[specialist]

Voice control has recently improved to Barely Useful, but still certainly Not Usable.

I now listen to audiobooks, podcasts for ~2 hours daily, while walking my dog. If there's a way to control apps, navigate options, perform useful dictation, I haven't found it. I can barely get Siri to reliably start and stop audio playback.

I'm now curious how blind people manage these things. Also, I dimly recall Marvin Minsky or Donald Norman or Alan Kay... writing about early experiments with conversational user interfaces. It really seems to me that we have to go back to the basics, to start over with new assumptions. (I still have the books, I might be able to relocate those notions.)

To wrap up, much as it's clear my Apple Watch (w/ AirPods) has the potential to replace my iPhone, and my clear desire for that to happen, today it's not on the horizon.

Oh, here's my gratuitous geek cred: We were trying to use voice control in early 90s. For stuff like AutoCAD. While some of my users liked it, one even excelled with it, most didn't. So I've been waiting for this for a long time.

[timidiceball]

> I'm now curious how blind people manage these things.

The key ingredients that make iOS an excellent computing platform for those hard of sight are

* enforcement of UI guidelines that enable the screen-reading to work well

* a collection of accessibility gestures meant for no-screen operation.

NOT Siri.

[msh]

Siri is bad. Voice control over audio playback with google assistant on my nest hub works perfectly well. Actually it performs better in my native danish than siri does in English...

[bestnameever]

> If there's a way to control apps, navigate options, perform useful dictation, I haven't found it. I can barely get Siri to reliably start and stop audio playback.

google assistant is getting close

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GILvyiWB7xY

[specialist]

Ok. Google Assistant is available for iPhone. I'll try it. Thank you.

Continuing my rant...

I know that Siri is impaired by choices Apple's made wrt to privacy or some such.

But why does local voice recognition fail so often? Like while hiking or I'm in the basement. Surely some hybrid is possible. Does Siri really need network access to process a stop playback command? (I do fuss with the Voice Control features every few months, to see if things have improved.)

Warning, idea incoming:

I want the ¡Tchkung! voice interface. Pops, clicks, buzzes, Looney Tunes sounds effects. Why are we limited to just speech recognition? Why can't I beatbox to control my phone?

In the 80s, there was a comic who'd straight read serious writing, adding sound effects for the punctuation. Hysterical (at the time). Sorry, can't remember name. But I want to make sounds for punctuation, backspace, back one word, newline, etc.

[majewsky]

Counterpoint: I recently switched from Android to iOS. On Android, Google Assistant and the likes were always the first apps I deleted. Google is just not a company that I trust at all with my personal data. On the iPhone, I have Siri enabled because I have the expectation that my personal data does not leave the phone when I use it with Siri. So when you say:

> I know that Siri is impaired by choices Apple's made wrt to privacy or some such.

For me it's the other way around. Without those choices, I would not be willing to use Siri at all.

[specialist]

Hearing you on FM. Just gonna test drive it for a bit, to calibrate my expectations.

[bestnameever]

I don't think Google assistant on the iPhone will be anywhere close to as good as it on Android for the type of usage your looking for.

Having said that, I wouldn't give up on Siri - she has improved quite a bit from just last year in terms of answering questions. I'd be surprised if they aren't exploring ways to control your phone as well.

[leephillips]

Sounds like Victor Borge.

[easton]

Is this available on Android yet? I haven't heard much about this since the demo.

[rebuilder]

I'm honestly a bit surprised we still don't have decent voice control for mobile. Is it really such a hard problem? Or is it that there's little incentive to help users look at their screens less? Audio advertising is much more disrupting than on-screen ads alongside the desired content...