13 ms·
Google launches voice typing in Google Docs
- archiebunker 11y agoThis is totally cool. Their translations are pretty good. Regular desk microphones (condenser) work just fine. Thank you for posting this.
- giancarlostoro 11y agoAmazing work, it is good to see Google Docs moving forward. I have written plenty of essays in Google Docs in the past, hopefully this new feature is just what some have been wanting. Thanks for the great work guys!
- nitin_flanker 11y agoAmazing, I always wanted a feature like this. Sometimes, we're so tired to move our fingers to type something. I hope they make it as convenient as possible, like introducing voice typing in Google Keep, and creating a complete note just by saying OK Google. Sometimes, things pop-up in mind suddenly and we need to note them down right away.This is definitely the coolest feature. Also, on the other side, this is also helpful to people who face problems with typing, or somehow can't type (temporary injury in hand, or slow typing speed, etc.)
- sdrothrock 11y agoI'm sure Google is mining (anonymized) data from this -- I wonder if they can use it to improve the transcriptions for Youtube automatic captioning by seeing what kind of revisions people make to the voice transcription.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoI've often wondered this but it feels like they're very siloed. Google Now seems to improve every year; it almost never gets anything wrong that I speak nowadays but just a few years ago it could get rough if I'm trying to get it to type a bunch of stuff. But YouTube auto captions? They seem just as horrible today as they were years ago.
- eitally 11y agoThere are a lot of checks and balances internally re: who's allowed access to user data, even in cases where it seems logical & obvious. Regardless how it appears externally, Google does take data privacy & security very seriously (to the point where sometimes it's painful trying to get things done).
- th-ai 11y agoFor talking heads speaking clearly in English, YouTube speech recognition is improving noticably.
- SwellJoe 11y agoI recently started paying someone on fiverr to caption all of the videos I make. Costs practically nothing ($5 for five minutes plus tip), and is so much better than the YouTube auto-captions that it's not even comparable.
- eva1984 11y agoGoogle Now has been used as voice reminder keeper by me for a long time! There are cases where it can still miss by a large margin, but general usability has greatly improved over past 2 years. I would love to see that this thing become smarter, that it can detect you are saying a list of things then format them automatically. That well be truly AMAZING!
- simplemath 11y agoI am sure that the team who owns voice recog at G is working on it. I wonder organizationally if it's structured that way, but I digress... This particular integration is really impressive after some cursory testing. If I were CTO at, say, Dragon... I would be having a sleepless night.
- pjmlp 11y agoI bet it doesn't support Portuguese in all its variants.
- gregsadetsky 11y agoIt does support both "Brasil" and "Portugal". Have you tried it out? Does it work well in Portuguese?
- pjmlp 11y agoNot in a place I can try it. But usually such dictating software does a very bad job regarding Portuguese, regardless of the language variant. Apparently I offended some people, thanks for the downvotes!
- NegatioN 11y agoThe offensive part is that you're what you're stating is something you haven't even bothered to examine before deciding to write down an opinion.
- pjmlp 11y agoBecause in 30 years of computing experience I am used to my mother tongue being forgotten by American companies when they announce voice dictation software. I am not sorry if others cannot take critics from those used to be ignored by them.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoEven if you'd just asked the question "How good is Portuguese support?", whilst you probably wouldn't have received too many upvotes, I think you at least wouldn't have been downvoted into oblivion. Unfortunately, what might have been an important point will now just get buried.
- talles 11y agoIf you consider that your comment is against the same company behind translate.google.com, which does have a (wonderful) Portuguese support, you'll probably be able to see how unthoughtful it was. Heck, Google even have specific doodles for Brazil and even have an office here in my city. I'm a native Portuguese speaker and I'm not pissed off as you are.
- Theodores 11y agoSeriously folks, this is awesome. Does anyone have a recommendation of a USB microphone/headset that will work with Ubuntu so that I can start using this a bit more comfortably? I did not know voice typing was possible before, this has made my day. All I need now is to invest in a decent microphone!
- joshdotsmith 11y agoGet a Blue Yeti.
- NegatioN 11y agoBlue Yeti is good (and not too expensive), but isn't it a bit overkill for voice typing? If you generally feel like having a better microphone would help in other cases as well (Skype, vlog, what-have-you), then I'd agree with the above post.
- drited 11y agoMicrosoft lx 3000 is unidirectional and has noise cancelling and is cheap. Caveat : I haven't tried it with Ubuntu.
