How do you do new lines and new paragraphs when dictating?

[douglerner]

The Nexus manual says this about punctuation when dictating text:

Say ?comma,? ?period,? ?question mark,? ?exclamation mark,? or ?exclamation point? to enter punctuation.

Not much detail there.

What about new lines, new paragraphs and other punctuation, like quote marks? Is there more info on this?

Thanks,

doug

 

[douglerner]

Also, is it just me, or does the voice to text feature suddenly just stop working in the middle of a sentence a lot?

doug

 

[YAYTech]

Also, is it just me, or does the voice to text feature suddenly just stop working in the middle of a sentence a lot?

doug

I believe a lot of the processing is done on Google's servers, so as you talk, it has to send the audio for analysis, then get it back. Add to that the fact that I'm pretty sure it doesn't analyze single words, but several together to consider what you probably said in both words and phrases, and it will have some little delays. Fact is, it does a fantastic job compared to a couple years ago, and just keeps getting better and better. It's not perfect yet, but the fact that you're complaining about pauses and not mistakes says volumes about the improvements in voice recognition. A fast typer will still outperform voice recognition, though (and honestly always will, since a good typist can type faster than a person can talk.)

 

[HeavyBombers]

I've had the same question. I thought I had it doing a carriage return in one application. However, now if you tell it to return after a punctuation mark, all it does is a line space.

 

[douglerner]

I believe a lot of the processing is done on Google's servers, so as you talk, it has to send the audio for analysis, then get it back. Add to that the fact that I'm pretty sure it doesn't analyze single words, but several together to consider what you probably said in both words and phrases, and it will have some little delays. Fact is, it does a fantastic job compared to a couple years ago, and just keeps getting better and better. It's not perfect yet, but the fact that you're complaining about pauses and not mistakes says volumes about the improvements in voice recognition. A fast typer will still outperform voice recognition, though (and honestly always will, since a good typist can type faster than a person can talk.)

When I say stopped working I don't mean pauses. I mean it stops completely. Mid sentence it just stops and the voice input isn't active anymore and you can't get it to take more words by voice. There are plenty of mistakes too, as with Siri in iOS, but the most irritating thing is it just cutting out mid sentence. If I press the mike button I might get it to take another word, but when this happens I can rarely get it to just continue and finish a sentence.

I think the gesture keyboard is great. It's faster than pressing one key at a time. But dictating is faster, unless you are on a real keyboard.

 

[YAYTech]

When I say stopped working I don't mean pauses. I mean it stops completely. Mid sentence it just stops and the voice input isn't active anymore and you can't get it to take more words by voice. There are plenty of mistakes too, as with Siri in iOS, but the most irritating thing is it just cutting out mid sentence. If I press the mike button I might get it to take another word, but when this happens I can rarely get it to just continue and finish a sentence.

I think the gesture keyboard is great. It's faster than pressing one key at a time. But dictating is faster, unless you are on a real keyboard.

Ah, that could be quite frustrating. I do find it annoying when I pause too long to consider my next words and it cuts out. I don't think I've had it just lock up on me yet. *shrug*

 

[douglerner]

Anybody know about voice commands for new paragraphs, etc?

Thanks,

Doug

 

[TraderGary]

Say "new line" twice.

Sent from my incredible new Nexus 7 (2013)

 

[douglerner]

Say "new line" twice.

I'm afraid that doesn't work. I just tried it in the Gmail app when composing a message. If I say, "This is a test period new line new line does this work period" it creates this input:

This is a test. Line new line does this work.

doug

 

[TraderGary]

I found that "new line" command after a Google search and posted before trying it. It doesn't work for me either. Double Dog Darn!

Sent from my incredible new Nexus 7 (2013)

 

[douglerner]

I called Google to ask! I didn't realize they have a toll free support number - 1.855.836.3987.

At first the rep said there didn't seem to be a way.

But then I was testing it live with her while composing a Gmail message and guess what - "new paragraph" started working! It is now consistently opening a new paragraph.

I don't know why, but it is working now. Hmm...

doug

 

[douglerner]

Hmm again. It "sometimes works and mostly doesn't." It's very inconsistent.

And the voice dictation accuracy seems to be getting worse the more I use it.

I think I would have to give Siri on iOS an 80% and the voice dictation on the Nexus 7 a 50% so far based on my testing. Basically the voice dictation seems a lot less powerful and is a lot less accurate and doesn't let you easily and consistently do things like new lines, new paragraph and other important punctuation like open and close quote marks.

doug

 

[douglerner]

Actually I would rate the Nexus voice dictation as "unusable." If Siri is 80%, the Nexus voice dictation is 20%. It's highly inaccurate (and I have a very neutral English American accent), and it stops all the time in the middle of dictating. It's useless.

The gesture keyboard is cool and fast and eerily accurate though.

But the voice dictation might as well not be there. It's horrible.

doug

 

[TraderGary]

I wonder if voice dictation has anything to do with where you're located in japan? When watching a live interview halfway around the world there always is a very noticeable time delay from responses on either side. Voice dictation does require a back and forth response with Google servers. I wonder where all the Google servers are actually located.

I use voice dictation a lot . I am using voice dictation with this message.
Accuracy is seldom 100 percent. But for me it's easily better then 95 percent and for me that makes it a lot faster than typing.

Sent from my incredible new Nexus 7 (2013)

 

[Jeremy8000]

I've had the same question. I thought I had it doing a carriage return in one application. However, now if you tell it to return after a punctuation mark, all it does is a line space.

Yes, but if you say 'return' twice it will do two line spaces for a paragraph.

Example:

Saying "This is a test of voice dictation period return return hopefully this is a new paragraph period return did it work question mark return return let's find out exclamation mark"

yielded:

This is a test of voice dictation.

Hopefully this is a new paragraph.
Did it work?

Let's find out!

Wish there were a list of editing commands, though... better than trial and error.

 

[douglerner]

Jeremy, that worked! Thank you!

So the secret word was "return". I got precisely the same results you did.

Any ideas of open-quote and end-quote or quote mark?

So much for Google free dial-in support!

Thanks!

doug

 

[HeavyBombers]

Yes, but if you say 'return' twice it will do two line spaces for a paragraph..

That's very interesting.

Thanks and I agree would be nice to have a full list of commands. As far as percentage of voice recognition I find that's very accurate.

 

[douglerner]

Interestingly enough, I could not get either return or return return to work this morning in Gmail. It was just literally entering the word "return".

So I finished the email using the gesture keyboard.

Frustrating.

I wonder what's wrong.

doug

 

[douglerner]

Two updates.

Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Google tech support got back to me by email and their only suggestion was to restore to factory default and start over. Obviously I want to avoid that because there doesn't seem a way to backup all my settings and files and restore from backup.

I was just testing again. Sometimes "return" will do a carriage return. Sometimes it will just enter the word return. No idea why.

On the positive news front, if you activate Japanese as an input language you can also dictate in Japanese. That seems to work well. Ironically, it's easier to switch between dictation languages than it is to switch between keyboard input languages.

I think maybe Google support is hard for them because of all the different devices working different ways.

doug

 

[douglerner]

This dictated perfectly:

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.