iPhone 3GS Voice Control Glitches Recalls Newton Handwriting Woes
11:29 pm, June 23rd, 2009, Pete Mortensen
Besides its (much-needed and noticeable) speed bump, the new iPhone 3GS offers only three exclusive features over its predecessors. There’s the extremely well-executed video editing, the promising but presently limited compass, and the voice control app.
And, surprising no one, the voice program is the only one of the three that isn’t ready for prime time. Why? Because voice recognition programs suck. Based on the challenges facing the 3GS, a truly foolproof voice interface is about as close to arriving as a mind-power interface. Having never owned a Newton, I have the distinct pleasure of playing with an advanced Apple technology that really doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s almost exciting!
Let’s get out the good first. When the app works, it does a pretty good job. On about 3 out of 10 efforts, it has actually done what I asked (more than any previous voice dialing app I’ve ever tried). Another third of the time, it did the function I wanted but with the wrong content (it placed a phone call, but to my mom, not my wife). And then 40 percent of the time, it just did something crazy and frustrating, like shutting down and locking the screen or, when I asked it to “Call Bruce,” it began to play a Sonic Youth song.
So there you go, a 30 percent hit rate of actual usefulness. Which is about 69 percent below the rest of the iPhone’s functionality — even the AT&T-dependent parts. Though I’ve owned an iPhone for all of 56 hours, I’m typing like a pro now, much faster than I ever managed on a BlackBerry. Every part of the iPhone experience that’s supposed to be questionable is actually brilliant.
Which just makes the voice control app’s flaws that much more prominent — it’s like a holdover from a Moto Razr that somehow snuck onto my iPhone. It’s not even good enough to use in the car — too great a risk of calling the wrong person. Honestly, I think it’s as good of an example as you can find for the overall difficulties with making voice-anything bullet-proof and reliable. Too many vocal variations, accents, and possible disruptions to ever be as good as what Apple shoots for.
Still, it’s hardly a downside to owning a 3GS — you can pull it out at parties and amuse your friends as it screws up. It’s like the first-generation Newton’s handwriting recognition all over again. Ian is riding a taste sensation, indeed!
Posted by Pete Mortensen in iPhone 3G S | Comment on this article
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I keep reading about how ’snappy’ the 3GS is. Tonight, I finally made it out to an Apple store to play with one… and guess what? The ’snappiness’ is most certainly overrated. I’m one of those MacHeads who was furious that I couldn’t buy the phone at the much touted low prices, but after playing with it I feel much better. There are basically two functions that I’d be buying the phone for that my current phone doesn’t have: the video and the focusable lens. They want to charge me $200 more than the most advertised prices. That’s a hundred bucks a button.
I walked away, knowing that I can certainly wait for the next phone.
JAYnLA, on June 24th, 2009 at 12:15 am
EDITOR’S NOTE: Michael can’t watch his mouth, so his bad words have been replaced, in caps, with his true feelings.
so because you have a 30% success rate, that means that everyone else has the same amount of success? how self centered. i’m not sure if you have an accent. i’m not sure if the article even mentions it – i stopped reading about halfway through – but you look british. (read: like a SUAVE, HANDSOME MAN)
I have an American accent and have 100% success with the voice control. Except when I’m in the car and the air conditioner fools the phone into thinking I am still talking. I am so ENTHUSIASTICALLY tired of people like you who criticize Apple when they try to implement some really cool 1.0 feature and it doesn’t work 100% of the time for everybody. Yes, it’s pretty limited with the commands it takes, but it will improve. It doesn’t mean you need to shoot them down or compare it to the Newton. Guess what, MY PERSONAL HERO? The Newton was way before its time, and that’s part of the reason that people still use them today. A mobile phone that can take voice commands without having to send that data over the network first to parse it is revolutionary, no matter what MODEL CITIZENS like you think.
