[nostrademons]

I've found that the voice recognition on Android phones works well enough to be useful in a wide variety of circumstances. Navigating, getting directions, setting alarms, taking notes, sending text messages, sending emails, searching for things, and many more. When I was still using my Moto X I did the majority of every-day tasks with voice recognition.

The iPhone is catching up fast too...my wife's taken to sending emails via Siri (to avoid strain on her hands), and most of the time it gets things perfectly.

The biggest problem is privacy. One of the nice things about touchscreens is that you have a personal dialog with the device that can't be overheard by anyone nearby. That doesn't apply to voice recognition systems, and it can be pretty awkward to dictate an e-mail to a phone in a crowded place.

[xigency]

Being overheard isn't the only privacy concern. Most of these solutions offload the speech recognition and language parsing functions to corporate servers. I like texting with Siri but I'm not exactly keen on having Apple record everything. It also seems limiting in that I can't use voice commands without a network.

It would be nice for voice recognition platforms to start being built in. I know there's training data that's needed, but there's some convenience afforded.

[josh2600]

I think the processing requirements for handling on-device Siri would destroy battery life.

[gervase]

This actually doesn't seem to be the case. Take a look at Google Translate's offline voice recognition AND translation - it's really amazing, considering it's all happening on your device.

[SapphireSun]

I forget where it was, but they published something about training a very small very fast neural network that could fit comfortably in the phone's memory. Tricky tricky. :D

[euyyn]

Plus the only way to train these things at scale is to upload the recordings once you have some usage.

[kalleboo]

Worse for battery life than firing up the radio?

[awqrre]

And devices that listen to you 100% of the time is yet another privacy concern... even if they don't send everything to a remote server.

[qznc]

If you have a human assistant who does that job, he also listens 100% of the time.

[flavor8]

But he or she is less vulnerable to being automatically hacked by a three letter agency, foreign government, and/or hacker gathering data for identity theft.

The privacy concern _isn't_ necessarily about having something to hide. It's about the consistent hacking of major systems, and exposure of personal data.

[kbutler]

And you don't think there are privacy concerns with that? It is a /very/ intimate relationship, and generally requires some ritualized/formalized interaction, and a very high degree of trust.

[yomly]

Just on the note of hand strain, without knowing anything about your wife's condition, a way that could help alleviate it is to critically analyse hand position/technique. As a pianist, I have been trained to have a very supple hand position when operating any device but I notice this isn't at all the case for many people I observe in their day to day activities.

Historically probably wasn't much of an issue but given that most people will spend hours at a desk on a keyboard, it's likely to become more of a problem. Think of it akin to paying attention to your posture

[saym]

The use of Google Now from my bluetooth'd helmet has really improved my motorcycling experience.

Real easy to say: "Okay Google... navigate to California Academy of Sciences."

What's missing for me is spotify/app specific integration.

[dragonwriter]

> What's missing for me is spotify/app specific integration.

For that to really happen in a robust way, I think Google needs to open up Custom Voice Actions.

[0] https://developers.google.com/voice-actions/custom-actions

[nl]

"Ok Google.... Play <artist> on Spotify" works for me.

I agree discovery of these magic phrases needs work.

[dragonwriter]

Yeah, there's some that can be done through system actions (which I think that is) and it sounds like custom actions have been implemented by selected partners, I just mean they need to open up custom actions to enable more general app-specific integration.

[mehta]

I thought this already worked.

Okay Google... Play music will start Music app Okay Google... Start Radio will start NPR app

[saym]

I can say "Open Spotify" and it will open the app. Then I have a button on the helmet that sends the Play command. But I can't do anything robust like playing a specific artist.

Perhaps if I used Google Music the integration would be built out.

[nl]

On my phone "Play <artist>" uses Google Music. "Play <artist> on Spotify" makes it use Spotify.

[khaosrage96]

On my Nexus 6p saying "OK Google play 'artist'" will open Spotify and start playing the top songs of that artist. This does not work to play specific playlists though.

[rayiner]

Define work well? It doesn't work well if you're not connected to the Internet, if you speak quickly, if you interrupt it, it can only do limited follow up.