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I think his post demonstrates a poor understanding of the state of voice technology. > That being said, current voice recognition technology is incredibly good

I think his post demonstrates a poor understanding of the state of voice technology. > That being said, current voice recognition technology is incredibly good at certain things. It’s great at detecting and transcribing words, listening for specific commands, and making matches against expected inputs. Current state of the art is not actually great at transcription or detection, in fact only Google and Apple's algos are any good and they both involve sending all your voice recordings to their servers where huge models are used to transcribe, meaning lag times and it's not efficient to always be sending every minute of audio to them. If you want to do continuous listening or use local voice transcription it's possible but you are limited by your hardware. Listening for activation words is also a hard problem. In fact, Moto X has a chip designed just to listen for "Ok Google" so clearly you see some of the problems: 1. it uses lots of power, 2. it has no flexibility. Other examples he gives assumes the phone won't intercept outside noise or will differentiate between voices. This is unfortunately not the case -- you could maybe apply a training and have a custom voice model but it's still just an unrealistic idea at this point. > The reason current voice interfaces suck is because they force the speaker to consciously enter a “voice” mode and then create context around the action they want the computer to perform. This makes no sense; the computer should just always be listening for potential commands within the context of whatever the user is doing. Yes, this is true. But it's all side-effect because of power, bandwidth, and processing-power constraints given today's algos / models. Today's voice processing algos rely on lots of data. And also the fact that voices aren't differentiated right now and it'd be havoc if everyone were setting off each others' phones.

eghad 12y ago
Your post is a bit ironic seeing as the Moto X does differentiate between voice (if you're good at imitating someone's voice you can set it off, but sending a command is unlikely) and the power usage is not as bad as you assume (it's got average battery life but can easily make it through the day), but I will agree that the "Ok Google Now" being inflexible is a niggling point. The new Moto X is always listening as well, but allows you to change the trigger phrase via some magic they've worked out.
- codemac 12y ago
  > Your post is a bit ironic seeing as the [..] Ironic? I think you're saying that they're incorrect, that the power usage of the voice chip isn't that bad and that it can differentiate between voices but not command phrases. Which I think is a misunderstanding of what they're saying. The fact that you need an entirely custom chip to even make voice processing reasonable in power consumption shows that it's a domain-specific heavy calculation where silicon is the only place to speed it up. The new Moto X has a better domain-specific chip.
- kajecounterhack 12y ago
  I see, thanks. I didn't know these things about the Moto X. It's really a spectacular feat of engineering! But in the broader picture my point stands, he still made a number of false assumptions regarding voice tech ("right now it's good at x y z," and it's not by any means). It's as if he were imagining today's voice tech to be at the equivalent of capacitive touch screens when in reality it's not, they aren't quite invented yet and our current level of tech is still resistive. So of course sensitivity is poor and multi-touch hasn't been implemented. It's not design oversight, it's technological limitation. This isn't to say things aren't changing -- that's what the Moto X represents, improvement on the bleeding edge :)

eghad 12y ago

Your post is a bit ironic seeing as the Moto X does differentiate between voice (if you're good at imitating someone's voice you can set it off, but sending a command is unlikely) and the power usage is not as bad as you assume (it's got average battery life but can easily make it through the day), but I will agree that the "Ok Google Now" being inflexible is a niggling point. The new Moto X is always listening as well, but allows you to change the trigger phrase via some magic they've worked out.

codemac 12y ago
> Your post is a bit ironic seeing as the [..] Ironic? I think you're saying that they're incorrect, that the power usage of the voice chip isn't that bad and that it can differentiate between voices but not command phrases. Which I think is a misunderstanding of what they're saying. The fact that you need an entirely custom chip to even make voice processing reasonable in power consumption shows that it's a domain-specific heavy calculation where silicon is the only place to speed it up. The new Moto X has a better domain-specific chip.
kajecounterhack 12y ago
I see, thanks. I didn't know these things about the Moto X. It's really a spectacular feat of engineering! But in the broader picture my point stands, he still made a number of false assumptions regarding voice tech ("right now it's good at x y z," and it's not by any means). It's as if he were imagining today's voice tech to be at the equivalent of capacitive touch screens when in reality it's not, they aren't quite invented yet and our current level of tech is still resistive. So of course sensitivity is poor and multi-touch hasn't been implemented. It's not design oversight, it's technological limitation. This isn't to say things aren't changing -- that's what the Moto X represents, improvement on the bleeding edge :)