>too great a risk of calling the wrong person.
that’s why there is a cancel button, GENIUS. jesus you are MY SAVIOR. you should probably get a refund for the iPhone and go back to the blackberry. you won’t be missed.
michael, on June 24th, 2009 at 12:47 am
Hi,
I got my 3GS in Spain on launch day. I had serious doubts about how Voice Control would work in spanish (Voice Over for Mac OS X doesn’t even exist in spanish).
I must say I was quite surprised about the reliability of the feature. I’d say it gets it right about 70% of the time.
It doesn’t seem to know the difference between spanish and english music titles though, so you have to pronounce everything ” spanishy”
Pablo, on June 24th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Totally agree with your article. I’m from Northern Ireland and voice recognition has trouble understanding my accent. Hopefully apple will update this issue in the next firmware release. It would be good to teach your iPhone voice commands, that way the issues you wrote about wouldnt be as frequent.
Chris, on June 24th, 2009 at 2:29 am
I was kicking the tires on the 3GS in a crowded, somewhat noisy retail store, and the Voice Control worked flawlessly for me, with my “typical” North American accent.
Brian, on June 24th, 2009 at 6:36 am
@Chris…..
Haha…..leave the iPhone alone. I’m from Southern Ireland. We have issues understanding you guys too!!
ElectoBoy, on June 24th, 2009 at 6:48 am
That’s weird, I have had 100% success with my Voice Control, from in the house with headphones, to walking around on a busy downtown evening, to in the car with the windows down going 65. It always knows just what I want to do and gets it done. The only time it messed up and told me no match found for an artist I had played many times, I realized I accidentally deleted them from my phone. My only complaint is that I can’t get it to play individual songs, but I can wait for a software update.
Calvin, on June 24th, 2009 at 8:01 am
I have had great success with the Voice Control app. The first time I used it, it did not function correctly, but I realized later that I hadn’t given the app enough time to ask me which number to call. Once I slowed down a little, it has worked perfectly.
Scott, on June 24th, 2009 at 8:04 am
Agreed that voice activated anything will probably never work, given the fact that the English language is being murdered everyday. Being in New Jersey, even I have some problems with understanding words that are pronounced that I know should have an “R” at the end of them.
Scott, on June 24th, 2009 at 8:43 am
I’ve had great success with the Voice Control app. It only missed once for me and that one I think I garbled a little. This is a very valuable app.
Overall I’m am very impressed with the new iPhone. The speed is truly awesome. Map’s update very quickly. It would be nice to have voice control over Google Maps to make that work better when you’re driving.
John, on June 24th, 2009 at 10:10 am
“Why? Because voice recognition programs suck”
Technically, it’s speech recognition… and yes many speech recognition applications can, and often do suck. But it is not because it the problem can’t be solved. Ignorance of the problem domain seems to be the most common source of poor performance. In the case of the iPhone there is more than enough computational horsepower and audio processing quality to allow for good recognition. But by choosing a speaker independent system with no capacity for training, it is inherently limited by the size/scope/quality of their chosen acoustic model. It is going to have poor results for any accents not well represented in the model, and even for neutral accents the recognition rate can still be low enough to be useless.
I work for a company that makes rugged, portable, wireless speech recognition hardware (the guts of which are similar to the average smartphone) and software used in industrial applications. The workers using these systems are using them full time, no keyboards, no displays, 8hrs a day, day in day out, unaffected by language or accent, and in extremely unfriendly acoustical environments (warehouses, factory floors, freezers, etc…) We’ve been doing it for 20 years.
If Apple wanted to, they could make this work.
Mark Denovich, on June 24th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Someone should delete the offensive (double) comments by “michael” above. I’m a brit, but don’t have an accent at all and I am pretty offended by him referring to all brits as “tards.”
Dear “michael,” while you are spilling your crap all over everyone else and calling the kettle black, you might want to look in a mirror to see what a waste of space you yourself appear to be.
