Switching to Android

“Speech recognition is actually useful. Big surprise here. I can tweet, search the web etc. with minor edits to my dictated text”

For those who don’t know Android has a built in Voice Recognition API so any application can easily put use it for input while Apple has steadfastly refused to include this feature because “it doesn’t work well” (Dragon has an app but you can’t integrate that into an application).

This, to me, is a sign of what will cause Apple’s lead to crumble. Apple’s one real weakness is they demand perfection but some things just can’t achieve that. As has been pointed out by several HN featured articles Voice Recognition may never be perfect. But it’s still useful. It can still hit 90%+ efficiency much of the time and for many applications that’s enough.

I don't have a problem with it, but I wish they let users know the first time they download something off of iTunes or something.

You think the record companies would want iTunes users to know that their name is tied to their music as a scare tactic or something.

I don't think this capability of android is recognized for the amount of power it provides both the developer and the user. It's often said that things like the dialer or contact list can be changed out if the user doesn't like the default one, but that level of integration isn't just at the app level, it's at all the system services. If Android didn't provide voice recognition out of the box, it would be entirely possible to replace or augment the default input method with one as a third-party app install. There's nothing special about this from a user standpoint. This is actually quite common on android, the most frequent example being replacement ringtone apps (which is odd because it's not that hard to use any random file as a ringtone as it is (make a directory named notifications on the sdcard and put the files in there, they show up in the sound selection dialog), they are mostly just better interfaces, although there are a few that have serious value adds, like recording a new ringtone live and editing it). I found a keyboard app called "Better Keyboard" that I consider to be truly better than the default keyboard functionality provided.