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Voice control. How are you finding it? Personally, I find it about as useful as a chocolate teapot. So much so that I’ve almost given up on it completely, but before I do that I wanted to give it one last chance.
The first time I used Voice Control, I was walking to work with my iPhone in my pocket and I was listening to some Coldplay, but I felt like listening to some Kaiser Chiefs instead so I thought I would test out Voice Control. I held the button on my earphones and said to it “Play music by the Kaiser Chiefs.” To my complete horror, it then replied with “Calling Doctor” and preceded to dial my GP. By the time I’d fished the iPhone out of my pocket and got my bearings enough to end the call it had rung twice. At that stage I disabled voice dialing and haven’t had the guts to switch it back on since.
Even with it being limited to just music controls, I still find it very unreliable and find that it gets commands wrong about as often as it gets them right, which isn’t a good success rate. To give it a fair go and either confirm or allay my concerns about it, I have completed a very unscientific test this evening with my wife.
I wrote down twenty commands, a mixture of dialing commands such as “Call home”, “Call work”, “Dial 09 1234567″ etc., and music commands such as “Play music by Norah Jones” and “What song is this?”. We each asked all twenty of the commands and recorded how many times it got them right. For the record, the Voice Control language settings were set to English (British), which was the default setting, and for complete disclosure I have a British accent (partially worn at the edges by the nine years I have lived here), but my wife is a kiwi and has a New Zealand accent, naturally..
For my twenty attempts, iPhone got it right just eleven times. Surprisingly, all of the nine commands it got wrong were music commands – commands like “Play songs by Coldplay” and “Play Viva La Vida”. Interestingly, for those ones it simply returned with “No match found”, yet for other commands such as “Play music by Norah Jones” it just got it plain wrong and came back with other albums or artists, or tried to dial people from my address book by mistake.
On my wife’s attempt, iPhone got it wrong on exactly the same commands as mine with just one exception, which was “Play music by Gin Wigmore”. It understood me, but didn’t understand my wife.
The commands we used for voice dialing were all successful, even the one where we spelled out an actual number to dial rather than a name. I was pretty impressed about that, but given the high fail rate in general I certainly wouldn’t rely on it and definitely wouldn’t go doing it in a situation where I couldn’t quickly and easily cancel the call if it got it wrong.
It seems to me that what Voice Control needs is the ability for the user to train it to understand their voice. The world is covered in so may varied and wonderful accents that its not surprising the poor thing gets it wrong — I’d like to see some training added in a future firmware upgrade, but something tells me that if it works fine in America then Apple won’t be in much of a hurry to fix it.
I did manage to find some hints and tips from the Apple website, and they are:
Using the microphone
- Use the built-in microphone or the microphone on the headset. Bluetooth headsets are not supported for Voice Control
- For best results when you’re using headphones with a built-in microphone, let the cord with the built-in microphone hang freely. Avoid holding the cord with the microphone or bringing it closer to your mouth. When the headphones are in your ear and the cord dangles freely, the microphone is in the optimum position.
- For best results when you’re using the built-in microphone on iPhone 3GS, hold iPhone like you were on a telephone call. If holding it in front of yourself, you can hold it up to 12 inches with the built-in microphone facing you.
- If you are using a carrying case and experiencing some issues with Voice Control, the microphone may be blocked. Try removing the carrying case.
- After you press and hold the Home button, you will be prompted by an audible tone to speak a command
- Always wait until the prompt is complete before you start speaking. Any words you speak while iPhone is giving the prompt will be ignored.
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Be ready to speak when the beep has completed. Long pauses may cause unexpected results.
- Some short names may be too similar and may be hard to distinguish by themselves. For best results with these kinds of names, try saying both the first and last name.
- If you’re having difficulties getting iPhone to recognize a particular name, try editing the contact, tap Add Field, and add a unique nick name.
- Avoid possessive names. Instead of saying “call Frank’s mobile” try “call Frank on his mobile.”
- You can play all songs in an album, playlist, or by an artist. iPhone 3GS will not recognize commands to play a particular song.
- If you can’t get iPhone to recognize the album or artist name, try telling it to play a particular playlist.
- If an artist has “The” in the name, make sure you say it.
For now I guess I’ll stick to buttons and screen taps, but how are you finding voice control? Are you having more or less luck than I am? Let me know in the comments.
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I have found it impossible to use so gave up on it too!!
Ill try some of the tips however.
Thanks for the useful review
(psychrn has made 108 comments)
It’s getting better for me too, given though that I have an American accent. It was always getting Liam Finn wrong so I decided to ask it “what song is this” and I found out that it was pronouncing it “Lie-am Finn”, now when I ask it to play “Lie-am Finn” it gives me what I want.
(moviemichael has made 50 comments)
I also found it completely useless unless I used an American (or English) accent, depending on the global region setting. It also kept dialing random contact numbers. They should have included a more granular option to specifically disable Voice Control phone dialling.
(nzsnowman has made 3 comments)
Related but unrelated, the new SingStar karaoke games on PlayStation 3 allow voice control by way of 4Mb update (tiny?).
I haven’t really formally tested, but the software seems to easily pick up basic commands without any training whatsoever (advance, back, select, etc.), and can seem to pick up the names of bands/songs too.
Again, this is without training, and added with a 4Mb update and it left me very surprised what is achieveable.
(ahmad has made 73 comments)
I can’t remember if I set it to American or if it came that way (I bought the phone hear from Vodafone) but it is set to American now.
It would be nice if it was smart enough announce callers, but I did read a clever workaround: someone had set up Automator to create an individual ringtone with a voice announce for every single user in the address book, then they just linked the appropriate ringtones to the individual contacts. Unfortunately that wouldn’t be able to be turned on or off so that it only happens when you’re wearing headphones, etc.
(moviemichael has made 50 comments)
Wow -getting the hang of this now-managing to get it to play artists much better.
Calling contact list people is a bit hit and miss however!!
(psychrn has made 108 comments)
Michael — did you buy your iPhone here? If so have you left it set to the default English (British) or did you switch it to English (American)?
One other thing I forgot to mention in the article — since iPhone now has the ability to 'talk' it would be awesome if it could announce who is calling when you have your headphones on and your iPhone in your pocket. I hate not knowing who is calling and having to answer the call blind!
It took a while, but I'm now happy to use Voice control. Mainly a case of using the correct commands in my case. I find "Dial" works fine but "Call" almost always gets it wrong. Also if you're using the earphones and voice control gets it wrong, just a single click on the control cancels that command
(Leong has made 1 comment)
hello
this is my very first comment to leave here as i am your new member:)
im finding difficult to use the voice control but getting better.
thank you for finding the tips!
(lytower has made 2 comments)
I came here to search for comments on this issue since finding how hopeless this function was (especially compared to my previous Nokia) with my in-car Bluetooth unit.
I couldn't believe how bad it was. Will try the tips but not holding my breath. (Hey, maybe that's the problem…)
First going to try and find the dialect setting.
Thanks guys.
(Eediot has made 1 comment)