Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe pocketnow.com in recent days we've shown you videos about how you can talk to your phone and have it do things for you for example we've shown you how to use Google search with your voice we've shown you how to use text input with your voice well today we're going to show you something called voice actions and this is something you guys have been waiting for it's been around for a little while we just haven't done a video on it because it requires Android 2.2 plus some prerequisites it's really cool and it will do a lot of stuff using the power of your voice and your Android powered smart phone let's go take a look alright so first of all do you remember stuff like this this is the HP iPAQ H 4100 it's a pocket PC that's way back in the day before they were called Windows Mobile or Windows Phone devices and this wasn't a phone it was however what was called a PDA or a personal digital assistant now why do I bring this up well if you think of an assistant that's generally speaking is someone who helps you get your job done helps you make your life easier they're the person who signs for packages when you can't they're the person who answers and screens your phones they're the person that you can dictate memos to letters to emails to and they send them off for you in your behalf they're the person who schedules meetings just all kinds of stuff well that's really what these PDAs were supposed to do well today we've got even more powerful PDAs that now have mobile internet connectivity with them and they have just all kinds of stuff over here there was an app back then we called them programs that I could get that would let me literally speak to my PDA and have it do things not quite as advanced as what we can do today with Android but we could still do it now what I'm running here is a t-mobile g2 it is running a CyanogenMod nightly which is running Gingerbread or Android 2.3 you don't need to be using that in Android 2.2 will work just fine 2.1 isn't gonna be able to give you all the advantages that you'd be able to get then i'm gonna show you here but you'll still have some stuff that you can do so really 2.2 and above is the sweet spot next off you're going to need to go to the market and download two things the first thing is the google search widget now you might think well I've already got the Google search widget on my phone no you don't you'll need to go to the market and you'll need to get it the difference is this one has a G with a little drop down menu on it that lets you select what stuff you want to search for it is different than that the search widget that comes pre-installed on most Android phones so you'll want to make sure you get that second thing is something called Google Voice Search or just voice search it is by Google and it adds what are called intense now an intent is kind of just like it sounds it's not intense it's an intent meaning I'm not going to tell you exactly what I want you to do I'm going to tell you what I intend for you to do and then of course the phone interprets what that intent is and it handles it it carries it out for you so you'll need to get those two apps they are free they are in the marketplace you cannot see them unless you have Android 2.2 or above so I'll let you go and do that now if you want to pause the video and come back you can do that if you want to watch it through all the way that's great if you do pause the video subscribe to the video channel so you can make sure you can come back and get the rest of it so okay since you're back I'm assuming that you either have already done that or you just want to get the information so what we're gonna do now is well really some cool stuff and it all focuses around either tapping on a voice search shortcut like we have on my desktop here and that's really just for illustration purposes because I have a search button down at the bottom and by long pressing on that I can invoke the same thing as I can here so what we're gonna do Google has called these voice actions their actions that you can carry out with your voice and tell you your phone to do stuff so we're going to long press here and I'm just gonna talk and it's going to show you on the microphone moving up and down that it's listening to me it's gonna try and recognize this which we really don't care about it's not gonna know what to do but the reason that I want to show you this there's word is working is you can get to this and you can of course if it's a text input box you can search excuse me you can type words with just your voice if it's a Google search box you can input text into that and hit search and search that with your voice so all kinds of neat stuff now two things up front first of all you can see I have a server problem that means that all that information that was just recorded was attempted to be sent off to Google servers so that Google servers could crunch all that information and figure out what I'm saying the more I talk to my phone not talk to people on my phone but actually talked to the phone using this this voice search functionality or the text input functionality the better it's going to get and recognizing my voice and figuring out what I mean now that is we've talked about it before or something for a conspiracy theorist because you're sending that information off to Google so Google is technically building a profile of your voice on their servers so they can understand what you sound like basically they're they're creating a fingerprint of your voice if you don't like that it's turned off by default but if you want to turn it on you can go ahead and do that in the settings over here how the second thing is this is on a flat table now last time I color the keyboard so you know go ahead and laugh at me at my expense I make mistakes too was really kind of funny this is a table it's a flat surface and you'll notice that on a lot of HTC devices and some others there's this little teeny microphone on the back now that does a couple things you've got a mic on the back you've got a mic on the front down here and both of them work together to help figure out what you're saying the one on the back is primarily used for something called active noise cancellation so it's listening to the background noise and it's listening to the foreground noise it's applying the two and basically subtract doing the two waveforms from each other so all of the background noise that's coming in if you're on a busy street if you're on an airplane in a work environment it's going to attempt to subtract anything that it hears from the mic in the back from anything that hears from the mic in the front and that it assumes is your voice so keep that in mind for this demo being on a flat table I'm kind of blocking that back