- gregsadetsky 11y agoThis had been announced back in September 2015, albeit from a Google Docs for Education point of view: https://googleblog.blogspot.co.nz/2015/09/google-docs-classroom-school.html https://googleblog.blogspot.co.nz/2015/09/google-docs-classr... Under the first video, see "With Voice typing, you can record ideas or even compose an entire essay without touching your keyboard." --- It seems that what's new are the "Voice commands" to Select Text, Format, etc. etc. That's really great! Take a look at the commands here: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/4492226 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/4492226
- mbrock 11y agoI would like to use this kind of thing even if I had to type the commands... anything to avoid mousing, and holding down arrow keys, and all that tedious stuff. Typing sentences is totally natural for me, I can do it all day. For years I've been dreaming of a renaissance of ed-like editors.
- dcvuob 11y agoWelcome to the future (of 2013): https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?t=9m5s https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?t=9m5s https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?t=16m22s https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?t=16m22s Don't forget to see the entire talk (28 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
- shpx 11y agoOne important note is that your throat gets tired talking, just like your hands do typing.
- dcvuob 11y agoI think it is an issue of convenience. Anecdotal evidence, I have never had trouble doing either of those for 8 hours straight (and more). Voice will need some serious software support if it is going to take off. There is zero chance that users will learn those mnemonics, just as now almost nobody knows how to touch type. The usage will be more in the form of general commands, than specifying every action like we do it now with the keyboard+mouse.
- JohnDoe365 11y agoNot available for me, menu item grayed out. Austria/Europe here. Language is set to English/USA.
- janus24 11y agoI have that on Firefox, it works with Chrome.
- JohnDoe365 11y agoAlright, was with Firefox
- ygmelnikova 11y agoI've been dabbling with speech recognition for 20 years now, and this is nothing new, but what's been a long time coming is the recognition accuracy. In the old days, you'd get about 85% accuracy, now we're looking at what, 95%? That 10% is a game changer.. 85% accuracy was simply too frustrating to be practical.
- racl101 11y agoPretty neat. It won't accept curse words though like the f-bomb and the s-word.
- brotchie 11y agoSuper impressive. My wife just spoke full-speed Vietnamese into a Google Doc, 100% correct, even the tone marks.
- Manishearth 11y agoWorks pretty well with Hindi, too, neat!
- piyush_soni 11y agoYup! Just tried. Now only if it works in Firefox too.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoIs there something particular about Vietnamese that makes it easier than other languages for dictations? Like, does it lack homophones, are letters always pronounced the same way? 100% correct sounds incredible.
- brotchie 11y agoVietnamese writing is pretty much phonetic. Technically, you could learn the alphabet and read Vietnamese almost perfectly without prior understanding of word pronunciation (obviously there are some exception, but there much much less variation than English). Also, different regions in Vietnam pronounce certain alphabet letters differently, but within-region per-letter pronunciation is very similar. I suspect Vietnamese tones (6 tones in total) give an stronger, more consistent, "orthogonal" signal that helps speech-to-text. For example, a word spoken with an "up" tone will always be spoken with an up tone. Whereas in English, depending on the word's position in a sentence, the speaker's emotion, etc, you might have great across-word tonal variation, even within the same speaker's multiple utterances of the word. When you listen to Vietnamese it's very "short and choppy" with a lot of tonal variation. I suspect that the recurrent neural nets Google is training for speech recognition purposes have better inference over these separable, tonally-consistent utterances compared with harder to separate and highly variable English speech.
- 11y ago
- justsaysmthng 11y agoTried with Romanian, got a bunch of random words .. about 50% right, the resulting text is totally unintelligible. I was expecting a lot more accuracy.. Apple's built-in dictation does way better than this.
- ACow_Adonis 11y agoIts pretty impressive. I haven't touched much upon trying such things for quite a few years when I last had a quick play with Dragon Naturally Speaking. It's getting PRETTY close, with a basic cheap laptop microphone, my Australian accent, and no training. But I did say pretty close. Not exactly right. And I'm only speaking a few sentences. I read out a passage aloud, and apart from not quite getting everything right (but getting some remarkably difficult words/names correct), the thing that struck me is how written word, and the art form of such, is in fact quite different from a verbal stream of spoken words. The little sigils and breaking up of a written text conveys a whole bunch of meaning and subtlety that a word for word stream doesn't quite get. For me, its just inaccurate enough to still be irritating. Everything's working fine, and then I hit a mis-dictated word, have to do a bit of a double take and ask myself "What the...what on earth does it think i'm trying to say here...oh...i said THAT!" which breaks the flow of anything but the most basic and primitive sentence. But then that makes me wonder, you know what... how many humans can actually follow everything I'm actually saying? It's not like I can peer into their heads and verify the transcription of voice-to-words inscribed on their brains.
