Amazing voice input

[incrediBILL]

I had previously kind of abandoned using voice to text input on my Android phone, it was good but not great, and edits were painful enough I just used Swipe instead.

Not to mention the fact that using it in a noisy environment was kind of useless.

Well, I've decided to try voice input again this week, starting in a noisy restaurant the other day. The results were just short of amazing. It didn't let the background noise interfere, it only took my input quite accurately, and the resulting translated text was just short of amazing.

I haven't used the keyboard option to Swipe in text in a few days now, except the rare correction, even verbally replied to a couple of posts on WebmasterWorld.

Unless someone at Google breaks this version of the speech to text translation on Android, I may never tap that keyboard again!

OK, never is a bit extreme, but I've been using voice to send a bunch of SMS all morning and it's quick and painless, very efficient.

Guess I'm just amazed it works this well considering my last attempt to use the speech to text input which was just an OK experience by comparison.

[phranque]

what version of android?

[incrediBILL]

I'm using 2.1 but it doesn't matter because the voice to text processing is done outside the phone in the cloud. Not sure if using Swipe makes any difference either.

[lexipixel]

I find it hit or miss. Last week, just when I thought my phone had learned my voice, (and I had learned how to talk to it), I gave it an address for Google to GPS navigate me to.

I glanced at the text, and it had the address just the way I thought -- the only problem, it was a street in another town, (I said "Belmont", it picked "Brighton")... right street, wrong town, (and not even phonetically close other than the first letter). After driving about 5-6 miles, I pulled over knowing something was wrong and realized the error. I typed in the correct address...

The take away from this: Voice input has gotten better, but it still needs to be proof-read.

[phranque]

i wish!

webmasterworld = "what pastor world"
pubcon = [no match], then "ok"
speech recognition = "recognize"
speech = "speak"
crawlwall = "chrome"
this sucks = "this sucks"

after many samples each, it got one thing right on the first try...

[incrediBILL]

Maybe I can just pronounce things better? :)

I don't expect it to understand WebmasterWorld or PubCon, but generic words should be fine.

BTW, had a total voice-to-text SMS chat with a buddy today and out of about 20 messages had to make one correction where it picked "wants" instead of "once". It would be very difficult without reading the context to choose which word to pick in that instance based on sound alone.

I was also amazed that it converted and formatted money such as "$48" or "$20".

Not saying it's perfect, but it's definitely better than it was because previously I felt it was more of a novelty. Worked well enough but not good enough to use often and at the moment I'm barely touching the phone's keyboard.

We'll see how long this love affair with voice lasts, but now I'm missing it when I sit down at my desktop, just like I miss the touch screen.

[tbear]

Reading this thread is like watching The Big Band Theory, sometimes... LOL.

And there I was thinking TBBT was fiction.

[phranque]

webmaster and world are common, as are pub and con.
i pronounced these several times, as compound words as well as the separated words.
i tried my normal pronunciation and exaggerated enunciation.

i haven't tested with others but i'm guessing it works better with higher frequencies.
going back three generations of voice-enabled handheld devices i've never had one work well enough to get past 10 minutes of testing.

if i ever need to send a "this sucks" text message i'll know it's good at that.