Apparently, voice recognition in a car (or using SIRI, or whatever the android version is) is as dangerous as actually using your phone while driving, primarily because it doesn't always work and drivers get annoyed.

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Right. Here are some facts.

The CIA isn't spying on most of us through our TVs right now, though they do have the technology to do it and have developed it specifically for that purpose.

So have countless other entities (government and independent. You can download the tech yourself if you care to, or have the technical ability).

Samsung is spying on you through your Samsung TV's
(http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/fine-print-on-one-of-samsungs-tvs-says-its-recording-your-voice/)

Any consumer products with voice recognition could be considered to be spying on you, such as Google and Amazon "home assistants".

Technically, by now anything with an active microphone has the capability to do this. It should probably be considered worse that it's not the government, but completely unknown third-parties who supply the infrastructure to do this on a massive scale for the purposes of data mining for advertising.

I have personal experience with this technology and the industries that develop and distribute it. This isn't hearsay or conjecture. I will never understand why it's acceptable for unchecked third-party corporations to spy on you, but once the government does it, a slightly larger minority gets upset.

Reaction times yes, but I think having a sufficient degree of certainty that the correct decision will be made is hard to conceive.

Imagine the legal liability of a clear software failure. Even if average accident rates were lower for automated cars, a clear incidence of failure would be a huge monetary legal risk. Whereas, if legal exceptions were carved out for the likes of Google, I doubt there would be very good consumer uptake.

I would suspect their automation algorithm are highly based on visual inputs. Pre-available GPS mapping data would get them only so far. These visual inputs are hugely variable. The number of different car makes, times of day, weather and road conditions among other things, would make for a incredible amount of scenarios to envisage.

I think voice recognition is very similar, if anything more constrained. The deciphering of combination of pitch, accent and pronunciation is a far simpler and smaller domain that we haven't mastered. That would seem to me to be demonstrable proof that automated cars to the level of reliability we would expect, are currently inconceivable.

Perhaps not the best choice of words, but what i mean is the level of accuracy and reliability required seems unattainable.

Voice recognition which I think of very comparable, requires AI 'training' and a stable voice manner to be usable. Take Google's integration of this into YouTube and the garbage subtitles it spits out as an example. This is a technology which has been around for a decade and is still woeful unusable outside limited scenarios. The multitudes of increasing processing power over this period have apparently not made much difference.

If we can't master that in 10 years, how are we going to master automated driving to the perfection required to make millisecond life or death decisions?

Actually what I mean is, they made a console that responds to voice commands but didn't think that there should be words or names to be blacklisted. I realize that the voice command capabilities have to do with Kinect, but considering nearly every vocal command starts with "Xbox", any usernames starting with the same word or letters (it is voice recognition software after all) should have been unable to be registered as a valid profile name. It is a major over site by either the programmers of the software or by the people who tested the product to 'work the bugs out'.

@VoodooV Like I've been saying all along, your posts are mostly attempts at intimidation. I enjoy answering some of your questions, because it helps me question my beliefs, something I think is constructive and that you seriously shouldn't be afraid of. We are all supposedly looking for the truth anyways. All this could be settled by answering my simple question, whether you'd agree or not, it wouldn't even necessarily be an argument against gun control. I was pointing out the apparent conflict between wanting people to be more responsible by taking their freedoms away, when taking their freedoms away might not contribute to making them responsible people in the long run. An unpresumptuous suggestion meant to be taken as food for thought.

Instead, you resort to being juvenile and making fun of me, while writing huge posts with my entire posts quoted afterwards as an attempt at making me turn away in horror at the sight of a huge wall of text. Sure, it takes me time to sift through all of it to see what really matters. You're trying to muscle your way through, and it's a waste of everyone's time. I actually take the time to make my posts short and to the point, did you notice that? I happen to think it's a good habit to have some consideration for the reader, why am I not surprised you have none for me?

So, instead of appreciating that I don't waste your time by making an effort at being succinct, you accuse me of avoiding some of your arguments. It's true, I avoid a few of them because I think they're irrelevant, it's called being selective. Now I know that was a bad idea. I'm terribly sorry. I won't do it anymore. I will take the time to answer the most points I can to the best of my ability, and if that my makes my posts tiresomely long and wastes my time, so be it.

I bet you're trying to flood me with words because this isn't about any truth, is it? It's about discouraging and distracting me from something. Ever heard of picking your fights? It's about being reasonable about yours and other people's times. After all, I do assume you have a life outside of this internet topic on videosift, don't you? Anyway, let's get to it:

- About emotional manipulation, you FAILED to prove it, and here's why:

When you obey traffic laws, you are being coerced if there is coercion as consequence for not obeying them. Will you get arrested? Will you get your car, which is your property, impounded if you disobey? Then yes, they are coercive laws.

