Ring Voting? I didn't ask for upvotes, I apologize if this was a violation of netiquette. Thanks for explaining this!

I can't speak for dang, but if you didn't ask for votes, I don't think you violated netiquette at all.

So now instead of sending my friends a URL I have to give them vague instructions about where to find the content?

Welcome to Web 3.0!

One of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect. Nice work!

Thanks!

Just tried out and am really impressed with the entire setup and pairing process. Very clever use of QR Code. It works just as featured in the video. The 2-3 second wait for uploading/processing is annoying but I can get used to it. However, having to click 'Done' disrupts my chain of thought and makes concentrating harder. I don't think I can get used to manually clicking 'Done' after every other sentence/paragraph. I wish there was a way you could auto-click 'Done' when my sentence was completed.

A neat UI could be a buffer that slowly grows, maybe showing the # of seconds recorded. Once it's near 30-60s length and I pause for 1-2 seconds OR shake the phone backwards, auto-click 'Done'.

Also what does the "Log Dictation on Desktop" option mean?

It shouldn't take 2-3 seconds to process. Where are you in the world? We have servers in West Europe, South East Asia (for Asia and AU/NZ) and Chicago. If you are far from one of those, or your phone isn't on Wifi you might see some slowness.

Good point about the Done thing, but we're limited to what iOS allows. If we do anything that modifies Siri then we could get booted from the store.

Log Dictation on Desktop literally keeps a text file on your desktop of everything you've dictated. For your records.

Why would I want to use my phone, and public network latency, to do what windows already offers built in.

Is it really that much better dictation? Or is it one of those I'm lucky I speak the 'way' that windows is expecting.

A fair question! If the built-in tools are working for you then you might not need myEcho. Our inspiration for writing the app was that we found the built-in dictation to be lacking, and wanted to have the same quality we were getting on iOS. myEcho is free to try, though, so you can decide for yourself! :)

Leaving aside the quality issue, depending on your uses of dictation, you might find yourself wanting to be able to do it remotely. If so, using the iPhone you already have, plus a $2 app, is cheaper and easier than buying a wireless microphone.

Interesting app; I'd thought about doing something similar with a web socket and the (non-Siri) iOS dictation capability, but never got around to it, so this might come in useful.

No points, though, for autoplaying your demo video in the middle of Domingo's Nessun dorma. That's just rude.

Finally an app that is compelling enough to make me want to upgrade from my iPhone4 !

Thats cool!

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