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The T-Mobile myTouch 4G picks up where the myTouch 3G Slide left off with the inclusion of the Genius Button hands-free mode. What you may not know is that the Genius Button is powered by Nuance Communications‘ natural language detection technology. In essence, they put the ‘Genius’ in Genius Button.
Thanks to nuance you can place calls, respond to text messages, get voice-cues for incoming calls, and more. It’s a lot like Android’s Voice Actions with just slightly more beef. The Genius Button could be a must-have for hands-free addicts, but personally I prefer to interact with my phone using my faithful digits, though voice commands have been creeping in for direction searches and responding to texts hands-free. The real question is, knowing that Google is bound to develop Voice Actions further, does a third-party solution like the Genius Button even need to exist? Food for thought.
Very Nice. Makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking. Been always interested in seeing what that software has to offer.
Well, good competition like this drives innovation. It will drive Google to make theirs better than they might have if this didn’t exist.
Yes, it promotes further & future innovations.
I have a MyTouch Slide with the “Genius” button but unfortunately it takes so long to start up the Genius app that I never use it. It also indexes all your contacts from any linked accounts like Facebook, so I’ve encountered mishaps like dialing a former coworker I didn’t even realize was in my phone when I meant to call my wife.
I don’t have Android 2.2 yet, so I don’t have access to Google’s Voice Actions, but I have been using Vlingo and it seems to work very well. It has a good set of widgets and a better “Car Mode” than the “Genius Button” app, loads faster and seems to work better.
Genius but is counter-productive with how long it takes to load. I dont want to hear “please wait……..please wait”
Nuance is on point and always have been the leader in voice recognition tech. I’ve loved Nuance ever since my first samsung flip phone years ago! wish they would put in the market. On the other had Googles voice actions is very good but in mind it’s missing a key element with no bluetooth support. Nuance put a app in the market I think you’d fair very well.
Interesting, semi-related story- I work helping people who are severely disabled go about their daily lives. Recently, I was talking with someone who specializes in customizing adaptive technology for people with disabilities. He told me how he had recently talked with the developers of dragon dictation at a tech conference. They had worked for years refnining the software interface for their disabled child.
After presenting their program at an adaptive tech conference, an eager software distributor offered them less than $800,000 for it. They took the offer, not predicting it would someday be involved in multi-million dollar transactions.
Every time you use the genius button, remember it was inspired by someone who had no other option than voice input. Similarly, most keyboard alternatives started as a last ditch effort by somebody who couldn’t find anything else,for them, that worked.
Sorry to get all preachy on your tech blog, but I sometimes feel like reminding people that necessity is the mother of invention, not convenience. And also, the result of invention should not be profit, but benefit.
Also, I am drunk. Goonight.
The genius button is worthless. It takes too long to load. And gives me errors. Vlingo is much better. Can I make the genius button launch Vlingo instead?
I am trying to get the genius mode button to interact with my google voice text messaging instead of a standard text message. The reason is because I’ve cancelled my standard text plan and just text through google voice. Anyone know a way to change it from standard texts to google voice texts, both reading them and sending through there? This would make the app 10x’s better. Right now its worthless to me without being able to do that.