- danieltillett 11y agoHumans don't follow what you say :) On this topic I have never managed to get my typing above 60 women because this is as about as fast as I can think ahead writing.
- smhg 11y agoI wouldn't complain if you can type as fast as 60 women! ;)
- wohlben 11y agoindeed, he probably utilizes superior techniques with multiples keyboards simultaneously!
- danieltillett 11y agoLol. Got to love the auto correct of wpm to women :)
- cellover 11y agoThey have my emails, they have my documents, they have my pictures, they have my location, they have my browsing history, and now they can have my voice. Only lacks DNA, fingerprints, retina footprint and non-verbal communication. Oh wait, it's only a matter of time.
- spangry 11y agoThis is what really concerns me, and why I've avoided using 'google now' on my phone. With this data, google could easily construct a 'voice signature' for every one of their users. And those voice signatures are just one FISA warrant away from falling into the hands of various national security agencies. I would rather google had my DNA on file if I had to choose between the two. Why? Because voice signatures can be used to passively authenticate/identify someone without them even realising they've been authenticated/identified. You just need control of a nearby microphone while they happen to be talking. At least with DNA, I'd probably notice someone jabbing a needle in my arm or sticking a cotton swab in my mouth.
- cellover 11y agoI could not envision living like Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) in Gattaca, making sure you live no trace of yourself anywhere. I you are alive, you already leave traces everywhere. No need for a needle or cotton swab here. Of course I am being paranoid, but we all should be :)
- spangry 11y agoI must admit I don't do a morning scrub-down a la Vincent in Gattaca :) It's true that DNA can also be 'non-obviously' collected. But there are two key differences between DNA and voice auth, when looked at from the perspective of a national surveillance agency: 1. 'Non-obvious' DNA collection occurs after the fact, and is much more costly. You have to send someone to the physical location, collect samples, and process them in a lab. 2. Because of (1), DNA could never be used as a 'always on' mass surveillance system. As opposed to voice auth, where you just need enough microphones, covering enough area, streaming data back to a server for processing. Sorta like how Batman finds the Joker in 'The Dark Knight' :)
- amelius 11y agoWhy isn't this just built into the browser or the OS?
- cyrusaf 11y agoI wouldn't be surprised to see it shipping with Chrome sometime in the near future.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- marak830 11y agoWindows does have a built in dictation tool, you can even us it in .net (i am for my side project).
- lovelearning 11y agoI've often wondered about this. There are any number of desktop environments for linux, but I haven't come across any that are speech oriented. One reason I can think of is that there was no incentive to build speech recognition because in most organizations that use computers, people talking to their computers is likely to disturb everyone around. But with more and more jobs becoming work from home, this may not be such a problem in future.
- ceejayoz 11y agoDictation is built into recent versions of OSX. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202584 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202584
- imaginenore 11y agodictation.io is another voice recognition system that impresses me, and it understands tons of languages.
- blackkettle 11y agoIt's the same Google ASR on the backend.
- artumi-richard 11y agoWhat fun: I have recently been reading The Hobbit with my 6 year old son Benjamin stop he has become engrossed in the book somewhat and then just hearing about the Adventures of Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf as well of course as mine growing are a diary Norrie tilly tilly Bailey and wailing not forgetting the king Under the Mountain himself starring oakenshield Gollum Gollum
- JulianMorrison 11y agoThis sounds like it could be a massive step up for disabled and low literacy people worldwide. The fact that it's in so many languages, and accessible anywhere with internet, really distinguishes it.
- conceit 11y agoTo the contrary, I believe, while it will be helpful in a number of ways, the orthography skills would likely suffer from lack of exercise as a computer takes on the task. Writing helps a lot to have to think about the spelling.
- athletics 11y agoAm I the only one that finds text to speech cumbersome and more of an impediment than anything else? I applaud the effort, but spreadsheets are difficult enough to navigate at the best of times, let alone trying to manipulate with your voice.
