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Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal counterpoint: Siri is horrible at recognizing my speech if it is anything that it doesn't expect. I can ask it to define a word all day long but I doubt it will get any better. It just keeps giving me the same (incorrect) response repeatedly. Google Now does a very good job at recognizing voice including words I may mispronounce when I say "define X"

I can sort of imagine why. Google "knows" me better. What is awesome/scary is that I have tried this on other people's iPhones and Google Now still does better than Siri.

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Google Now's dictation is so much better for people with accents.

My family's English pronunciations have a very strong Indian/Punjabi accent. For people with accents, Siri works very unreliably to the point that we've given up on it, whereas Google Now "magically" works all the time.

Indeed, I have noticed the gap in comprehension between Siri and Google Now. I'd attribute that to Google having a much deeper expertise of ML than Apple. I wouldn't entirely discount things like Siri though, they'll get better with time.

Google built their own voice recognition using neural nets. Apple licenses theirs from Nuance, the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking. I don't know what technology Nuance uses now, but historically it was Markov Models, I believe. The founder of what-would-become Nuance, and early pioneer in voice recognition, Ray Kurzweil, was hired a few years ago by Google to "to bring natural language understanding to Google."

I speak a weird hybrid of four Norwegian accents, and Siri + iOS dictation is indispensable in both using my phone faster, and operating it when my hands are occupied with other things. So there's clearly a variety of experiences here.

English with Norwegian accent is generally very clear and pronounced though. I never have problem with google now either, and I use it several times a day. As you I speak a Norwegian that is called "lett blanding" or "light blend" in English, composed of western, southern and eastern dialects :)

Well there are some problems.. If I have it set to English, I can't really get it to grasp Norwegian names for streets etc. I wish it could have a mix of some sort.

I talk to Siri in Norwegian, actually =)

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