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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

All these companies keep pushing voice input as the way to interact with their personal assistants, I personally feel that it would be 100x better to let me interact with them however I choose. In my experience, voice recognition is just not there yet, especially noisy environments, even if some companies are better at it than others.

If I could just type something into Siri I would use it countless times more. Most of my frustration comes from it misunderstanding me, often resulting in me pulling out my phone and typing in my question into search engine anyway.

Additionally, I do not want my business spoken aloud.

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I never used voice input until I got my nexus 6p. Now it irritates me to no end when my wife wants to set a 15 minute timer for a power nap, and she has to poke around for 30 seconds, while I just turn my head towards my phone and say "ok google wake me in 15 minutes".

Or in the car, I'll pick up the phone and she'll prepare to say "don't start tapping on that thing while you drive!", but I just say "ok google navigate to [restaurant we're going to]".

Voice recognition isn't perfect, but a couple of years ago, android crossed the threshold where it's good enough for me.

I do similar things with my iPhone 6S. I say "Wake me up at 7" just about every week night, and then "Turn off my alarm" when I get out of bed in the morning. Realizing I could do this is why I started using my phone as my alarm; I wasn't about to fuss with the app every night and morning.

What baffles me is that opening some apps is not allowed without unlocking the phone. I should be able to say "Hey Siri, open NPR One" while washing the dishes. And I can, but it tells me I need to unlock my phone - but I used my voice because I have soap all over my hands, so no thanks.

Question, is your voice input experience mainly with iPhone and Siri? I find that voice input is fairly excellent for my Nexus 5X (less so for my Galaxy Tab).

Google seems to be doing a melded experience based on their Google I/O presentations. A lot of the third party experience will involve visual responses.

> All these companies keep pushing voice input as the way to interact with their personal assistants, I personally feel that it would be 100x better to let me interact with them however I choose.

Google Assistant is accessible by typing; it's built into Allo, and either built into Google Search on Android or the latter hooks into Allo if it is installed, I forget which.

So, I mean, you're still out of luck if you prefer interpretive dance as the interaction mode, but you aren't limited to speech.

Ask your Google Assistant to send a message using Allo, see what happens.

It just doesn't support Allo yet. Try SMS then.

If I use the Assistant integrated in Allo on Android and ask it to send a text to someone, I get a card with the contact information that asks me for the text for the message this send. (Same thing if I do it from the Google Search bar in Android.)

You seem to imply this doesn't work, but I'm not seeing it.

On my Nexus 5X, I can choose to type into the google search widget. Entering "when I get home remind me to take the trash to the street" will create a reminder, same as if I had spoken it. It's even pretty forgiving about typos.

Worse, using voice recognition allows companies to store your voice samples, that allows them to generate your voice fingerprints, that allows your presence to be detected once you happen to say something out loud in proximity of such devices.

That's only google, Siri doesn't work that way.

I'd love to believe that -- any source?

It really does not matter if a single device does not work this way if the global trend is to push boundaries of privacy to closer and closer to non-existence.

I am afraid that soon it is hard for general public to avoid the situation where when they flush the toiled some unexpected device will recognise it and report to the headquarters.

From Apple's website: "processing is done by remote servers, it requires a data connection"

From Apple employee: "only collects the Siri voice clips in order to improve Siri itself"

Which is basically what Google says.

EDIT: both companies have promised "off-line" processing, whatever that means, but I don't know if any already does that. Note that off-line processing does NOT mean they won't store your voice clips on their servers.

That can be disabled in Google's case.

And how many people are aware that it is possible and that it is for their benefit to do that?

Type into the search screen on your iPhone. I believe that is the Siri backend. If not completely implemented, that's where it should be.

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