When you decide not kill someone because the law will coerce you if you do, you're being coerced into not killing, even if you freely decide not to kill out of good morals and empathy for fellow human beings, the option of killing is always there in reality (you can always kill anyone if you really want to), but not legally. If you kill, you're under the threat of going to prison. The positive or negative language seems completely irrelevant, what matters is what happens when you disobey the law. If coercion ensues, the law is coercive, or, more accurately, its enforcement. I'm not actually making the distinction right now if it's a rule related to coercion itself (a rule that makes coercion more or less likely to happen), just pointing out the irrelevance of your distinction between negative and positive language.

Now, I have to admit that there is divergence when it comes to defining coercion, but there is no emotional content here as far as I can tell. I'm using it in the sense that people have a right to their life, property and freedoms, and when you take or threaten to take away any of those things (and have the power to do so), THAT is coercion. There is no emotion here, I am offended that you would think that I would resort to that, because I don't even have to. Coercion has a meaning to me, I'm just using the concept as it is. If there is an emotional content, SHOW ME what emotion that is. Up until now, you have FAILED to do so.

- About requiring things before freedoms are granted, I think you FAILED to make your point, here's why:

To type boring senseless posts on the internet, you require a keyboard. Maybe, if you could type with voice recognition, like I do, you wouldn't need a keyboard, but what matters is that you use something to type or produce characters that will be submitted to the videosift website and become a useless post. So, for the sake of argument, let's call this an "actual physical requirement".

Now, with a gun to your head, if I require that you, VoodooV, jump through actual flaming hula-hoops positioned vertically on an intricate obstacle course before typing in your videosift comments, the world would be a better place (at least videosift would). However, my requirements would be arbitrary in the sense that it imposes something not actually physically necessary to enjoy the hypothetical "freedom to post inane ramblings on videosift" (we are assuming it's a right), can you spot the difference?

So, requiring things that are not necessary to enjoy a freedom is not something that makes the freedom better or is in any way justifiable just because history is littered with the precedent of assholes like kings and despots requiring stupid things before we can enjoy freedoms that we supposedly already have. When it comes to guns, a law says we have a right to bear them. Any laws that restrict that supposed right are infringing on the freedom that comes from having that right.

- About the claim that people will be less responsible if they have less freedom:

"If I made decisions for you, I could make you act more responsibly, but that's not the same thing as making you a more responsible person."

"Over time, when we take people's freedoms away, they tend to be less responsible about the decisions we're not letting them make. There's no way they can learn about any different (good or bad) outcomes related to decisions they couldn't make, and they can't be held responsible for them either, so they can hardly become more responsible."

- About your reduction to absurdity claim that removing all the rules would make us "SUPER-Responsible":

"I don't think rules inevitably destroys our freedoms, let's make a more refined distinction:

- If a rule is meant to stop people from infringing on each other's freedoms, if it's a rule that makes people less likely to coerce each other, it's a good rule because we end up with less coercion happening (even counting the coercion necessary to enforce the rule), we end up with a more civilized society. There are not many of those kinds of rules around.

- If it's a rule that imposes some regulation because we don't trust that people will be responsible enough to do what's best for them regarding something unrelated to coercion, we not only restrict their freedom by coercion (in this case, coercion by the government), it doesn't make coercion less likely, so it's likely a bad rule."

The problem with removing all rules is that, without rules related to coercion, people would be too subjected to the threat or actual coercion from other people around them, society would be less civilized. Would that make them more responsible? That's a good question. On one side, they would have a lot more responsibilities if they had to worry about their own lives and safety every frickin' day, and all the terrible worries that comes with the unstable chaos of anarchy. However, given that they would enjoy less freedoms due to the constant coercion of others, they would likely end up being a lot less responsible, because they would have far less choices.

That's why I took the time to explain the difference between rules related to coercion and rules that just infringe on freedoms.

- About your examples of requirements before freedoms and rights are granted, here's a list of your "numerous examples" and my reply to each of them:

VoodooV: "You have the freedom to go to college..."
VoodooV: "You have the freedom to have a certain job..."

"Going to college or getting a job are not things people are entitled to (supposedly), there are no rights involved, so no freedom is being denied."

VoodooV: "You have the freedom to imbibe alcohol....IF you are a certain age and can demonstrate that you can use it safely"

I don't know about using it safely (what does that mean?), but regarding age restriction, I don't agree with those laws. I know, very "liberal" of me, but I think children are the responsibility of their parents, so it's a law that steps into parenting territory.

VoodooV: "And according to the right, you have the freedom to vote..."

