I do a lot of texting, and a lot of the time it's a mixture between plain old thumb texting and swiping for longer words. But about 30% of the time I use voice to text.
I use Google's assistant and the voice to text is excellent. It even uses context to go back and correct ambiguities (synonyms) and even cooler -- mistakes. If I say "I baked a match of cookies", it will first transcribe match, but as soon as I say cookies, it will in real-time go back and change match to what is obviously correct -- batch. Note this doesn't work with direct assistant commands ("okay Google what time is it?"),but it definitely does work with text messages you send while talking to the assistant ("okay Google, send Brandon a text message: I'm baking a match of cookies" gets corrected). This helps with stuttering or mistakes you make while speaking.
It's certainly a bit of a mental shift to get used to speaking text messages. Saying punctuation marks out loud is awkward. but it's definitely at the point where it's convenient.
I think tech people just find typing away much faster and voice interface kinda annoying, but a lot of more 'average type of users' really like the voice interface better.
I wouldn't have predicted, but voice is here to stay and it has long legs. It seems that casual home use, and in car (where the next battle will be) are the best uses of it, and not mobile/while out
I think it works brilliantly for certain narrow domains - answering factual questions, directions, distances, top rated attractions etc. And is quicker than typing and scrolling. But I agree the AI behind it has yet to demonstrate any real broad understanding - assimilating various contrasting opinions from text, providing context etc.
I also personally don't want to sit on a train, couch or a dentist waiting room listening to people talking to their phones or watches.
> I can see a future where AI voice control is incredible
It's not going to work overnight. I think it's great that apple integrated Siri in their product even though it wasn't very useful. There has been great progress in just a few years. I was skeptical too but I use it more and more. Things like "remind me to ...". "Play ...". I also use google voice quite often with my android TV box.
That being said, I'm always much faster with a keyboard. I prefer a smart text interface that understands basic actions, fuzzy search and so on.
It would be pretty nice if it actually understood what I was saying instead of sometimes randomly capitalizing words and not offering a lowercase alternative when you press the word, and occasionally outputting something wildly phonetically different than its input.
I've come across several phrases that simply will not translate and must be entered manually.
Android, FWIW
That's about it.
I’d guess voice assistance could be useful in other situations too. But for me the error rate still seems too high, and there are limited applications.
For one, I don't see anyone using them. I've never seen anyone use Siri on a phone, with one exception: I have a friend who uses voice transcription to write emails and text messages. (Not sure if that counts as Siri.) I don't know anyone who uses speakers such as Amazon Echo or Google Home, or mentions wanting them. I've used Siri on my phone a few times to try out silly things like asking about the weather or converting units, but it's seems so obviously bad that I've never tried going "Siri first". It's on my Apple TV, but I've not used it. Are people actually using this stuff as much as this article (and all the current focus on AI-powered speakers etc.) implies?
I'd love true AI -- a personal assistant that actually understood me, knew my tastes, remembered my choices and so on -- but that doesn't exist. So we get an uncanny valley where speaking to a device comes with uncertainty about whether the device will actually be able to service the request (see the numerous annoyed threads on Reddit about Siri not understanding incredibly basic things), requiring the user to carry around with them a mental model of the receiver's inadequacies. And we get that problem where many tasks that would be super useful to have done by an assistant is actually too difficult for a current AI. For example, booking a trip. I've never booked a flight that didn't involve pouring over pages of results, weighing the various compromises (optimizing for price vs departure time vs airport distance vs layovers vs airline crappiness etc.) and of course filling in a whole lot of information about myself. Let alone booking holidays (I spend many days on research for such a task). Bus and train tickets -- maybe, if it's a simple route with few variables. Dinner reservations and movie tickets, sure. Home automation, well. Once a home is fully outfitted with all lights, doors etc. being connected to a home automation system -- maybe. None of this is automated in my apartment, and I've never seen a home that is set up like this.
There's also the inherent limited utility that comes with an AI being unintelligent. For example, my Apple TV. I rarely know what I want to watch. To only rarely would I be able to say "Siri, play The Grand Budapest Hotel". Usually it would have to be something like "Siri, list me some sci-fi movies". But then I would still have to navigate the results. If it could respond to "Siri, show me French movies with an IMDb score of 7.0 or higher, or with a four-star review from Roger Ebert, that came out after 1990", well, now I'm interested. But somehow I doubt that those sort of multi-dimensional cross-referencing mechanics are currently available.
Edit: With the comments saying how good Google Assistant is compared to Siri, I tried it out. My first queries failed ("What is the weather in Washington State like in March") because it thought I was finished speaking and cut me off at "What is the weather", and showed me today's weather in my city. After a few attempts I got results, but then it returned Fahrenheit units (my phone is set to use metric/international units), and then it continued giving me Fahrenheit after I changed it, because apparently climate information is a "web search" returning text, not data: https://imgur.com/gallery/LI8Sc. Not so impressive. Meanwhile, Siri on the phone doesn't understand the query at all, ignoring the "in March" part and giving me today's weather, no matter how I phrase the question.
I can see a future where AI voice control is incredible, but it requires an enormous advance, and it seems like even the best AI of today just comes with frustration and failure. That's surely why companies like Apple and Google are working on this, but it doesn't explain, to me, why the current voice AI is being pushed so hard.