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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

What I think is good about this is that they are thinking of a new paradigm for UI on a wearable. For Android Wear devices it feels like Google just decided that voice was going to take care of UI, and no decisions about physical controls needed to be made. But there are two problems: voice isn't that reliable, and more importantly, there are a lot of situations where you want to use your watch but not talk to it.

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I disagree with you in parts. I've a pebble while my wife has an android watch. The killer feature on the android phone is voice commands. I agree that when in public it's a privacy concern to use voice commands hence an alternative is necessary. But its incredibly convenient and useful to control your phone and watch say when you are driving or at home. It's incredibly useful to set reminders just by saying "Ok Google, Set reminder for..." etc. Btw, our native language is not english and have bit of accent although that hasn't caused any issues. The second great feature on android watch is gestures. Just swiping and tapping to control is useful than having to fiddle with 4 buttons.

However the best thing I find on the pebble is - Battery Life, - Readability in daylight, - Slim and light weight.

Smart Watches are quite nascent tech and if we get to where we get ones that are amalgamation of all these features, I'll be a content man.

Basically the only things I use voice commands for is "set a timer for..." while cooking or "remind me at noon to..." when I need a time alert.

Oh, and saying "What's my name" and having Siri respond "Your name is <name>, but since we're friends I get to call you Captain James T Kirk". But that's just personal amusement.

I'm not sure if it works with Siri, but my favorite google voice command is "remind me to {do something} when I'm at {some place}"

I use it for stuff I forget to buy when I'm shopping, mostly. The stuff you don't buy often, like "remind me to get deodorant when I'm at Kroger."

Also the timer-type reminders/alarms are great.

I really wish it was easier to compose notes and the like. I finally found how to reliably get a newline with the voice keyboard (by saying "period newline"...the period is required).

"Her" was pretty inspiring for all of the voice-related stuff. But I'm still weird about using voice commands in public. If everyone was, I'd get over it.

Huh. When I ask my name, it says "Your name is <name>. That's what you told me, anyway."

Seems a lot more suspicious of me for some reason..

It's like a tamagotchi- you have to take care of it everyday for a bond to develop.

I agree that voice commands are sometimes useful, but they also sometimes aren't. One problem is that voice is more reliable when it has context, like a complete sentence. That doesn't always fit the use case of openign an oddly named app.

Another problem is typified by a commmon Android Wear app which allows you to request a fake phone call on your phone. This example shows one of the use cases for a wearable: its a device you can look at when its socially or physically awkward to pull out a phone. You don't want to say, "Google, this meeting is boring!" But you might want a button that lets you do something about it.

voice is more reliable when it has context, like a complete sentence. That doesn't always fit the use case of opening an oddly named app.

One could get around most of that by being able to set aliases for often used apps, like, "quick open 1." If it's hard to open a seldom used app, it's not that big a deal.

As I said earlier, I agree that in certain circumstances voice commands are not adequate. But in cases where they are, they are extremely efficient, handy or safe. Hence I believe selection of user interface be at user's discretion.

> Just swiping and tapping to control is useful than having to fiddle with 4 buttons

What's fiddly about buttons? It's much faster than swiping a couple of times to get to the option you want.

The screen interface is more accessible than the buttons. With buttons I've to feel my way around since there are three on the right side. Also I've to support the watch from the side opposite to the one where the button is being pressed. Also with gloves, jackets etc I've to wiggle my way to be able to press buttons also sensing which button I'm pressing is not easy.

For me, being able to operate the buttons by feel is a key feature, and I find it pretty easy to do on my original Pebble. It's useful for controlling music playback or dismissing alarms without having to look at the watch.

I agree that there are disadvantages too. One of my jackets does make it harder to access all the buttons. And scrolling through a list one item at a time can be more annoying than just swiping and tapping on the item you want.

I do wish the pebble buttons were easier to press.

Why can't you just ... issue voice commands to your phone?

Because at home I don't carry it around. Outside, I would have to get it out of my pockets to be able to access it. Also in inclement weather a cheap/water proof watch is less of a risk.

What's the range on that smartwatch before it is disconnected from your phone?

We have not tested it in the open. Inside home it stays connected when I'm in kitchen and the phone is in bedroom. It has also stayed connected when I went out to my car which was across my patio.

that's incredible; much better than I would have guessed.

Yes it is. Although, I believe it depends on the bluetooth's strength which may be device specific. Mine is a SGS4.

I feel the exact opposite as far as controls go. Android Wear decided voice and touch would take care of the UI whereas Pebble has gone completely with buttons (4 of them!) and as an owner of the previous generation of Pebble I always found them very awkward to use especially if I was doing anything except maybe standing still.