Also, while some brits do have thick accents (“brit” covers several different countries in case you didn’t know, each with multiple regional dialects), an English person (which I am), who has been taught proper English is actually by definition *not* speaking with an accent given that, you know … The English people actually *invented* English sorta. :rolleyes
It’s the American’s that speak the US *variant* of English that are the ones with the weird accents most of the time even though most “brits” are too polite to mention it. So learn a little respect why don’t cha mister “murican.”
Gazoobee, on June 24th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
I have had great success with the calling features, but very limited success with using the voice control for iTunes functions. I get errors, it plays the wrong artist or song or, more often, it just does nothing, closes the voice control screen and goes to the home screen. It’s a cool function that, for me, isn’t working very well. But the voice dialing is really the important part for me and so I’m only mildly disappointed. I’m guessing the next update will straighten out some of the voice issues – I am sure they are aware of them.
Incidentally, I have better success when I use the microphone in the new headphones than when I talk into the phone itself.
Jean, on June 24th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
I have used voice calling over 100 times for both dialing a contacts and numbers. With over 390 contacts on my phone, it has never failed to dial the correct number.
Not sure what your talking about Willis…
Chris, on June 24th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
You have to be stone cold sober to use Voice Control. Get your drinking problem under control and you’ll have better luck. Until then, you need to talk to your mother more than your wife anyway.
Lefthanded Eggbeater, on June 25th, 2009 at 8:34 am
My Iphone gets my voice commands correct about 10% of the time. I wish I had even your 30% success rate. I think the feature is horrible.
sean, on June 25th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Oh yes, voice control. I remember trying to play chess via speech control on Mac OS X about five years ago. It sucked then, and it still sucks now.
I even downloaded the app that’s suppose to recognize the hit song you hear come up on the radio and don’t know who it is by. Yeah, that didn’t work either.
mattmattmatt, on June 25th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
I upgraded to 3GS last week and so far I have never had success in making voice control play a song. Call have worked at most with 20% of success. I had not think about the accent issue and, by reading the comments in this thread, I changed the Voice control to French, but still Voice Control doesn’t work for me.
max, on June 27th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
I agreed until I read this. There are word cues that have to be spoken for it to understand you. Such as “Play artist xxxx” not just “Play xxxx”. It works a little better if you know how to phrase your requests.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/how-to/#basics.voice-control
Also If your complaining about not getting the full discount on the new iphone because you haven’t had your 3g a year yet go complain to the AT&T employees they have the ability to give you the full discount.
Brad, on June 27th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
I agree, it hasn’t been very accurate at all so far, but I haven’t had it long. I was surprised to find there is no training mechanism to account for accents and the like…sometimes it’s a complete miss, not even close. There should also be an option to record names for people in your contact list. For example, my boyfriend might be listed as his full name in my contacts, but I might want to call him via a nickname with voice control.
I’m Australian, the woman’s voice on the voice control is English, and the Americans on here are saying they seem to get good results…god knows what accent I’m meant to fake to get it to work.
Anita, on June 27th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Ha, and in addition, got excited when I went to the link posted by Brad re the commands (thanks Brad) and I found that you can adjust language and sometimes dialect via the settings panel:
“Change language or country:
In Settings, choose General > International > Voice Control and tap the language or country. By default, Voice Control expects you to speak voice commands in the language that’s set for iPhone (the General > International > Language setting). The Voice Control settings let you change the language for speaking voice commands. Some languages are available in different dialects or accents.”
…However, I found, to my disappointment that there was no setting for Australian English; only British English, U.S. and Canadian…the ignorance astounds me.
Looks like my easiest answer is to get a proper English accent on to get it working. I don’t know what the solution is for those heartland Aussies who epitomise Australian drawl…
Anita, on June 27th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
I have found the voice control useless and given up on it. I have a clear speaking voice and found about 90% of the time it gets it wrong.
Ross, on July 1st, 2009 at 5:12 am
My phonebook is composed of names in different languages (what’s worse, names in Chinese and English which sounds very much alike), and my iPhone has not been successful in understanding who in which continent I am referring to so far.
