War of Words: Google’s Android sharpens speech-recognition in duel with Apple’s iPhone
Google fired the latest salvo in the smartphone war with Apple on Thursday, jazzing up the allure of its Android phones with new voice recognition capabilities.
Google’s new Voice Actions feature lets users of Android phones quickly send text messages, play online music or find a restaurant’s phone number by barking commands into the handset.
Anyone who’s ever been behind the wheel on a long drive, or running through an airport carrying multiple bags, will recognize the appeal of firing off a quick missive by saying something like “send text to Marlo, I’m running ten minutes late,” instead of stopping to type everything out.
Google wants to maintain Android’s reputation for voice recognition – the company said on Thursday that 25 percent of US users of Android 2.0 phones currently use voice recognition to conduct Web searches – as Apple hints at its interest in bringing speech features to the iPhone.
In April Apple bought Siri, which makes an app that allows iPhone users to do things like find restaurant address or movie listings online with voice commands.
The competition between Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android has heated up during the past year, with the two companies racing to add unique features to differentiate their respective products.
Apple has sold more than three million iPhone 4 phones – which feature special video calling technology dubbed FaceTime – since releasing the product in late June.
Google’s Nexus One muzzles the foul-mouthed
One of the most innovative features of Google’s new Nexus One is the built-in voice recognition. But there’s one major limitation that Reuters discovered while putting the smartphone through its paces: the phone is a bit of a prig.
Try uttering a curse word into the Nexus One, and the well-mannered device will automatically replace the offensive expression with a string of # symbols.
Thus, a jocular text message inquiring about a buddy’s whereabouts is transcribed as “Hey #### where are you?” on the Nexus One; A spirited rejoinder to a dubious assertion becomes “that’s bull #### and you know it.”
While perhaps not as politically charged as Google’s censorship of Internet search results in China (a practice Google recently said it will no longer engage in), this restriction of free speech for the foul-mouthed is puzzling, and somewhat inconvenient.
So why the no-curse policy? After all, what business is it of Google’s if a person chooses to be profane in their private communications?
A Google spokeswoman provided a statement suggesting that replacing curses with # symbols aimed less at enforcing etiquette than to ensure that offensive words don’t accidentally appear in transcriptions – a potential concern given the fact that voice recognition technology is still not perfect.
“We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent,” said Google.
Sounds like the Stallone movie “Demolition Man” where Stallone is brought back to life in the future and any foul language will cost you credits. Be Well!
I am deaf and do not use a telephone (Android or otherwise) and hence have never ‘texted’. If Google can really sent text to an Android phone from another phone then I might be tempted to by one. The question I have is whether many texts can be sent. The talker (who I would be looking at, say, in a restaurant) would be using an Android phone and I would also have one and be reading what they say. Is that really possible? The quality does not need to be too high simply better than my 10% recognition rate.