microphone it doesn't just do noise cancellation it also helps get a more full fingerprint of your voice and apply that altogether I know it sounds kind of funny but voice recognition is going to be diminished because of how I have this set up to make it work well hold it up to your phone or up to your face like you would phone and talk to it that way or hold it out in front of you in a quiet room you know that just the typical stuff about voice recognition applies so let's go ahead and get started and see exactly what we can do what I've done is I've long pressed on my search button and then I hit the Help button rather than the cancel button and that brings up this it's a very quick tutorial and in fact over here at the beginning it has a video that you can watch to see how to do all this stuff and give some examples I would highly recommend that you go ahead and do that I'm going to show you a lot of the stuff that it has but it's always good to see things from two different perspectives so keep that in mind the first thing that we're going to do I've created a new contact on here called John Doe he's my really good friend he lives out in Washington DC and well he does some some political stuff for well you'll see in just a little bit so I'm gonna show you what we can do probably one of the most common things that we're going to want to do is call somebody so here we go let's see if we can call John Doe call John Doe and while that recognizes it comes back here and it says hey look I've got a John Doe at home I've got a John Doe on his mobile I can do a search for call John Doe I can call B John Doe call of John Doe so these are the things that it thinks I might have said that it doesn't have a voice action associated with and that it'll do a search searching primarily just Google just the Internet sometimes it will search stuff on your phone as well but here if I want to call him at home I can tap and call right there so I long pressed said call John Doe I press and it works great but that still might be a little too much if I'm in a car so let's do something else let's get a little more specific call John Doe at home so now I've said who I want to call and to call him at home it gives me a minute before it goes through and does the dialing and the reason is in case it got the wrong person you can cancel out of that now of course I don't want to call John Doe at home so I'm going to cancel that and we're going to go back to that screen where now it says hey you cancelled out of that did you really mean something else it gives you another opportunity but if I have a work number if I have a mobile number if I have you know a whole bunch of different numbers associated with John Doe I can very quickly and easily with one voice action one intent tell my phone to call John Doe at his home or on mobile so that's all pretty simple pretty easy to understand right all right let's move on to the next one so similar to phone calling of course is texting it's something that we all do all the time so let's go ahead and send a text over to my friend John Doe send text to John Doe I'll be late for lunch today stuck in traffic let that recognized and over here is sending a text to John Doe it automatically defaulted to his mobile device and it says I'll be late for lunch today stuck in traffic of course Albie not what I meant but that's what it heard partially because I've got a really thick accent that's sarcasm by the way guys but mostly because of the way that I've got my setup I've got it on this table which we already talked about so I can come in here and tap on that word and you'll notice it was in blue now that means that it's not entirely certain that that's what you meant to say when you tap on it it brings up this little quick correct I can delete it of course with the delete button you can pull up my on-screen keyboard with the keyboard button or I can even hit the microphone and have it listen to my voice again and just correct that little bit so let's go ahead and try that well of course we also have these quick corrects up here on the top I'll be is what I wanted it to say so I could select that but since this is all about voice let's go ahead and do that I'll be and I slowed it down a little bit and you can see it got it even worse so let's go ahead and just delete and deed we'll come back in here and say I'll be in there so I'll be and it lost light in there so if we'd gone through and selected it right the first time we could have just sent it off very quickly very easily but you can see how this lets you go in and make a very quick text message that now when I send it it's going to send this off using my default text message handler whether that's handset whether that is the built-in messaging app whether that is Google Voice text messages which is what mine is configured to do obviously that's not a valid text will phone number so I'm going to go ahead and cancel out of that but I can very quickly and easily even in a car tap and hold send a text to John Doe I'll be late for lunch stuck in traffic and get that set off without getting my keyboard out and poking a whole bunch of buttons and getting into a wreck or or being a danger on the road so there we go what's next of course email let's go ahead and send an email using a voice so again we're going to long press on the search button send email to John Doe I'll be late for lunch too because I'm reviewing the new sales proposal that recognizes it's a little bit longer so it will take a little longer to recognize in this case it didn't understand what I meant because it picked up search button so let's go ahead and try that again send email to John Doe I'll be late for lunch today while I review the sales proposal again it recognizes and there you go you'll notice this is not your email client just like the last one though it was not your text messaging window this is a new kind of intent box I don't know what the name of it is if we've got any Android developers out there please let us know in the comments so that we can call it the right thing and so that all the the watchers all the viewers know what it is but you can see here it went ahead and found John Doe shows me his email address just so you know if I've got two john doe's in here I know I'm sending it to the right one and here's my message again apparently I'll be is being interpreted as Alby so we'll fix that I'll be late for lunch today while I okay so that's pretty close and I can go in and make some changes of course the more I use this the better it's going to get at recognizing which we've already said I can add a subject just do this sales proposal I can add a Carbon Copy I can add a blind carbon copy I can add more to the text and then I can go ahead and send it off so very very powerful very