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Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

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Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#81
post #78

Similar offline versus online privacy thing for music recognition. My Pixel is sat here charging. Billie Eilish is singing in the background, by the time she sings "I should have known..." it has recognised the music and passively displayed "No Time To Die by Billie Eilish" on the lock screen. Google's team were building an ML model for music recognition and they realised oh - the smallest model fits on a phone. We d…

How in the world is that possible with 97 million+ songs in existence?

I believe their model only works for the top 50k songs in your region. Pretty rarely does my pixel not recognise music that is playing around me, that seems to be a large enough number

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#82

Latency is super important.... High latency is one of the largest problems with modern software. But what about transcription accuracy? I mainly use Android but also use an iPhone.... I have found transcription accuracy is so much higher on my iPhone then Android. I pulled out my old BlackBerry (Android) when I sent my Android phone in for repair recently. The voice transcription via blackberry's keyboard is hands do…

Did you watch the video? The iPhone went back and retroactively inserted errors into its transcribed text.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#83

The Pixels get a lot of hate from people who haven't used them though I think they are great phones and I'll never buy a Samsung phone again. There are so many nice software touches on them that you just have to experience to appreciate.

This is not specific to a phone model. It works reasonably well on the venerable Nexus line of phones too. Any android device that uses gboard. I still won't actually use it for anything, but it works within a limited vocabulary. It's still not what I would call generally useful, although I'm sure it is very helpful for those with disabilities.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#84

The Pixels get a lot of hate from people who haven't used them though I think they are great phones and I'll never buy a Samsung phone again. There are so many nice software touches on them that you just have to experience to appreciate.

> I think they are great phones and I'll never buy a Samsung phone again.

These are seperate statements.

You can not like pixel but still consider them better than samsung.

Personally I've had one samsung phone and it nearly put me off android entirely- had I not previously had a Oneplus1 I would have considered the entire ecosystem to be pretty garbage.

Samsung is a very low bar for software/ecosystem.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#85
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS having better privacy is a myth. iOS sends your location to Apple every time any the GPS is used, and you can't turn it off. You cannot install apps on your phone without telling Apple which apps they are, and if you want to develop your own apps for your device without having to reinstall weekly, you have to hand over payment information. Stock Android devices from nearly any vendor do not suffer from these prob…

Those are different things than what most people talking about iOS privacy mean by “privacy.” The thing people usually mean by privacy is “security of personal data and metadata”—i.e. being able to use your phone to break the (perhaps unjust) law, without a state actor being able to then prove you broke the law by forensically analyzing your phone. Phones already leak a lot of circumstantial forensic evidence just by…

> In that regard, iOS is usually considered the winner.

That, too, is based in myth. More iPhones have had malware than Android phones available for purchase in Europe and the US by an order of magnitude, and Android vulnerabilities are more expensive than iOS vulnerabilities, so if your standard of privacy is protection from state actors, you should prefer Android devices.

> If I’m e.g. a Canadian diplomat in China and my phone breaks, I’m not going to trust a Chinese-OEM Android phone, but I might be able to trust a phone I send a plainclothes gofer to buy me from a Chinese Apple Store.)

If you're in China, you're in trouble because the CCP has access to all your iCloud data and any iMessage messages you send while there. Nobody is suggesting that you buy a Chinese OEM phone with who knows what modifications. Just get a Blackberry, Nokia, Google, or Android One device, and you'll be in a much better privacy situation than if you got an iPhone.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#87
post #44

Some hackers have been trying to reuse Google's offline speech recognition models within other software toolkits, https://hackaday.io/project/164399-android-offline-speech-re... > Especially the offline part is very appealing to me, as it should to any privacy conscious mind. Unfortunately this speech recognizer is only available to Pixel owners at this time. Since GBoard uses TensorFlow Lite, and the blog post is al…

Yep, that will be fun. Hopefully we will soon see the same hardware accelerators in laptops than currently existing in smartphones. I bet in the future, neural models will constantly run in background for some tasks.

  neural models will constantly run in background
This doesn't feel like progress to me.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#88
post #38

There are already some novel applications of this. It is extremely useful to use Google's screening service for unknown numbers that might be a call I'm expecting from a new number. I can't recall the last time I actually listened to a voicemail. I know that at least voicemail transcription works elsewhere, and I can't speak to how well, but I do know that on the Pixel, transcription is really quite impressively accu…

Call screening has saved me so much time that it's one of the main things stopping me from switching to iPhone.

iPhones have had speech to text for voicemails for years. Long enough that I can't remember a time without them.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#89

The Pixels get a lot of hate from people who haven't used them though I think they are great phones and I'll never buy a Samsung phone again. There are so many nice software touches on them that you just have to experience to appreciate.

I'd love to say I've had the same experience, but unfortunately that isn't the case. I'm on my fourth Pixel 3 because of hardware issues (the first time it was my fault, all the other ones not really). My previous Pixel 2 worked flawlessly for two years. I'm starting to think of going back to Samsung after this experience.

Which is a shame, because I do love how unencumbered with bullshit features and spamware the phones are.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#90

There are already some novel applications of this. It is extremely useful to use Google's screening service for unknown numbers that might be a call I'm expecting from a new number. I can't recall the last time I actually listened to a voicemail. I know that at least voicemail transcription works elsewhere, and I can't speak to how well, but I do know that on the Pixel, transcription is really quite impressively accu…

+1 on this, plus it's very well integrated and backed by audio when in doubt.
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