Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by starsinspace 2490 days ago
iOS already has a separate feature "offline dictation" which works on-device. I don't understand why that isn't used for Siri.

Also about "recently"... back in the late 90s I had a desktop PC running Windows 98, I think it was a Pentium 166 MHz with 32 MB RAM. On it, I had a voice recognition program called "Dragon Naturally Speaking". It required a little training with my voice but after that, it worked remarkably well. And that was over 20 years ago on a PC with a - by today's standards - very primitive CPU. Decent voice recognition isn't new technology.
2 comments
GeekyBear 2490 days ago
The problem with Dragon was that it was so inaccurate that a moderately skilled typist could produce final corrected text much more quickly than they could dictate text and then make corrections.

Looking online, this is a feature Apple is adding in this year's iOS and Google is adding to Pixel devices only so far, so I would expect to have to give them some time to get on device speech recognition working at all as a first step.

link
jbverschoor 2490 days ago
Exactly. Also, smart Siri is so stupid, it recently started correcting the contact I want to call to someone else, even though it was properly recognized and transcribed.

Funny thing is I call this person daily, and the other one was 6-7 years ago

Frustrating as hell

link