About voting, I don't know, I guess being registered is a requirement for the voting process? Like the right to life requires... being alive?

"The voting process, on the other hand, seems to be something that requires registration (again, I'm not an expert on voting, so forgive me if I'm wrong), otherwise we end up just shouting to ourselves, "I vote for X"!"

VoodooV: "And having a gun, or a car, has a significant risk to infringe upon other's freedoms so it's not unreasonable to ask that you demonstrate proficiency and safety before using said items."

A driver's license is not about owning or using a car, but about driving in public venues. I could be wrong, but we don't need a license to drive a car in our own backyards, do we?

Simply owning a gun, on the other hand, not only isn't a violation of anything, it supposedly provides protection against these violations.

- About me supposedly contradicting myself, saying "there are no rules for us talking", then proposing a dare:

Did I shoot you in the face when you failed my dare? So I guess it's not the kind of rule in the sense that I didn't threaten to coerce you if you failed it. Do you understand what kind of rule I was talking about? Do you even understand what a contradiction means, or are you just taking advantage that not everyone that reads your posts knows exactly what you're referring to make yourself look smart even though you can't point out a contradiction if it rested flat in your deepest held political beliefs?

On the subject of contradictions, strictly speaking, there's no contradiction between calling you juvenile and being juvenile myself, even if I did so afterwards, and in retaliation, to give you a taste of it.

Ooooooooh... must be very embarrassing for you not to know what a contradiction stands for.

Here's your entire post quoted, because, why not?

You're still getting a little too excited. This is a simulation. None of this is final. But even the promise of this does not obviate the need for a phone, The interface certainly does not have the richness of a phone. And I've not seen them suggest this is a phone replacement.

There are areas where it will struggle:

Simply being able to see a large amount of information from the device and without interfering with normal sight. With my phone I can read quickly and then be back in the real world by looking up. I don't see myself reading reams of data with this thing. I'd love to try though!

The interface is different/more limited. You lose haptic feedback and long-presses to expose different functionality. I'd love to see how good a feature-rich note-taking app will work. Voice-recognition is the most likely use.

But voice recognition remains difficult and performs variably.

And nothing to say of how slow it might be to change networks, adjust settings etc. Many things might be locked down to ensure a smooth experience for the average user.


So, integration (or how Glass will be useful).

Glass will serve as a nice entry-point into the phone experience. You could open the notifications in Glass but you might want to focus on recording some video.
Or you hover on a film poster and have IMDB open up the details on the phone. You might have a lot of these moments in a day. Imagine building up a list of pictures, quick ideas/notes, something useful someone said and then take your phone out only when you sit down. Everything is there for review. Glass might be a very good inbox.

I could instantly sync my photos. It's thus backed up on the phone straight away (and later on the net) and could be auto-shared - I don't need to issue copious voice instructions. Same with video. Glass will gather data but you might want it to hand stuff off to the phone. And net access isn't always guaranteed.

Looking up real world objects, scanning barcodes, even raw data and have it converted into usable data. You could hold up your phone but it's a nicer experience to have a document rendering onto your phone while you look at a page of data or even take a phone call. And you don't have to get the phone out of your pocket. Multi-tasking for the win!

I view pdfs and spreadsheets on my Note 2 all the time. I've not scanned much because it seems hit and miss and there's no cool software to do much with it. This would be amazing with my laptop. I often get printed documents or scraps of paper. Being able to instantly scan and digitise on the go would be almost revolutionary.

The point is Glass will be a very useful *extension* of the device you are already carrying around. Which people will be carrying around for many years to come.

I hope it's cheap as chips because getting it pinched off your face would be fun

>> ^deathcow:

I am sure it was a GPS voice recognition error. The dude was like "Take me to Lenny's" and the computer was like "Dennys. Turn right and descend to 2500 feet."


Actually the GPS was right, must have been user error. This airport is really close to a Lennys.

-Tampa Native

I am sure it was a GPS voice recognition error. The dude was like "Take me to Lenny's" and the computer was like "Dennys. Turn right and descend to 2500 feet."

>> ^deathcow:

my Android 4 phone voice recognition is pretty amazing


Yeah, I have Ice Cream Sandwich on a Galaxy Nexus, and I'm pretty amazed by how well it gets addresses I ask it to navigate to. I keep thinking 'No way will it get this', and then it does. 'huntington drive', 'warrnambool', 'craigieburn'.

I'm looking forward to the natural language search like this in JB. I'm waiting a bit to see if my local carrier releases it for use. If they take too long I'll root my phone and flash it to stock Google.

my Android 4 phone voice recognition is pretty amazing

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by geo321.

Yep, sorry cab,
*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/The-problem-with-voice-recognition-in-Scotland