TiPb Video: iPhone 3G S Multilingual Voice Control Challenge
Throwing any last remnants of fragile self-consciousness to the four winds, I break out my subpar French and very rusty Italian and Mandarin Chinese (Aiya!) and see if, even under the onslaught of terrible accents, Apple’s new iPhone 3G S Voice Control can still do as it’s told.
Note: the accent appears to be key. If you say a command in French, you can’t pronounce the following name English-style and expect good results (though Chinese seemed much more English name tolerant). However, I tried some (poorly rendered) regional accents at the very end and that didn’t seem to be a problem.
If you’re multilingual, or have a colorful twang to your speech, give it a try and let us know how Voice Control works for you!
June 20th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Video has been removed by user.
June 20th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Why do the YouTube links on this site never work? And what happened to the iPhone version of the site?
June 20th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Why has it been removed.
June 20th, 2009 at 11:11 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od0xBzV-HUk
here it is
June 20th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Fixed, sorry!
June 20th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Which version of iTunes must be installed so as not to cause a problem with quickpwn 3.0 (jailbreak) once it is released?
June 20th, 2009 at 11:40 am
LOL, didn’t know he could speak so many languages.
If people are having trouble with the recognition, I’m sure Apple will hear about it and get a fix going on, everything looks good right now though.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
That was a pretty awesome test!
@Rene Are there a large number of contacts in your phone?
It would be interesting to do a voice control test with a large contact list to see if there are any issues…with my previous smartphone (Treo 650), voice commands were thwarted by similar sounding names in my contact list. I think this may have been one of the issues with the earlier version of the Google app, too.
Commands like “call” and “play” are going to be much easier, even with accents because those commands are one of very few options preset on the iPhone. But what if you say, “Call Evenson”? Historically you would get “Stevenson” or even “Stephanie” as a contact. I don’t know if there would be the same issue for a large music library, but contacts have traditionally been susceptible.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
It distinguished Rene Ritchie from Ronnie Ritchie (my uncle) with no problem. If it gets confused, it tells you there are multiple possibilities and asks you to choose. Should have included that in the video, sorry
June 20th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Is that a frontfacing camera on your iPhone? Or is that just one of those three sensors? Just curious
June 20th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
It will also recognize Klingon…
June 20th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Immmmmpressive.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I wonder…. what happens….. when you have … halting speech patterns …. like me.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Yeah, okay, that was freakin cool!
June 20th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Very impressive Rene!
June 20th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
No Polish?
June 20th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Why is this not in the 3g?
June 20th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
@BarackObama
You might destroy the Republican Party and win a few elections.
June 20th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Wow the accents were absolutely ridiculous at the end. HAHAHA.. And hey I have the mirror screen protector too! and hey WTF is that light beside the speaker…!?!
June 20th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
@Truth
Your display name serves you no justice
The ending was funny. ” Cawl Dee-der bawn ” ^_^
June 21st, 2009 at 12:06 am
@ Omari James
The fanboy returns. Steve is waiting for his massage.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:14 am
@BarrackObama
Better than a President not knowing how to pronounce common English words or what they mean… cough BUSH! cough
June 21st, 2009 at 12:37 pm
no Arabic ?
June 22nd, 2009 at 3:41 am
Chinese (Cantonese) Chinese (China) Chinese (Taiwan) Dutch English (UK) English (U.S.) Finnish French (Canada) French (France) German Italian Japanese Korean Norwegian Polish Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal) Russian Spanish (Mexico) Spanish (Spain) Swedish
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:18 am
I’m from Northern Ireland and the Voice Control feature is terrible at picking up my accent (or it might just be my terrible accent). Pity you couldn’t teach the phone to recognise your voice like some Nokias.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
I have tried for days the new Voice Control feauture in my iPhone 3GS and it’s terrible. The success rate was less than 20% in catching the correct name. It was very frustrating experience. This new function is a yoke! Apple needs to learn from Nokia, Motorola or others in voice control.