> You just said that speech recognition doesn't work in general. I replied that the accuracy is high. It turns out, in retrospect, that accuracy and usefulness

> You just said that speech recognition doesn't work in general. I replied that the accuracy is high. It turns out, in retrospect, that accuracy and usefulness are two different things. In regards to automated driving, achieving better than human isn't all that hard. Heck backup cameras with little "warning zone" lines on them are better than human for the one particular task of backing up. Cruise control systems that maintain distance are better than humans. We are incrementally getting there. The progress is much different than with voice reco. The problem with voice reco isn't recognition technology, that works fine, it is with having computers understand what the hell to do with the voice. Contrast that to driving, where the end goal is easy to list - Rule 1: Don't hit anything. Rule 2: Get to the destination. (Rule 1 is the hard part, Rule 2 99.9% solved!) With Voice Reco, we got the transcription part down, but... now what? In the example I gave up above, knowing how to make a reservation is painful thanks to market fragmentation (not everything is an API), and people generally don't go and tag all of their contacts with their relationship status. I happen to have my wife under "wife" and my mother under "mother", that simple step alone gives me much more natural usage of voice input. Then when I saw "OK Google, directions to my Mother's house", well, that still doesn't work for a thousand little reasons[1], even though each and every word was correctly transcribed. (I get a nice Google search instead!) The set of situations that can happen while driving is far smaller than the set of interactions that can happen over voice when users expect a natural interface. Yes driving is really complicated, but it is possible to get a group together and after a day or so, brainstorm everything that could happen on the road out to 2 standard deviations of likelihood. It might take an hour+ just to list all the ways someone might ask for directions. [1] Mainly because no one programmed it to understand that particular way of making a request. It is annoying because I can ask it for directions to home, and that works fine, so I just figured directions to "Contact Name's House" would also work. Of course if I lived in NYC I'd expect "Contact Name's Apartment" to work!