- ergothus 11y agoDepends on the context. Running precise commands? Keyboard wins. No keyboard? I love the voice search of my roku 4 over trying to search via virtual keyboard and arrow keys, or using my Amazon Echo to find artists/songs Long text? While I prefer typing, I remember one author I heard (Kevin Anderson, I think) who dictates all his books (first drafts) into a mini-recorder and pays someone to transcribe them. I find that hard to comprehend, but I bet he's not unique. Spreadsheets? Keyboard wins for data entry, but I bet voice would be convenient for analysis. "Sum column B" "What is the average of column D, excluding 0 values"
- dharma1 11y agoThis is really nice. I think laptops will need to start having array mics for better far-field capture. Tested it for a quick Todo list and it was about 95% accurate. I can see myself using this
- ghaff 11y agoI suspect that array mics can be important for accurate voice recognition. My anecdotal impression, for example, is that Amazon Echo is MUCH better than Siri on an iPhone at recognizing what I'm saying. I can tell Echo from across the room with music playing to add something to a shopping list and it gets things mostly right.
- funkaster 11y agoI tried it a few days ago and it was amazing, even in Spanish (latam accent) and English with my non-native accent. Anyone knows if this is available through API? I would love something like this when writing text on emacs & org mode :-)
- petervandijck 11y agoGoogle seriously needs to build an Amazon Echo competitor NOW. Using Nest (if that division can muster actually creating a new product) and it's learning chops. Google: please don't mess this up as a science experiment as you do so many products - build it for real.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoIs there a technical reason this only works in Chrome? It wouldn't work for me in my main browser (Safari 9.1).
- Klathmon 11y agoSafari doesn't support the 'getUserMedia/Stream API' so it can't work on safari.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoThanks. A quick search shows 'getUserMedia/Stream API' is supported in Firefox though and people on this thread don't seem to be able to use it in Firefox (I haven't personally tested).
- Klathmon 11y agoHmm, then maybe it's using the speech recognition API which is really only supported in chrome right now (it's in firefox but behind a flag). Although i just assumed that google would be running the speech recognition themselves.
- gizzlon 11y agoOr Firefox?
- kull 11y agoThis actually works, finally a 'machine' which understands my easer european new york accent. Bravo!
- jacktang1980 11y agowe may programming in voice in near future.
- jacktang1980 11y agoWe may programming in voice in near future.
- eternalban 11y agoBiometerics [1]. Googling for Google's biometrics privacy policy.[2] HN likes to talk about the layperson non-techies disregard for technology's impact on our rights, but a grep of this thread turned up no hits on biometrics. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics [2]: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=inurl:google.com+privacy+policy+biometrics https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=inurl:google.com+privac...
- thrownaway2424 11y agoThis thread doesn't hit on "chemtrails" either.
- eternalban 11y agoFor obvious reasons. Your voice is a biometric. Innovation is fine, but Google needs to address our digital rights.
- spangry 11y agoThere's some conversation about this fairly far down the page. It would appear that the HN crowd are not even slightly concerned about the privacy implications of 'passive' biometric identification. Given HN is a fairly intelligent and tech-adept demographic, I suspect the general population would care even less. Pretty worrying IMHO. Short of surveillance cameras in our homes, I can't think of anything worse for privacy than government coming in to possession of passive biometrics like voice signatures (e.g. a google voice DB dump collected through a FISA warrant). Just in case people genuinely don't comprehend the danger: 1. They allow a third party to identify you against your will. 2. They allow a third party to identify you without your knowledge that you have been identified/authenticated. 3. You can't revoke a voice sig credential like you can with a password credential. Once the government has it, they can do (1) and (2) at will for the rest of your life. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biometric-security-poses-huge-privacy-risks/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biometric-security...
- gz5 11y agoI first realized the voice to text improvement while watching my three-year old daughter search on my Android tablet...she can't spell (correctly) but used Google voice search quite effectively. This should enable the very young, the very old, the disabled, etc. to digitize (and therefore share) their words, stories and worlds. Powerful.
- grahamburger 11y agoI've had the same experience watching my (now 4yo son) voice search on my phone. It picks up what he's saying very reliably ... even when he's still laughing uncontrollably from the results of his last search :) In case you were unaware, you can listen to past voice searches here: https://history.google.com/history/audio https://history.google.com/history/audio sometimes my wife and I will go back and listen to my son's searches for good laughs all around ;)
- brockers 11y agoThe Chrome integration is what is new right? I have been using Google Docs via phone using voice typing for a LONG time now. In fact, when I wanted to use voice typing at my desk I would just open the phone, open the document on both the phone and Chrome and watch the text appear on screen. Then edit it from the keyboard.
