Monday, August 16, 2010

Is Android a good listener?



Google is to release a voice control app for the Android smartphone. It will allow Android users to speak (or bark) commands to their phone such as 'send email' or 'access sat nav'.

Now I'm aware that I have a reputation for being skeptical but I'm not convinced this will be as good as it sounds.
Suffering from RSI, I just purchased the Dragon Speaking Naturally software which is widely considered to be the most sophisticated voice recognition software (I speak - it types) on the market. Please feel free to contradict me if I'm wrong on this.

Sometimes Dragon is brilliant and when it gets a head of steam up it can just sail along, putting lots of words on the page while I twiddle my thumbs.
Other times it will fail to spell a word correctly. Even if it gets the word right 99 times out of 100 and it is a word which I have trained it to spell on numerous occasions.

Allowing for my strange accent I would say that voice recognition software is temperamental to say the least and that this Google app for Android may not be the godsend that some people think.
However Google is a very powerful and knowledgable company and if anyone can get it right I'm sure they can. I'm also convinced they will have had a (legal) peak at the Dragon software for some guidance.

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