I also own a Moto 360 which is okay but honestly I'm not as big of a fan as I thought I would be. If they made Pebble Time have touch controls to get rid of the big buttons I would buy this thing in a heart beat.

I agree. Voice control in the Apple/Android paradigm is... weird. Talking to the phone, requiring Internet connection, unusable on a busy street. Take out the phone, unlock it, move it in front of your face (now I can't see a thing and start bumping into people), "ok Google", say it again, wait for the S4 to react, say something, see it's interpreted wrong...

I very much prefer to type, it's faster even on a touch screen.

So here I am, waiting for a subvocal recognition system and the comeback of off-line speech processing.

Android has offline speech recognition.

I'm not sure if it'll use it anytime there's a data connection, though.

I've also noticed it has a couple of flaws, like you can't use "newline" with it.

> voice isn't that reliable

Maybe it's because I'm from Minnesota and sound like Don LaFontaine, but Google's voice recognition is easily 95% or better for me. Probably closer to 98%, even on spoken sentences for sending emails or texts. When I'm navigating, or trying to call someone, it's closer to 99%.

That is near the success rate I have as well. And when I dictate a text on my phone voice works great because I can retype the one in twenty words it gets wrong. There's no keyboard on a watch. Worse, when you are misunderstood Wear is likely to launch the wrong app or pull up the wrong information. So you have the problem of canceling one thing and trying, awkardly, to get to what voice didn't understand.

If you look on the wear store, apps that create rows of icons on your watch face are very popular. I think that shows that this is a common concern.

Your post has 47 words. A 95% success rate means 1 in 20 failure, so you're going to have to stop, swear, fix it, and restart dictation about two or three times in your post. Even the somewhat optimistic 99% still gives only a systemic fifty fity odds of your post being error free.

Its just too annoying for most people to use.

What voice recognition reminds me of, is a disobedient / distracted little kid, the kind you have to tell everything twice.

> A 95% success rate means 1 in 20 failure

I'm not sure my success rate is any better than that typing on my iPhone.

But the correction is simpler and less distracting. I can backspace the word I misspelled and fix it without breaking my thought flow, whereas when I try that with dictation... well, it doesn't work that way. Especially that the whole point of dictation should be that you're not actually looking at the screen and double-checking if what's recognized is what you said.

"Especially that the whole point of dictation should be that you're not actually looking at the screen"

I've noticed UIs always get "needier" over time. Call it VLM's Law. In the old days a dumbphone could be operated tactile in total darkness without looking at it at all. Then smartphones came along which needed occasional glances at the screen to verify the screen and touch screen position/orientation (portrait vs auto-rotated landscape). Now you need to stare continuously at the screen to watch mistakes in the speech to text dictation system as you slowly, tediously, agonizingly argue with a machine.

How clumsy of a UI, like going thru life wearing oven mitts. And VLMs Law is it always gets worse over time. It'll take a lot of work, but we'll find a way to make UIs even more painful.

Yeah. What I loved about dumbphones and feature phones was not just keys - it was that they had firmware instead of a full-blown OS, and thus predictable timing. I could operate my K800i in total darkness without looking at it, because I knew that, say, "joy-click, wait for around half a second, left, joy-click, down, joy-click" would take me to my messages. If I tried something like that with my S4, I'd end up pretty much wherever, because the UI likes to hang for half a sec every now and then.

#nostalgia

Voice recognition has improved tremendously for me as well. But what I can't seem to get over is that it's almost always slower than using my thumbs. Talking is slower than typing, plus the process time needed to interpret the voice commands. -- from a keyboard shortcut junkie

Voice in my case is super reliable. I'm always a little surprised at all the things it gets right. I think the work google has been doing on context aware speech to text is paying off. I've had edge cases where it couldn't get things right, but just making an effort to speak slower and more deliberate solves that. Thankfully I don't need to do that often.

Meh, most of the time I can just whisper something ambigious if I'm concerned about privacy, or just pull out my big ass phone and type on it, which is what I would have done if I didn't own a moto 360.

I tried one of those keyboards for the watch, and its really a non-starter. Wearables only make sense as voice devices. Even the large moto 360 can't support an on-screen keyboard and I imagine future smartwatches will be smaller, especially one's marketed at women and children.

I can't disagree more. 4 big buttons in comparison to a touch screen is not new and actually backwards.

Touch screens are not the solution for every problem.

I just saw a TV show the other day where the bomb squad was driving a robot with an iPad. Yes, all driving input and finite movement of the robot arms was done on a touch screen.

Terrible idea; nobody would do that in real life.

A touch screen that is 1.5" square is effectively four buttons.. without the tactile feedback.

At least I don't have to take my hands out of my glove in this cold to operate it.

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