alt Hacker NewsI have a lot of issues with dictation as well which I feel has gotten much worse as it gets "smarter." It used to take literal dictation & I could say "comma" "period" etc. to insert punctuation. Now it tries to guess when commas or full stops should be added and it's horrible. If I pause to take a breath it puts a comma or period, sometimes entirely changing the meaning of the sentence.
Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.
What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?
Replies
It's extremely painful that there's are free, OSS dictation tools that can run on-device, that are so much better than Apple's dictation, and yet it's quite difficult to use them on the iPhone. I'm referring to Whispr. Microphone access is a pain for custom keyboards -- for good reason, but still.
Same frustration here. It’s somewhat painful for me to type but using dictation on the iphone is so terrible I prefer the physical pain.
As for names, I an also baffled. Most people in my family have either a Brazilian Portuguese or German name, but my work life is in English, so guess what, no getting anyone’s name right!
I still use spoken punctuation and it works ok so long as you don’t pause. E.g. “ hey siri text my wife I’m not sure when I’ll be home comma but I’ll text you when I’m leaving” if I say that without pausing, it puts the comma in the right place
I struggled with family member names too until I realized I can create shortcuts for them (usually just their initials). Now I just type the shortcut and it always works. Joy!
Here's a recent conversation I had with Siri.
Me: Hey Siri, set the living room lights to 100%.
Siri: 100% = 1
This has been working for 6-7 years without any issues, and suddenly Siri is giving me math lessons. What the hell is happening in this company?