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How is the speech to text function for the Evo?

sweteg

Member
May 23, 2010
71
10
Hey, I'm going to be new to the Android (coming from iPhone for a few years, but I have an iPad now that makes my iPhone usage strictly for calls/texts now). One of the many features that I was really interested in is the speech to text. Can anyone give input or a review of how well that works, especially for texts? Thanks in advance!
 
You can try it out right now. Go download the Google app for the iPhone. You can do speech-to-text searching in that app. It's the same basic function as on the Android.

Yeah, I've used that before. It's alright, but not really meant to be used but for a few words I believe. I remember watching youtube videos on people showing a demo of it with the Nexus One (speech to text function). It looked like it worked pretty well. Wasn't sure if it might be even better on the Evo.
 
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Yeah, I've used that before. It's alright, but not really meant to be used but for a few words I believe. I remember watching youtube videos on people showing a demo of it with the Nexus One (speech to text function). It looked like it worked pretty well. Wasn't sure if it might be even better on the Evo.
Both apps have the voice recognition being done on Google's backend servers. The phones themselves aren't doing the voice recognition functions, they're simply recording your voice and uploading it to Google. Then Google's server farm crunches away at the audio file and spits back the text. So, it doesn't make sense for them to have one set of servers of VR for the Google iPhone app and another set for Android. I'm betting they all use the same server farms and algorithms.

The 4G network on the EVO should help though because upload speeds are drastically faster by all accounts. So, the audio file containing your speech should upload faster and you'll get the results faster.
 
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Oh good deal. I never thought about how it might works. I was guessing maybe the hardware affected it to an extent. It's nice on the Android because the function is integrated into the keyboard for use with multiple programs. There's a Dragon app that works really well for speech to text on Apple store, but pointless for texts because you would have to copy it from within the app itself then open messaging and paste it in there. I'll be excited to test it on on the Evo to see if that's something I can use repeatedly.
 
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Whenever I try to use the speech to text the first time on any application, it does not pick up my voice. You know how the microphone fills with color as it picks up your voice when it works? Well, it does not do this the first time I use it in any application. Here's an example:
When sending a text message, I hit the microphone icon to start speech to text. I begin talking, but the microphone does not pick anything up. I can wait a second and start talking again and it has a 50% chance of picking up the audio. So instead, I just cancel it and start it over. Once it starts over, it picks up the audio right away and the mic fills w/color as it should.
This happens ALL the time and is very frustrating.

I tried it on someone else's EVO and he is not having this problem. I thought it could be Advanced Task Killer, but it's not.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Any ideas on what could be causing this?

Thanks!
 
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Whenever I try to use the speech to text the first time on any application, it does not pick up my voice. You know how the microphone fills with color as it picks up your voice when it works? Well, it does not do this the first time I use it in any application. Here's an example:
When sending a text message, I hit the microphone icon to start speech to text. I begin talking, but the microphone does not pick anything up. I can wait a second and start talking again and it has a 50% chance of picking up the audio. So instead, I just cancel it and start it over. Once it starts over, it picks up the audio right away and the mic fills w/color as it should.
This happens ALL the time and is very frustrating.

I tried it on someone else's EVO and he is not having this problem. I thought it could be Advanced Task Killer, but it's not.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Any ideas on what could be causing this?

Thanks!

I noticed the same thing too. At first, I thought it was just because I was talking "at the screen" and not directly into the mic on the bottom. I started talking directly into the mic, and still nothing. I was even yelling at it, and not a peep was registering on the screen.
 
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I like the feature! It has picked up a whole sentence with quite a few words with no problem. There's settings for it for how quick it picks up your words. I have it at Normal so just speak normally. Not too fast or slow. Most of the time it is accurate.

I remember when I was trying to text my cousin "is game 6 tonight", referring to the Stanley Cup, it spit out "want to have gay sex tonight". I almost died laughing. LOL!! I was driving at the time so it seems it did not pick it up clearly.

And I've noticed it won't spit back cuss words. It will just give you #### symbols.
 
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I noticed the same thing too. At first, I thought it was just because I was talking "at the screen" and not directly into the mic on the bottom. I started talking directly into the mic, and still nothing. I was even yelling at it, and not a peep was registering on the screen.

OK, so this is not an isolated problem. Here's hoping that it's a software thing and not a hardware issue. I'm thinking about doing a hard reset and seeing if it has any effect.

Thanks for the replies.
 
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Hey, I'm going to be new to the Android (coming from iPhone for a few years, but I have an iPad now that makes my iPhone usage strictly for calls/texts now). One of the many features that I was really interested in is the speech to text. Can anyone give input or a review of how well that works, especially for texts? Thanks in advance!

hey i'm going into the android coming from my phone for a few years but i have a nice pad now that makes my iphone usage strictly for calls texts now. 1 of the many features that i was really interested in the speech to text. can anyone give input for a review of how well that works specially for tax?thanks in advance!

The above was dictated with speech to text directly from my EVO. Obviously it doesn't do CAPS or commas and other punctuation like ! (it does do periods if you say "period") I made no edits, just added ? and ! manually. Interesting that on the two different cases of the word 'iphone' it gets it once right but the other time ends up as 'my phone'
 
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