If I might go off on a tangent about one of his points I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately…
“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.
(Dragon has an app but you can’t integrate that into an application)
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.
Actually, replacement Input Methods are more common than the ringtone things, in my experience. It's also an area where you see a fair amount of innovation taking place on Android -- there are IMEs like Better Keyboard or Smart Keyboard Pro (which I use personally) but there are also people experimenting with things like Swype.
Android really lowers the bar for creative people developing new ways of interacting with mobile devices, and I think that's probably the single most exciting thing about the platform.
I think things like ringtone customizers get slightly more mindshare, at least in the circles I've been following, because people are used to doing that on other phones -- it's rare, so far, to be able to customize input methods on most phone models, so that's not something people commonly look for. When I've told people they can get a different keyboard for Android, they've been surprised.
I have never understood the appeal of speech-to-text on mobile phones.
I don't want to sit next to someone on the train while they enunciate a long email or a text message to their girlfriend. Nor do I want to shout my own internet musings at those around me. Besides, these days most of us are used to editing as we write. Good PC dictation software makes that easy. On a mobile phone, you'll end up editing it by thumb anyway.
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The problem with not demanding perfection is that once a feature ships and it's "good enough", it's probably going to stay "good enough" forever.
Yep, Android's has lots of cool features that iPhone has not, but a lot of its core functionality isn't fucking done.
>Yep, Android's has lots of cool features that iPhone has not, but a lot of its core functionality isn't fucking done.
Like? I've had a G1 since launch, and I can't really agree with this sentiment.
Yes, Android has had some very rough edges in terms of UI, but, if we're talking core functionality, I've never felt like anything was flat out unfinished. There've been a lot of things added iteratively over the last two years that I wouldn't want to do without now, but everything has been building on the same fundamental base that they shipped with 1.0.
I think it's hard to claim that the competition isn't also guilty of shipping unfinished products. Take a look at the evolution of the iPhone -- all the moaning about copy+paste, multitasking as an afterthought, the fact that cross-app data sharing is still impossible under Apple's ToS, or the fact that Apple fed people a line of bullshit for nearly a year that "if you want to develop for the iPhone, make web apps."
If I was doing anything on my ADP1 when I got an incoming call, the phone would become completely unresponsive and quite warm to the touch while it tried to page out other activities in order to allow me to answer the phone.
Only about one time out of five did it actually finish whatever it was trying to do in time for me to answer the call.
I certainly wouldn't want to dictate a "long email or text message", but I do find the speech to text useful with the built in navigation, web search, and yeah, occasionally short text message replies. For example, from the Android "car dock" app, you can click voice search and say "navigate to Barnes and Nobles", etc.
When I am in the car driving, it is a great way to dictate notes to my self and others (to edit later), hands free. I end up forgetting some of those ideas when I don't get them recorded, and it's easier than going through audio recordings.
The cool thing about speech to text is that there seems to be a learning algorithm behind it, so it does just keep getting better.
My compliant about the voice features in Android isn't just accuracy but also speed. It's just too slow. I can type much faster than it can do speech-to-text. If it does mess something up going back to edit on Android is a bit clunky (nothing like the magnifying glass feature on iPhone) which slows me down even more. Apple has their Voice Control feature and bought Siri so I would imagine they're working on something. It's a feature that would be useful if it actually worked better in my opinion.
I don't disagree but I don't think it is wise to hold that against the platform. I'd much rather have it built in and refined for when processors get faster than to have Google wait for that to happen (Plus I personally find it to be fine for short messages now)
I agree, the voice speed is too slow, and it sends the data back to google for analysis each time, rather than doing it on the phone, which means if you are anywhere with less than stellar reception, or if you have limited data, it can become instantly useless. If you could download the maps for you local area, and do vocal direction searches on it, or search your phone without having to be connected to the internet, I could see myself using it a lot more. As it is, I have found that as useful as voice recognition might be, in reality it is far out-shadowed in usefulness by google gestures, which is quite simply the greatest phone app I have yet discovered. I have gestures set as one of my four taskbar apps in Cyanogen, and in the quickbar, this means that from anywhere In the phone i am only ever two touches away from it.
What google gestures does, for those who have not tried it, is to index everything in your phone, contacts, apps, songs, games, the lot. it then allows you to search through it all by drawing a full screen letter. If a single letter does not narrow the search down enough, wait a second and enter in a second letter. I have never had to enter more than three letters to have the correct item appear, backspace is back swipe, clear is forward swipe. All processing is done on the phone, results are instantaneous and every result gives the option to play, view, edit, send message, call, locate or delete right from the same window. It is genius.
I never seem to see it mentioned in android reviews, but for me this is androids killer app. Combined with swype or shapewriter it totally changed the way i interacted with my phone. Voice recognition may never reach %100, and it may require generalist AI before it does, but contextual gesture recognition is here now and it works fantastically. While iphone has some apps that perform similar task, they are all for a specific purpose, like swype but just for sending texts. Whereas android allows you to set swype as a system wide input default.
Ubiquitous seamless context sensitivity is just so beautiful, it is hard to imagine it not becoming a yardstick against which things are measured. Instead of asking if can email or skype, we may well be asking if it can detect when I'm at the movies and turn itself on silent, or adjust its brightness to match the setting, or make the heater turn on when im getting home. So much of what we use our phones for is predictable, as the sample set of your daily routine grows, your devices should be able to learn and adapt, just as its dictionary builds a lexicon of your used words, so it should build of memory of your default actions and be ready to activate proactively rather than reactively. Why should I have to hunt for the TV remote app, it knows that i am infront of the TV, and that the TV app is what I usually use when I am there, with a bit of context sensitivity the whole debate around ease of use could rightly shift from the sleek ui, to the sleek life integration, which is really where google shines.
