3 comments

  • dlcarrier 2 hours ago

    In 2008, I had a Nokia phone running Symbian that had a pretty janky graphical interface on a tiny resistive touch screen, but the voice commands were far more useful than any phone I've seen since.

    Changing the brightness was a chore, that required holding the power button more than half a second but less than one second, to bring up the menu. Hold it for too short and the phone would lock, or for too long and the phone would shut down completely. From the menu, there was a settings option, then brightness, which finally brought up a slider.

    Using voice prompts, was much easier though, which made sense at the time, because it was a phone. I often used it from a helmet intercom, while riding a motorcycle, with the phone packed away in my luggage. I could press the button on the intercom, then say a command like "Call Sue Mason" and it would usually respond with "Call Sue Mason mobile" but sometimes with something like "Call Sam Isleton home", and I could respond accordingly, before placing the call. I could also say something like "Navigate to 132 Larch Street, Springfield, East Virginia", and get a similar confirmation, then turn-by-turn directions.

    With modern phones, the have huge capacitive touch screens and somewhat better navigation menus, but they'll just call Sam Isleton without a chance to stop it, or bring up navigation with an on-screen button to continue, so it's completely useless without interacting with the display.

    I feel bad for anyone who's blind. I usually navigate web pages with a keyboard, because it's faster, even though I'm perfectly capable of using a mouse. A bunch of web pages have started hijacking keyboard navigation for accessibility overlays, which make everything far more difficult to use. I ended up adding the overlay hosts to my add block, but found it hilarious that they're so reviled that there's a Chrome extension just to block them: https://www.accessibyebye.org/

  • ben_w 4 hours ago

    Sounds (no pun intended) about right to me.

    Every so often, I notice the same happening on Google Translate. (Or equivalent errors, like "Do you speak English?" becoming "Parles-tu français?"). Google Translate is, of course, the product that the Transformer model was invented for.

  • kykat 4 hours ago

    I haven't used transcription, but in a similar way, I think DeepL translation got worse. Now it always makes the translation more formal, "professional", and gives everything the "LLM voice".