Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel • Hacker News Board

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#101

Post by jamescham » Thu, May 28, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

jdtang13 wrote: post #96

gonational wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what the “new feature” bit is about; I’ve been using off-line dictation on iOS for years. Anytime I need to dictate something very long, I turn the phone on airplane mode so that I can dictate without Apple, inevitably deciding, at some point in the middle of my dictation, to delete my entire message and begin to retype it in slow motion (has anybody else experienced this? I’ve been dealing with this for…

Yes. It is absolutely horrible. You can press-hold on the mic icon to force it to offline mode.

Oh! Good to know!

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#102

Post by jamescham » Thu, May 28, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

fenwick67 wrote: post #5

I basically can't look at my phone screen when doing TTS for full sentences, it does something to derail me and I basically cannot finish a sentence, similar to how DAF trips people up. Am I alone in this? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_Auditory_Feedback

Yeah. I’m convinced the current model is just too confusing. But I really wish there were new interaction patterns that took advantage of low latency speech recognition...

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#103

Post by abrowne » Thu, May 28, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

maccard wrote: post #73

jiofih wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Western Europe, there is near zero chance you’ll get an unexpected call from any of those. Either you’re the one calling, or updates will be sent via email / message / WhatsApp / some specialized app. Probably another efficiency consequence of human labor being insanely expensive.

I'm in the UK, and my dentist and doctor both communicate by phone, including appointment reminders. The garage I use has a website but no email, and they call if you're waiting on a part (not exactly unexpected but close enough). My car insurance and home insurance and bank (much to my dismay) all semi-regularly phone me, each of the ones Ivr listed I've had an unplanned phone call from in the last 6-12 months

And on the other side, in the US I still expect calls and voicemails like was suggested, but the two bike repair shops I frequent and my dentist have switched to texting, while my medical provider emails.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#104

Post by jamescham » Thu, May 28, 2020, 2:21 AM UTC

jonplackett wrote: post #45

QUESTION How hard, on a scale of 1 to impossible, how hard would it be for Apple, or someone else to just grab the model google is using from the pixel and reverse engineer it and steal all their years of research.

My understanding is that Google’s big advantage is that they’ve collected so much good, annotated voice data.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#105

Post by SquareWheel » Thu, May 28, 2020, 2:22 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #62

kccqzy wrote: post #56

In case anyone didn't notice, this is comparing Gboard (Google's virtual keyboard) on iOS versus Android. It's NOT comparing Apple's voice recognition tech with Google's.

So this is google's product on both devices? I thought this is a demonstration of apple's built-in speech-to-text vs android's built in speech-to-text. If it's the former this is less interesting except for the observation that speed of conversion really is valuable.

You missed mwest217's reply above explaining that it is indeed Apple's speech-to-text engine being used here.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#106

Post by SquareWheel » Thu, May 28, 2020, 2:26 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #64

jonplackett wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just makes it even worse! Look how much better the Pixel is doing on accuracy too. It's almost flawless while the iPhone, despite the advantage of offline processing, is getting maybe 10% wrong and writing complete nonsense words in there. Who is the hell is "Poor Michael Geer"? (for clarity, I'm an iPhone user and won't be switching because privacy, but this makes me jealous)

As pointed out on another comment, this is using Google's 3rd party keyboard, so in effect it's google vs. google.

No, it's still using Apple's native speech-to-text feature.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#107

Post by datguacdoh » Thu, May 28, 2020, 2:52 AM UTC

oh_hello wrote: post #39

An an iPhone user, I very often find speech recognition far too slow. It is to the point I rarely use the feature because it often causes frustration. The Google performance here is amazing. Is this a feature only of Pixel phones?

The more recent Pixel devices have a local accelerator for different machine learning tasks, they brand them Visual Core and more recently Neural Core. https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-4-neural-core-... has more details and a lot of the speed up is probably tied to these being onboard.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#108

Post by cl0rkster » Thu, May 28, 2020, 2:54 AM UTC

garaetjjte wrote: post #57

cl0rkster wrote: post #4

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…

Is voicemail popularity some US thing? I actually don't know anybody who uses it.

It's very common with people around and over roughly 40. We weren't raised on texting and social media. Usage of voicemail only goes up with the age of my friends. Vocal communication is very efficient when clarity is important.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#109

Post by datguacdoh » Thu, May 28, 2020, 2:55 AM UTC

_hhkc wrote: post #76

ksec wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone is doing this online, sending data packet back to Apple. Pixel is doing this completely offline.

iPhone is doing it on device as well.

Fairly certain that isn't true. On my wife's iPhone, she was never able to use voice to text while in airplane mode. Maybe that's changed with the latest 11 but it definitely didn't work on the X.

Re: Speech to Text on iPhone vs. Pixel

#110

Post by temporalparts » Thu, May 28, 2020, 3:49 AM UTC

RandallBrown wrote: post #88

paulgb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's quite different from call screening, where it actually picks up the call for you and transcribes what they're saying live and you can choose to pick up the call or ignore it based on their reply.