Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by daveguy 3325 days ago
Cool, and no offense, but let me know when a third party reviews it.

Voice recognition and personal assistants are annoying enough in a quiet house (but arguably useful). I would be surprised if it is useful yet in a noisy moving car.
2 comments
melling 3325 days ago
I've seen people use Google Voice in a loud bar. It seemed to be effective. I can't get Siri to work under those conditions, however. The noise should be a solvable problem.
link
StavrosK 3324 days ago
Yeah, Google's voice recognition has worked for me everywhere, even loud clubs. It's quite magical. I'm sure it would work in the car.

Now, whether I would trust Google with that data is a different question. (Spoiler: no.)

link
jstandard 3324 days ago
Inside the car is a bit of a different since the device won't be handheld and you may not even be directing your voice toward the microphone.

If you have a phone with a high-quality mic, mount it in the right spot, and speak loudly, it can usually get the job done though.

Performance in general has gotten a lot better in recent years, though it's tough to call it a "solved problem".

link
tedmiston 3323 days ago
Similarly Alexa does not detect the wake word if it's playing music all the way up and I'm more than a couple feet away from the Echo.
link
spike021 3324 days ago
I've used Siri just fine to set timers and create reminders while a TV is blaring with announcers commentating sports live.

Probably depends on some environments.

link
daveguy 3324 days ago
It should be, but I'm definitely not preordering a product like that without a third party demo.
link
jstandard 3324 days ago
Your cautious optimism is well-founded. Having worked in the space for a few years, I've found voice tech in the car isn't quite the promised land I was hoping it would be.

The experience is still uneven. There are times when I'm amazed the recognition and language models could pick out proper names of friends and other times when I'm red in the face shouting "I SAID 'PLEASE GET CELERY', NOT 'PLEASE SELL TO ME!'"

For the time being, we still need analog button backups to handle the cases where speech rec fails or routinely misinterprets. The long tail of error cases can actually be even more dangerous for the driver than a simple button press, since they can take your mind off the road for several seconds.

link