Offline Voice Commanding for Android
Something impressive is brewing in XDA (as usual), basic voice recognition that does not require you to be online in order to relay your speech and its transcription to and from Google in order to do whatever you tell it to do. I’m struggling to come up with many scenarios in which you’d want to be able to command your phone to do certain things offline, can’t really call anyone without a signal, and though I suppose depending on the signal and how long your command is the turnaround time on the recognition of this could be better, Google’s always going to be better at accurate recognition through that cloud of theirs.
At the moment it’s a zip you need to flash with root. Two developers here, 89luca89 who cooked the core of this up somehow and nitro-ale who’s been making it compatible on all devices and is also working to make an APK (possibly not requiring root) out of it with a bluetooth trigger, but this is impressive enough, a couple XDA guys cooking up an offline voice recognition thing possibly from scratch, to hit you with now and not wait for it to mature further. Maybe some of you could offer up a suggestion — here’s the thread.
Or you could just get an iPhone.
Doug Simmons
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Doug Simmons
Biographical info.. hmm. I have a history of not being able to strike the balance between what is "safe" to put into these forms and what is, in my mind at least, funny. Can't do it.
file this under “oh…really? why wasn’t it like this from the get go?”
What happens when you start dictating emails into your Windows Mobile and now your Windows Phone phones?
Or what happens if you run into someone who really needs to communicate with you but only speaks Japanese, how well would your Windows Phone be able to interpret what he’s saying (saying, not typing) to translate it to English for you?
Now that i have draggith you out with your sword so sharp! i shall embrace the iphone user inside me and simply say “thats stupid…im from brooklyn…where the fuck do you see japanese people?!” 🙂
Right around the corner, Japanese restaurant with actual authentic Japanese owners and waitresses, some of whom might want to double check with me that I want nothing but toro and hot sake using an iPhone or Google phone equipped with Google’s cloud voice recognition and translation technology.
Toro ain’t cheap. Gotta make sure she has that down correctly.
I really hope this happens. My 4 year old HTC Diamond running Windows Mobile 6.0 has offline voice recognition. I may not be able to dictate to it like Froyo’s attempt (which is 50% accurate at the most in my experience) but it COULD call anyone in my contact list, tell me the time of my next appointment, callback, redial, etc – all without a single training session needed.
Recording, compressing, uploading, transcribing, downloading then interpreting just seems dam clumsy to me.
Additionally, the transcriber has no frame of reference as it doesn’t have access to my contact list so when I say “Roland McDaniels” and it hears “Ronald McDonald” it can’t check to see if I have a contact called that before settling on it.
Very disappointed as I really want to go Android!
@Bob: Addendum: Doug you say “I’m struggling to come up with many scenarios in which you’d want to be able to command your phone to do certain things offline, can’t really call anyone without a signal”. Not everyone is on a tariff free data connection and cellular connectivity doesn’t necessarily mean internet access. I live in the Caribbean and data here is bloody awful.
“Google’s always going to be better at accurate recognition through that cloud of theirs”. Have you tried the dictating to an Android phone? My buddy had the NexusOne. We spent an afternoon trying to get it to call the right people, send an intelligible text, etc. It’s so bad he went and bought the Venue Pro and the Nexus one sits in the box in his apartment, crying itself to sleep at night, waiting for a plausible voice command update.