| The thing that always impresses me about Google Now and their voice parsing in general isn't so much about speaking answers back to spoken queries but just how good it can be at guessing what you mean. My favorite example was a couple of years ago when I was at a bar. There was a song on the jukebox ("Coffee Pot" by Cajmere) which, for reference, is a house music song with a repeated vocal sample that says "It's time for the perculator [sic]". I assume they mean "percolator" but that's how the guy pronounces it in the sample. Anyway, we were joking around and even though the bar was quite loud with people talking loudly all around and music playing, I pulled out my phone and asked "Ok, Google: is it time for the perculator?" I pronounced it incorrectly like the guy in the song and within seconds, I had results. The top one was a link to the video for "Coffee Pot" by Cajmere on Youtube and the rest were links to other stuff regarding the song. Now, this was at least 2 years ago and possibly more. The response to my silly joke of a question wasn't so witty as to give me a spoken "it's time for the perculator" or anything like that....but it could parse my words despite all the noise and competing speech around me, it understood a mispronounced word, and it knew that this lyric sample referred to a song with a different title (Coffee Pot) and linked me to the video. That was seriously the first time I was really impressed by their voice assistant even if it was a ridiculous request. No idea what the result would be on today's Google Now or tomorrow's Assistant (guess I'll find out when my Pixel gets delivered). Still, even if just from an engineering and software angle, that made me grin a bigger geeky grin than I might have imagined. |
I like that Google seems to just display information for may of the responses vs. trying to cram in some overly long witty reply or verbatim reading of the text that takes too long to speak back.
Having some sort of speed/succinctness setting would be helpful in that regard.