fast easy to correct and if I want this to be actually the word be I can change it to the word be so kind of cool let's go ahead and see what else we can do I feel like one of those infomercials guys but wait there's more let's take a look at that so I've got this sales meeting that I need to go to with John Doe but to do that you know I'm a late sleeper as you can tell I mean it's 7:15 I'm probably gonna sleep in so let's go ahead and set an alarm but I don't want to launch the alarm app and figure out how to do all the I mean it's just a pain so let's do that with our voice again tap and hold on this set alarm for 6:30 a.m. sends that off to Google and it sets the alarm for oh six thirty which is 24 hour time for 6:30 a.m. we could set a label on that if we wanted to just like we did before sales proposal meeting now when I wake up in the morning I'm going to know that I'm waking up at 6:30 because of a sales proposal meeting and I can get myself up and out of bed so I went ahead and got up but I'm driving around the city and I don't know where gas stations are and I desperately need to put gasoline in my Prius so let's go ahead and find out how we can can get some gas map of gas stations now this uses Google Maps so for this action you have to have maps installed and what it's going to do is it's going to look up where I am and search for gas stations and show me a list of all of the local gas stations around and you can see I've got one there one there in a whole bunch over there now if I was going someplace like Washington DC I could search for show me gas stations in Washington DC and it would use that as the location instead of my geo-located location and do that so very very handy but you know what now that I've got gas in that Prius I you know I can drive now what four or five thousand miles on that tank of gas where am I going to find my friend John Doe so we can have this meeting so my buddy John Doe and I are going to have lunch today to discuss this sales proposal but I need to know where to go and he's given me an address so let's see if we can not just get directions to but use Google Maps Navigation to show me how to get to this restaurant where we're going to be navigate to a 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington DC it recognized what I was attempting to say and fires up google maps navigations gets driving directions for that address and it's gonna start talking to us here so I'm gonna kind of try and talk over a little bit it took a while to get the directions and the reason for that is because I just plotted a route from my place to which is out in Utah by the way guys not real close to Washington DC all the way out to Washington DC and it's telling me you kind of missed it there that this road or this route has tolls so I'm gonna have to be aware of that and I'm gonna have to have my my wallet handy so I can pay some tolls but if we zoom out we're getting the the live track and traffic information we're getting the route to go all the way out I eighty across the whole country over to Washington DC out here at the end and it looks like I'm going to the Burrow out in Washington DC so it's it's quite a ways I'm probably not gonna make it for lunch today at least not by car but again very very easy way for you to to navigate to wherever you're going to know this primarily works with businesses rather than individuals so bear that in mind you can also speak and address just like you saw me do there to go to the specific location so I'm out and I'm on my way driving in my car but I need some tunes so let's get some music on here now what I like to do rather than loading up my phone with all of my mp3 is I like to listen to Pandora I get a lot more breadth of music choices that way and I get introduced to a bunch of songs that I haven't heard in a long time or that I have never heard of at all so I kind of like that let's see how that ties in and I'm just gonna choose a really abstract one off the wall guys and a lot of you're gonna laugh at this so please do listen to seven by Prince right there it pulls that up seven is a song by the artist formerly known as a symbol who's now known as Prince and was known as Prince before he was a symbol and all kinds of fun but I use that because it humorous and Pandora takes a little bit and I needed to fill some time with a little humorous anecdote so what it's done here is it's pulled up a song that sounds like 7vy prints and that is purple rain on the ultimate Prince album and you can hear that a little bit playing in the background it starts out kind of slow and of course I only want to play a couple seconds so we don't have to a license the song to play to you but it's gonna then stream that in all the way from my house to Washington DC as long as I've got data coverage so really kind of cool there one last thing that I'd like to show you although there's probably some other stuff buried in there that's where your comments come into play and that one last item is a note note to self pick up eggs milk and cereal and what that's going to do is it's going to recognize it put it into a note to self and now I can send this off to me as a Gmail or to anyone else at that point but just kind of neat I'd like to see this tightly integrated into Evernote or whatever your preferred notetaking application is it's not right now but hopefully in the future that will come as an update okay so as you can see there's a lot of cool things that you can do with Google Voice Actions or voice intense we covered most of them at least most that we know about I'm sure there are a couple others that are still floating around out there that we haven't shown you that's where you come in please let us know either with the text comment down below or via a video reply to this video showing us your favorite intent or an intent that we didn't cover that you think we shouldn't have maybe we'll do a follow-up video make sure you go ahead and do that comments or will help us know that we're doing the right thing that we're making videos that you like and help us improve if you see something that you don't like like hey Joe this video is way too long and yes it was ridiculously long but we showed you a lot of cool stuff if you liked it give the video a thumbs up that lets your friends know about PocketNow and all the cool stuff and it helps us grow and growing just means more cool stuff for you so really it's kind of you know self-serving but go ahead and do that no of course we also want you Hanover pocketnow.com and we want you to subscribe to our video channel if you haven't done so already doing that not only helps us but it helps you guys too it helps the whole community learn more stuff and really show off all the cool things that our devices can do for pocket now I'm Joe Levi