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Comment by ilanco | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised they didn't mention that in areas with a lot of background noise, eg public places, voice recognition doesn't work as well. I think that is also a reason why people refrain from using it in public. From personal experience I can say it's very frustrating to repeat the command to your phone multiple times because it's sorry it didn't get that, or calls your ex girlfriend instead of playing some music.

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My experience is totally opposite. I've found Google voice search very effective, even in a crowded bar. When I listen to some the recordings that were successful[1], I'm frankly amazed at what a good job it does.

1. https://history.google.com/history/audio

Didn't know about the easy available saved history URL. Interesting.

That URL is the most amazing thing I have ever seen! Unfortunately, it does not convince me of the power of speech operated interfaces. My history tends to consist of a series of multi-part voice commands with the first or second phrase being repeated multiple times, in progressively more angry tones of voice, until it seems I give up. It looks like the most common thing I do, interestingly, is set timers for myself.

The most hilarious clip I found was one where Google had transcribed the request as "bbbbbbb bbbbbbb bbbbbbb" and on playing it back, I heard the sound of my alarm clock going off with a steady beep, beep, beep...!

Google voice used to work poorly in noisy environments, then one day it didn't. I was at a trivia contest in a noisy bar a few months ago. When no one could answer a question off the top of their head, the question would go to a phone search permitted round. Our table won the contest handily because I could use voice search more quickly than any one else could manually type in queries.

Indeed - this is a good point. I travel a lot on subway in New York and by bus to my home in the suburbs. Apart from not wanting to disturb other other passengers, the noise levels are generally so high that its hard to get your word recognized. I need to use a pair of noise cancelling headphone to listen to anything at all.

It's all much more fun with an over-sensitive (broken) home button at a festival. Random calls for everyone!

Could this be fixed by a (bluetooth) microphone attached to the bones in the face (e.g. jawbone)?

Seems possible and available but not very user-friendly (yet) - time for some startup to 'disrupt' the microphone market ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throat_microphone

Interesting. I always believed that an important part of the voice was created in the mouth (tongue, soft palate, lips), and the larynx was only responsible for producing the base frequency. But apparently, attaching a microphone to the larynx works as a means to recognizibly capture the voice. I might have to adjust my understanding of the voice :)

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