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by alphakappa 4738 days ago
I have to respectfully disagree that this is the future. Is the future comprised of devices that you have to consciously wear on you all the time (I can barely stand to wear the prescription glasses I'm supposed to wear, let alone glasses that will occasionally provide me with some utility)

On top of it, is the future of HCI in devices that you have to talk to? (Siri, Glass) Not only do I have a very hard time getting any voice recognition to understand my non native accent (beyond common phrases), having to talk to your devices is an extremely unnatural thing for me to do, unless I'm in private.

These devices may be futuristic, but this is not the revolutionary future.

4 comments

I just picked up my Glass on June 27th. The first thing that bothered me was the voice recognition. The woman at the front desk asked if I was Irish, another French, and a person at the bar asked about my accent. I'm from Mississippi and partially raised by a father with a northern accent.

Sadly, Glass understands me 1/2 of the time. In fact, sometimes it even misinterprets "OK Glass". This has left me at an impasse, because this is mostly a voice recognition device while only having access to GlassWare.

Another interesting side effect: do you know the ghost vibrations from using a cellphone? After wearing Glass for 15-25 minutes, I have this ghost-like feeling that I am still wearing them. It can be disorienting once I remove them.

You remove them besides bed?

One tip that might help you is that you never have to say OK Glass anyway. Just tap the thing once to wake it up, then tap again to go to the voice commands instead of saying OK Glass. Or tap and hold for Google direct.

People claim I don't have an accent, but I still have to make each word clearly separate for the device as well. So make sure you are doing that. I've worked with voice recognition that blows this stuff away, hopefully Google will license better technology like Dragon or Nuance, theirs is pretty much the worst I've ever used and I don't think it has any sense of context or the complete sentences I'm saying at all.

I suspect that eventually (~15 years) this sort of technology will be worked into contact lenses (which communicates to a small device that fits in your pocket, like a phone) assuming prolonged RF that close to the cornea has no long term physiological effects.
That's what I try to say in the article. This is "A" possible future, and it is a first iteration of a totally new product. The first iPhone wasn't a success, and many people were convinced a phone without a keyboard couldn't be the future.
I'm certainly curious what metric you're using when considering the first iphone to be unsuccessful...
The iPhone 3G was the blockbuster hit. The first iPhone was at best modestly successful. The most obvious indicators were that Apple gave it a significant price drop after 3 months and then introduced another model with more storage after 7 months to bolster sales.
It wasn't as popular as today's iPhones.

It was successful for a first gen device, but it pales in comparison to today's success of iPhone.

Why don't you interact with computers in your native language?
Because that is entirely infeasible for most languages that aren't English.
Because English is essentially my primary language.You just wouldn't know that from my accent.