Thread: Android gets voice commands (tap a lot less!)
View Single Post
danramos's Avatar
danramos is offline danramos
2010-08-13 , 17:45
Posts: 4,672 | Thanked: 5,455 times | Joined on Jul 2008 @ Springfield, MA, USA
#10
Originally Posted by NokTokDaddy View Post
Voice recognition is one of the things I thought I'd miss when I came to N900 from Symbian.

This post makes me realise that (for me anyway) VR is something I have in fact not missed, apart from showing off. The multiple homepages, touchscreen icons & widgets on N900 have mitigated the need for a VR application shortcut.

I could never get VR for contact selection to be consistent enough to be useful if there was any background noise (eg when driving).

I would be interested to see how Android might have improved VR, but cannot say that I have Android Envy in this respect.

Do you still need to press & hold a button to activate VR on Android? (no time to watch the video yet)

When VR is like it's portrayed on Star Trek TNG it'll be really useful, but until then I believe it's more of a gimmick than a tool.
I've had plenty of driving background noise with no problems in speech recognition so far. I mean--I really am impressed with how well it seems to work. I've seen it make mistakes, sure, and a severe amount of background noise will throw it off too--but then it doesn't seem any worse than when I'm talking to a HUMAN on the other side of the phone trying to understand me. So far, pretty spot on.

Activating it seems to only happen one way that I know of:
You can tap the Voice Search app icon to launch it

Near as I can tell, there needs to be some way to tap something to say, 'I'm giving you a command', otherwise (the Star Trek way, of just looking into the distance and saying 'computer!') you're being listened to constantly and that would be both problematic as well as a constant drain on the battery. I'm only slightly disappointed that the bluetooth heaset "voice command" button doesn't do it. Could at LEAST hack a little Starfleet badge to chirp at a touch for commands and then execute the speech command.
Last edited by danramos; 2010-08-13 at 17:52.