- shanselman 11y agoVoice dictation is HUGELY useful but few people use it anymore. Most of us tried Dragon in years past, it sucked, and we gave up. I believe so much in this that I made a Siri->Windows bridge and dictate 80% of my text with it. (except that hash rocket) http://myechoapp.com/ http://myechoapp.com/
- melling 11y agoDavid Pogue has been using Dragon for over a decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0GXX-SJuQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0GXX-SJuQM John Siracusa used Dragon to write his 20,000 word Mac reviews. Developers have even used Dragon to assist with programming: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html I think voice accuracy is there but we need more integration with our apps and operating systems. Consistency would help too. Google recognizes "undo" while Dragon recognizes "scratch that"
- shanselman 11y agoPoint taken but I would guess that they use nice headset mics and extensively train (and maintain and carry around) their voice databases. With Siri you can get 99% accuracy if you dicate punctuation and there's no training or fancy mics.
- melling 11y agoI don't believe you need to extensively train the voice database. Most don't require any training to start. Don't think expensive microphones either. Maybe you should just read some of the links already posted.
- throwaway049 11y agoDragon strongly recommends training and using a good mic, but mine is good and cost 30 BP which I don't think is expensive in this context. Initial training takes about 15 minutes.
- 11y ago
- romaniv 11y agoCan't wait till Google starts data-mining background noises to "improve" your experience. Yes, they can do it with other of their services, but this one is the most likely to provide the most personal information. Also, it will capture much more information, since you will be running it over longer periods of time.
- entwife 11y agoIn response to multiple language support, an alternative use for the voice recognition is learning to speak well in another language. I've already improved my native English, by noticing which words are mistranscribed. And assuming the problem is with my imprecise speech, not the bot.
- james_pm 11y agoI can't stress how important this is for people like my daughter who at age 13 reads at a Grade 3 level thanks to a genetic disorder that affects her learning. She's a great verbal communicator, but the reading/writing is an immense challenge. Things like this will change her life and open up opportunities that we're previously not open to her.
- Mohammedmeshaal 11y agoمرحبا
- Mohammedmeshaal 11y agoمرحبا
- cableshaft 11y agoLooks like it's still not great for writing fiction. I didn't see anything for "Quotation Marks" for dialogue in their Voice Commands, and even if it did, I sure hope I wouldn't have to say "Quotation Mark What was that Question Mark Quotation Mark asked Billy Period. Quotation Mark I said Poop Nuts Exclamation Point Quotation Mark said Daniel Period." This is much much slower than I can type. I know it'd be hard to infer punctuation, but even just a one syllable shorthand command for each common bit of punctuation would be nice (you can disable it by default). I really want to use this stuff too, because it means I could write stories while exercising at home, which is apparently how Randy Pausch wrote his last novel (he dictated it and had someone else transcribe it... I'd like Google to do that last bit for me).
- melling 11y agoIf you're willing to pay, Dragon Naturally Speaking has more features: http://whatsnext.nuance.com/connected-living/thursday-tip-how-to-speak-commands-and-punctuations-with-dragon-dictation/ http://whatsnext.nuance.com/connected-living/thursday-tip-ho... If you simply want a better free product, you'll have to wait a few more years. In the meantime, the solution will work well for tens of millions of people and Google can learn from them.
- cableshaft 11y agoHow are they nowadays? I tried their free demo app awhile back and had to correct pretty much every third spoken word using an annoying user interface to go back to my previous text, that it was easily taking less time for me just to type it in the first place.
- melling 11y agoSiri is powered by Nuance technology. They've been pretty good for a decade now. David Pogue and John Siracusa have been using it to do their writing. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/23/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/23/
- hobarrera 11y agoThe menu item "Voice Typing" in "tools" is disabled for me, with no explanation or hint as to why.
- jimothyhalpert7 11y agoIs there any information about an API for this? I know that they abandoned their old Voice to Text API, which is sad, because there aren't that many alternatives out there. I'm using Watson right now, but it's really bad, and the language range is very narrow. I'm also open to any suggestions for Voice to Text online APIs or local server side solutions.