Voice Activated Assistants

[jeffkinn]

Mobile phones come with voice activated assistants these days. iPhones have Siri, Windows phones are getting Cortana and Android devices have a variety of options including Google Now.

I now have an iPhone and I do use Siri. I primarily use it in the car with the phone on a holder attached to an air vent and connected to the cigarette lighter for power. I activate the device by saying 'Hey Siri' and, once it has responded, I can instruct the phone to dial a contact, read an unread email or message or compose a new message and send it. It's a very useful function.

Even when I'm holding the phone I'll use Siri to look up certain things for me like the weather, or the time in a specific country of location.  I'll also use Siri to set alarms or timers on the clock.

It can be amusing to ask odd or unusual questions. For instance, if I say to Siri 'I love you!' it replies with 'I bet you say that to all of your Apple products'.

The big downside of all of these voice activated programs is the requirement for a data connection. If you are in an area where the data connection is slow they simply don't work.

The OK Google facility on Android phone and tablets is equally useful and devices that support the Ok Google keywords don;t need to be connected to a power source.

Who else uses a voice activated digital assistant? What experiences do you have with them?

[hrym]

I don't use voice assistants much, mainly because I don't use my phone in the car (I normally have someone with me) and I feel rather self-concious using one in public.   Generally speaking, I don't find it much slower just to open an app  - though I'll conceed that saying "OK Google. Navigate to..." is a lot quicker than fiddling with Maps.

I first started using voice dialling on my Nokia 6310 and it worked well, but only with pre-recorded voice tags, of which (as I remember) it could store six.   My Symbian-based Nokia N78 was much more flexible.   Say "Call John Smith mobile" and it would find the correct contact and line and make the call.   It had a pretty much 100% accuracy rate.   Then I moved to Android, with a Samsung Galaxy S2 on Gingerbread.   Voice dialling on that was pathetic.   If you could get it to bring up the right contact - it had some very strange ideas - all it would do was show the list of numbers available, so you still had to tap.   OK if the phone was in a holder on the dash, not if it was in your pocket (I was using a headset).

When Google Now rolled out, I gave it a try and was impressed.   Voice recognition is spot-on and it'll make calls reliably once you've given it permission to access your contacts.   To get the full Siri experience, using it direct from the homescreen, you need to have the Google launcher.  Otherwise, it's an upward swipe from the Home button.   One limitation to this is that a number of manufacturers have hijacked this gesture and added their own apps to that, instead of a simple upward swipe, you have to go up and to one side with some degree of accurancy.  Not something that's always easy to achieve in a moving vehicle.

Another option is Indigo Virtual Assistant.   This is similar to Google Now and requires you to open an app to operate.  Like all the other assistants, it requires a data connection and also an account, so that's somewhere else that's recording your usage, which may be a consideration.

[jeffkinn]

It isn't only phones that have voice activated assistants. A lot of cars have them as well. For instance, this week I'm driving a hire car Volvo and it has voice activated commands. I can use it to call contacts, find places on built in Sat Nav etc.

In my normal car at home I have a third party bluetooth Parrot hands free system installed and when a call comes in I can say 'Accept' or 'Reject' to answer or not.

[Ellis_VF]

I've started to use voice a lot more of late, mainly because I've found them to be getting more and more accurate. I find that they now work really well for text input for sending messages or for social media. I've found that this is especially beneficial in cold weather as I can send texts without having to take off my gloves.

I've also had fun testing out how it responds to different accents. Recently we got a few friends with different local dialects together and seeing how the same message came out. Surpisingly it handled them quite well and only stumbled over a couple of words. Considering how different a thick Brummie or Black country (aka Yam yam) accent sounds to someone from the Potteries, it was quite impressive.

[hrym]

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@jeffkinn wrote:

It isn't only phones that have voice activated assistants. A lot of cars have them as well.

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My wife's grandfather had one of the first cars in his part of Devon.  It wasn't a success and he landed up in the duck pond because, more used to horses, he had this habit of shouting "whoa" when he wanted it to stop.  Voice command would have saved him!

[63johnw]

Slightly (only a little bit) off topic, but irecently invested in an Asus Zenwatch Android Wear watch.

A lot of that can be voice controlled. I havent had the courage to use the voice stuff much yet (havent plucked up the courage to walk down the street talking to my watch !) but what I have tried seemed quite good, asking for navigation (handy when walking in strange town/city), google searches etc. are good. Tried the odd text and it was quite good considering my north east accent.

I think in the coming years this may take off, especially with the iwatch (or whatever it will be called coming soon).

:smileyhappy:

[jeffkinn]

Assume as slapped wrisdt for calling it the iWatch. It's the Apple Watch.

[Getafix]

I have used Voice commands in the Car since 2010.

I have started using it on Note 4 as finding it really very accurate.

[Ellis_VF]

What I want to know is do we have a preference for any of the voice activated clients? Is Siri the best, has Google done enough to get that title or has newcomer Cortana shown proven her worth?

[jeffkinn]

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@ellis wrote:

What I want to know is do we have a preference for any of the voice activated clients? Is Siri the best, has Google done enough to get that title or has newcomer Cortana shown proven her worth?

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That question, which is a good one, implies that the inclusion or absence of a particular type of voice assistant could influence the decision making process. Will someone buy a Windows Phone because of Cortana? Or an iPhone because of Siri?