Pixel 6 & 7 Phones' Secret Weapon
On the heels of Google Assistant winning the Super Bowl for voice assistants - Marques Brownlee’s Voice Assistant Battle 2023 - I could not resist republishing a post from some months back (before I discovered Substack). It’s a little something on the latest Google Pixel phones’ secret weapon, none other than that same big game/battle winner and the AI features on offer in these Pixels. Here it is, with just a few updates to note I’m now using the Pixel 7 phones:
Secret / Not Secret
The "secret" I'll talk about here is not a secret, apologies. It's a feature of the Pixel 6 / Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 / Pixel 7 Pro phones that has been (heavily) touted by Google themselves since before they went on sale - like so:
Google Tensor puts state-of-the-art speech recognition and language translation in your pocket. And because these algorithms run on-device rather than through a network and server, they work fast – no internet connection required.
Still ...
I feel like this feature does not get enough love or mentions. After almost a year of continuous use of the Pixel 6 Pro and three months with the new Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, I can honestly say that voice-to text / voice typing via Google Assistant is glorious.
It's not a little faster than Gboard (or any other virtual keyboard) used to be. It's not a lot faster either. It is night and day faster, lightyears faster. For any of us who use our phones for note taking on a daily (or more multiple times per day) basis, this saves a ton of time and effort.
And it's not just the speed that has improved this much; the accuracy has too, and so has the range of things we can do to keep our flow while using it. Here's just some of what voice typing with Assistant can do in this area:
Say a command. For example:
To delete the last word: Say "Delete last word."
To delete the last sentence: Say "Clear."
To clear the text: Say "Clear all."
To send a message: Say "Send."
To fill out the next open field in a form: Say "Next."
To add an emoji: Say the name of the emoji, like "Smiley emoji."
To stop voice typing: Say "Stop."
I find even just using the "Stop" command consistently makes me happy. Here’s a quick example from this weekend and note-taking on a cybersecurity course:
User Execution - Detection
Monitor the execution of and command line arguments for applications that may be used by an adversary to gain initial access that require user interaction. This includes compression applications, such as those for zip files, that can be used to deobfuscate/decode files or information in payloads.
Antivirus can potentially detect malicious documents and files that are downloaded and executed on the user's computer. Endpoint sensing or network sensing can potentially detect malicious events once the file is opened.
That was rendered near perfectly - punctuation and line break included. The only thing I had to correct was the spelling of deobfuscate.
Here's another thing that makes all of this great, straight from Google's feature description above:
these algorithms run on-device rather than through a network and server
So no concern with what we type being sent to "the cloud."
And ...
If you have Gboard set as the default keyboard, then all of this works across the apps and places that support the virtual keyboard, which is just about everywhere.
There's a lot that to love about using the Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 phones and their AI-driven features - from simple but wonderful things like “Hold for me” on phone calls to all the things you can put Google Assistant to work to to for you. Voice-to-text with Assistant is at or near the top of the list of those things for me.