I recently penned a quick piece on Apple’s (AAPL) Siri and Google’s (GOOG) new voice command support in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, explaining that while there are undoubtedly issues to iron out, services like these are going to change the way we interact with devices. But people are still fed up with Siri, and rightfully so says David Pogue in the latest issue of Scientific American. “We’re used to consumer technology that works every time: e-mail, GPS, digital cameras,” he wrote. “Dictation technology that relies on cellular Internet, though, only sort of works. And that can be jarring to encounter in this day and age.”
Pogue goes on to say that while we have grown accustomed to things that just work, people are not seeing the forest for the trees. These technologies are only just emerging, and we shouldn’t “throw the Siri out with the bathwater.” The virtual assistant portion of Siri works very well and the dictation portion will get there soon enough.
“Free-form cellular dictation is a not-there-yet technology,” Pogue notes. “But as an interface for controlling our electronics, it makes the future of speech every bit as bright as Siri promised a year ago.”
