Star Trek had it right all along. Commbadge (or flip communicator) is for talking. A PADD is for reading, writing, media consumption. A tricorder is for recording, remote sensing and remote operating needs. You always have at minimum the first one when in the go. When working, you usually have all on you. But then, at home and work you also have proper computer terminals available and then some.
10 years ago, I thought this was a quite obsolete vision, given how our smartphones are so multifunctional. These days I feel it was prescient, and that our phones are a bad idea, for human nature reasons.
20 years ago I was very resistant to buying any mobile phone because I was waiting for an in ear piece that would do the whole job, and let you dial by voice. It seemed just around to corner, and logical, because who would want to carry a phone everywhere?
But you still need an iPhone somewhere right? Can't just use the watch on its own?
I did think about this, but battery life is pretty bad if you actually use the watch throughout the day and I now need a whole train of devices instead of just an earpiece.
I tend to feel the Commbadge and communicator are tropes to make it easy to communicate to viewers. Given the technology in real life, I prefer text over voice for quick, rapid messages.
I'm a text person too, but I suspect we're not the majority, and definitely not the entirety of the smartphone-using population. I recently noticed my wife is increasingly often exchanging voice messages on Messenger instead of text messages, with increasing number of her friends. I queried about this several times, she says they all find it more convenient. It sounds unbelievable to my text-first sensibilities, but apparently it is.
This is very prevalent in the expat community where I have many friends. I hate it. At least the current AI developments made it possible for messenger apps to transcribe the messages to text (and back, though I haven't seen that feature yet) - we both get what's best for us.
And same with voice calls and voicemail - I mostly don't accept calls and let them all go to voicemail. iPhone transcribes what they're saying in real time and I can decide to pick up.
I'm really looking forward to an AI-first total overhaul of communication UX.
> iPhone transcribes what they're saying in real time and I can decide to pick up.
How does this work? Is it a carrier feature?
On my iPhone, if it goes to voicemail the call is done and the display goes to sleep. I have to go looking for the message in the voicemail to interact with it.
I’m in France and have never seen this on the two carriers I’ve used (Bouygues and Free).
It recently started to work on my Vodafone plan. Never even had a voicemail before that. Probably not a carrier-specific feature, at least not the transcription - though passing the voicemail audio data on probably requires some carrier-side support. I don't think it's some backhand deal though, I think it's using some unusual GSM/LTE/5G capability.
"In this excerpt from The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, 1999), Ray Kurzweil describes his work in speech recognition." - previous link
"The ‘80s saw speech recognition vocabulary go from a few hundred words to several thousand words. One of the breakthroughs came from a statistical method known as the “Hidden Markov Model (HMM)”. Instead of just using words and looking for sound patterns, the HMM estimated the probability of the unknown sounds actually being words." - https://sonix.ai/history-of-speech-recognition
"Voice Recognition", title of page 82, "Who's who in Artificial Intelligence: The AI Guide to People, Products, Companies, Resources, Schools and Jobs" - By Alan Kernoff, 1986
In my case, it always been garbage. Speech to text doesn't require AI when you do it like Microsoft did it in the aughts; ever since "new, better", cloud-side techniques came along, the technology got worse, and the only meaningful qualitative improvement I've seen in two decades is in the last two years, with new-generation models which may or may not be backed by LLMs now.
Over time its become worse, but all of Googles products have become worse. That doesn't mean it we couldnt do it, we just can't rely of Google to provide it.
They're not using voice messages as alternative to typing; most of the time, they have hands free to use the keyboard. They're using voice messages as asynchronous, replayable phone calls.
Star Trek had it right all along. Commbadge (or flip communicator) is for talking. A PADD is for reading, writing, media consumption. A tricorder is for recording, remote sensing and remote operating needs. You always have at minimum the first one when in the go. When working, you usually have all on you. But then, at home and work you also have proper computer terminals available and then some.
10 years ago, I thought this was a quite obsolete vision, given how our smartphones are so multifunctional. These days I feel it was prescient, and that our phones are a bad idea, for human nature reasons.