Oh and in regards to your issue of going back and editing, I had the same issue, until I finally discovered what that seemingly superfluous trackball was for, precise letter by letter control.
>Oh and in regards to your issue of going back and editing, I had the same issue, until I finally discovered what that seemingly superfluous trackball was for, precise letter by letter control.
It's really amazing how many people don't realize this.
The trackball's actually part of why I'm holding out for a Snapdragon with a keyboard to replace my G1 - holding shift with the trackball makes block highlighting a breeze, and alt+trackball acts as a Home/End for your current line.
Google gestures sounds awful lot like iOS Spotlight - it too indexes apps, contacts, calendar and contents of some applications. Instead of full screen drawing it gives you the default keyboard. Swipe right on home screen to access it.
Well it's similar in the fact that they both search data on the device.. But gestures is an application to access the index using quick, simple gestures instead of typing. If you want to search using a keyboard (the default method) then you wouldn't start the gesture application.
You still have to navigate to the proper box and hit the speech-to-text icon. Personally I just avoid using my phone while driving. Too distracting. Upside is I now look forward to long red lights.
I have huge difficulties with the voice recognition; it really doesn't handle anything other than an american accent particularly well (I'm Australian).
My (admittedly shallow) knowledge on Android's speech recognition is that it's being done server side. In other words, I suspect the reason Apple's not doing native voice recognition on the iPhone is that they don't have the processing power (either on the phone or their servers) to do so.
Static bits of the Android UI do like pretty nice. The article hits on an extremely good point that I haven't heard enough (but strongly feel myself):
Android's UI is just nowhere near as smooth as the iPhone's. "Clunky" is the exact right word. Scrolling on the iPhone is perfect - you can tell Jobs obsessed over making it zero-lag, perfectly smooth. That makes the whole UI -feel- better. And for a lot of users - me included - that's a big deal.
Everytime I pick up an Android phone to play with it - hoping they've fixed this - my immediate impression is "wow...this doesn't scroll as well, doesn't move as smoothly, and feels like an ancient UI." It is - quite literally - like Windows XP vs. Mac OSX.
I think if they figure out a way to NAIL the UI in Android, that will close the gap significantly....
On Friday I discovered a simple thing that shows 'clunkiness' on the Android.
Basically... from the home screen drum your fingers across the screen. If you've drummed them from left to right it will interpret the multiple finger input as a single swipe from left to right and it will move the screen to the right. Drum from right to left and it will read that as a swipe to the left and will move the screen to the left.
This differs from the iPhone 3 & 4 (which I also have on my desk). On the iPhone a drum of fingers isn't interpreted as a swipe... only an actual continuous movement from one side to another would be considered a swipe. On the iPhone the first finger is counted as the input, and the others are ignored as noise. So whatever app was under the first finger of your drumming would open up.
This is a very minor thing, but it does show that the Android is misinterpreting and not handling touch input very well. The iPhone correctly determines that a drum is not a swipe, and the Android does not.
I don't have deep knowledge of how either the Android or iPhone handle gestures, so I can't comment on the internals.
As to whether it matters... well I'm using an Android and love it more than I did my iPhone. So I would argue it doesn't matter to me (I value cloud + choice above the polish). But I also wouldn't defend the Android against charges of clunkiness because it's pretty visible throughout the system.
However, using android 2.1 + JIT (sort of a pre-froyo) on an htc hero, I find scrolling almost on par with the iPhone. I imagine Nexus One's with Froyo are near-perfect.
I can't get over the fact that every single iPhone app icon has the exact same cookie cutter shine to it. It's already starting to look dated--very trendy for 2005.
Oh sweet mother of interface chaos. That screenshot doesn't even come close to the interface clutter I get on my Android when running a few apps. While backgrounding is nice, I wish developers would resist the urge of throwing an icon in that top dock-thingy for every single process running.
Requires touch-typing ability, as you hide a large amount of the display as you swype, but easily stands to be much more efficient than repeated jabbing, but it doesn't prevent specific, accurate input. I quite hope this takes over, it's a great idea.
I prefer iPhone 4's form-factor, yet I use Nexus One as my primary phone because of its seamless integration of google voice, free turn-by-turn navigation system, and built-in support for tethering.
Wifi is much more useful though, I can plug my Nexus One in so battery isn't an issue, then use any device that knows about wifi - Nintendo DS, etc etc
If you don't like the stock Android keyboard (or even if you do) I'd highly recommend trying out Swype. It's pretty damn impressive. Not perfect, but it's definitely a strong alternative.
When we rounded up a few small business people, the things they pointed out that they liked best about Android and iPhone were even more basic than Chad Fowler's report
Amazon has double the bit rate though. That may not matter to some people, but I'm not going to spend money on 128kps songs. I'm no audiophile, but there is a difference at that low of a bitrate.
As of April 2007, DRM-free iTunes songs are 256kbps AAC. Amazon MP3 is 320kbps MP3. Audio file formats are a highly-debated and subjective matter, but the consensus seems to be that “AAC is higher quality at the same bit rate, so you can use a smaller file to achieve the same quality as MP3” [1]. (Originally DRM-free songs on iTunes cost extra, but now they are the default.)
News to me, thank you. I skimmed Wikipedia to double check my figures, but I misread it. In either case, I still prefer MP3 to AAC (though converting is trivial).
It's true, but I'm willing to have my files uniquely tagged. I bought them to listen to, not to share. If someone gets my laptop, they'll have all that info anyway.
I have had an iPod since 2005 and have never purchased music from iTunes. You can purchase or rip music from anywhere and put it on any Apple device. eMusic and Amazon have been the main online music stores I have used. Many people seem to assume that Apple devices can only purchase music from Apple music stores but this has never been the case.
“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.