Sean, on July 3rd, 2009 at 7:44 am
Voice commands work fine for me >90% of the time. Occasionally if I don’t speak clearly or loudly enough it will do the wrong thing, but I’ve found when I speak slowly, clearly, and loudly it works just fine even in a noisy environment like my car. I think it’s designed to recognize specifically American English. For a first version it works very well.
bcb, on July 5th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
The app has no context built into it ,like play beatles should be obvious what to do.
jim, on July 6th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
Apple voice control sucks. The voice dialing app on my Blackberry worked much much better.
James, on August 4th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
I thought it really sucked too, at first. It seems to work better with certain terms, Like “ipod” followed by”Lifehouse”(song title) or “Gravity” (play list title) is accurate about 95% of the time for me. Any other “play album…artist… etc.” command never worked. “Call” “Person’s Name” seems to work well too. West Coast accent.
I’m still not sure it’s worth the money for other reasons- like subscription costs.
Nikia, on August 10th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
I upgraded fom an i phone 3g, to an i phone 3gs, & i have had 2 phones in the matter of days, & all the problems are with the voice control, the fist one was fine with commands with calling people, but could not cope atall with playing any music, & when asked to do that, it just called anyone!, usually people i didn’t want to talk to!, anyway!, the 2nd phone, couldn’t cope with either calling( i asked it to call say: brian, & it would just call ANYBODY!!!!, & if you asked it to play any music, it just called anyone!!, nightmare!.
o2 tell me, they have never heard of any complainets against the voice control, & i have just been very unlucky, & they will send me out a 3rd phone!!, lets hope its 3rd time lucky & works
I had another thought!, i wonder if it has anything to do with my old sim card, should o2 send me another one, as i’m on a 3gs, instead of a 3g!, i shouldn’t think that would make any differance, o2 woukd had know that.
any comments,ideas?, thanks
k.letton, on November 22nd, 2009 at 3:56 am
I bought an iPhone 3GS last week, it’s my first iPhone. It’s absolutely amazing! I love it and can’t stop playing with it. Games, music, apps, the web, everything on it just far better than I ever dreamed it would be on a portable device. The fact that it’s a phone and email tool as well is just so great
I love it.
The one and only thing I’m not impressed with is the voice control. I have a little google app which you press and then speak and it finds the webpage. It works about 90% of the time for me and I love it. But the voice control that is built in to the iPhone to make calls and find albums, is really useless to me. It just doesn’t work well. I have a very clear voice but I will say, “Play Black Sabbath” and it starts playing The Red Hot Chili Peppers which couldn’t sound more different… So I’m not impressed with that. I hope they improve it with a download or something in the future. Other than that though, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever bought.
Jim, on December 8th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
I bought a 3GS and added about one dozen names to Contacts. The voice control worked just fine. But then I added the contact list from work to the contacts, and accuracy dropped 90%. My question: is it possible to limit the voice control function to a subset of Contacts (such as the “All on My iphone” list) or Favorites to limit mistakes? I really only use the voice control for a few names.
Bill, on December 22nd, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I don’t have an accent, well some would say I have a Canadian accent, and I have had little success with Voice Dialing. I’ve tried to voice dial a contact and had a song play instead, I’d say my contact matches are correct 20-30% of the time. I don’t thing Voice Dialing would be as bad if Apple would have added a confirmation and no, hitting cancel is not a solution. Microsoft’s Voice Command from WIndows Mobile 2 years ago works much better, you don’t even have to specify mobile or home call since it asks you which you’d like once you have a successful match.
Anyone who says it works 100% needs to stop being brain washed by Big Brother.
RobR, on January 1st, 2010 at 2:22 pm
For me Voice Control is very reliable. Not for choosing music, mind you, but for calling people in my native language (German). I’d say I get a hit rate of about 98 percent.
I would love to be able to change the language of music tags in iTunes so I could make better use of that feature with the iPod.
Sascha, on January 12th, 2010 at 5:46 am