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> The voice recognition is done on remote servers While possible, this is not theoretically necessary, and I find this highly doubtful in practice. What about

> The voice recognition is done on remote servers While possible, this is not theoretically necessary, and I find this highly doubtful in practice. What about the delay on each voice command as it pings the server? If it was generally the case that voice commands were sent remotely, I suggest usability would be 0.

maccard 12y ago
Siri, and Cortana (iOS and WP8 voice recognition engines) both send the clip to a remote server to perform recognition. There are many services that provide real time processing of large amounts of data on server cluster/farms, and more are coming. It is very much possible to perform large computations in almost real time in these situations, and you'd be surprised at how little latency people notice, particularly when there's no indication of what the actual number is.
- learnstats2 12y ago
  I wasn't aware that people generally found Siri usable.
  - thanksgiving 12y ago
    It is genuinely comic when I see what kind of questions my non-technical friends ask Siri. I can't imagine the thought process of how Siri could put together the information from the ramblings of a person much less answer the query...
  - maccard 12y ago
    That doesn't add anything to this discussion. Siri is more than usable for a lot of things - I can set alarms, timers, and make calls without reaching for my phone. I'm not saying that it's revolutionary, but it definitely works.
    - learnstats2 12y ago
      From my point of view it did add significantly to the discussion. I'm surprised to learn that people do use Siri in genuine situations, so thanks for your reply in that regard; although I still feel gratified that another commenter has the same experience that I do.
darkmighty 12y ago
The delay is approximately the same or less of what fast local evaluation would be (ping within a country should be <50ms).
- falcolas 12y ago
  If you're on wired internet, if you aren't saturating your local network, if your provider isn't having any issues, if their servers are up, if there is no DNS delay or caching issues, if... Relying on the internet for "real time" computation is a recipe for inconsistent behavior.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    The alternative, for the moment, is to not have the functionality at all.
  - hueving 12y ago
    The fact that people are using these features of android and apple phones shows that it's 'good enough'. I frequently use it to issue navigation commands on my phone and it fails maybe 1 in 25 times. Well worth not typing in destinations when I want to go somewhere quickly.
polarix 12y ago
It might be practically necessary, though, if they need to have a huge corpus of data in memory in order to perform their voice recognition.
vidarh 12y ago
It is not theoretically necessary if the local unit has sufficient capacity, which it doesn't in most current implementations. Hence why most implementations of voice recognition in consumer hardware does send the clips off to remote servers for processing. Judge the delay for yourself.
dolant 12y ago
I'd believe it, my friend had one and the delay on all commands in all forms was very 'laggy'.

maccard 12y ago

Siri, and Cortana (iOS and WP8 voice recognition engines) both send the clip to a remote server to perform recognition. There are many services that provide real time processing of large amounts of data on server cluster/farms, and more are coming. It is very much possible to perform large computations in almost real time in these situations, and you'd be surprised at how little latency people notice, particularly when there's no indication of what the actual number is.

learnstats2 12y ago
I wasn't aware that people generally found Siri usable.
- thanksgiving 12y ago
  It is genuinely comic when I see what kind of questions my non-technical friends ask Siri. I can't imagine the thought process of how Siri could put together the information from the ramblings of a person much less answer the query...
- maccard 12y ago
  That doesn't add anything to this discussion. Siri is more than usable for a lot of things - I can set alarms, timers, and make calls without reaching for my phone. I'm not saying that it's revolutionary, but it definitely works.
  - learnstats2 12y ago
    From my point of view it did add significantly to the discussion. I'm surprised to learn that people do use Siri in genuine situations, so thanks for your reply in that regard; although I still feel gratified that another commenter has the same experience that I do.

darkmighty 12y ago

The delay is approximately the same or less of what fast local evaluation would be (ping within a country should be <50ms).

falcolas 12y ago
If you're on wired internet, if you aren't saturating your local network, if your provider isn't having any issues, if their servers are up, if there is no DNS delay or caching issues, if... Relying on the internet for "real time" computation is a recipe for inconsistent behavior.
- vidarh 12y ago
  The alternative, for the moment, is to not have the functionality at all.
- hueving 12y ago
  The fact that people are using these features of android and apple phones shows that it's 'good enough'. I frequently use it to issue navigation commands on my phone and it fails maybe 1 in 25 times. Well worth not typing in destinations when I want to go somewhere quickly.

polarix 12y ago

It might be practically necessary, though, if they need to have a huge corpus of data in memory in order to perform their voice recognition.

vidarh 12y ago

It is not theoretically necessary if the local unit has sufficient capacity, which it doesn't in most current implementations. Hence why most implementations of voice recognition in consumer hardware does send the clips off to remote servers for processing. Judge the delay for yourself.

dolant 12y ago

I'd believe it, my friend had one and the delay on all commands in all forms was very 'laggy'.