Two Weeks with Google Now - A touch less experience

[amintha1992]

A few weeks back I accidentally dropped this phone and completely shattered the front glass. This resulted in a broken digitizer and left me with a smartphone that was oblivious to my inputs.

 

So let's take a look at how I survived the 2 weeks of waiting for the replacement parts to arrive.

 

The First thing that comes to mind is voice control. Since this is an android phone we have Google now.  Just to recap what Google now is,  it is a news and information aggregator with the ability to do many things by listening to the users voice. It can be used to do a simple Google search or even set a calendar event of your choice. What's interesting is that since I don't have a touch screen it puts the voice input to the forefront and tests it's abilities to see how it holds up as a primary input method on a modern smartphone.

 

For me the most important aspect of the voice control is that there is no need to press a button any more. Depending on how you have set it up voice commands can be used even on the lock screen. All you have to do is press the power button and wake the phone up and command away. As you can Imagine this came in handy because I had no way of touching any other buttons.

 

Most primary functions like calling and texting are all present and works as just fine, For example you can say "send text to [Name]” this is only a test" and it will send a text to that person.  Or you can say "call [Name]” and it will call that person. It's possible to do so much more and a simple google search will give you all that information

 

It's not all rainbow's and ponies either. There are some serious limitations on google now. For example I use hangout's instant messaging a lot more than Sms. But unfortunately there is no way to tell Google now to use IM instead of SMS. This drove me nuts. This is the same story for calling as well. There is no way of specifying what kind of call to make. For example if I say "call [Name] on hangouts"  it will do a google search. Thanks Google I know what I just said.

 

And everything goes downhill from there. There is no way to open a specific conversation thread on hangouts, I mean it's a first party app. You would think at least that sort of voice command is possible but you'd be out of luck. All you can do is to hope that you have opened that conversation before.

 

Now you must be thinking there is no way I used just my voice to use the phone. And you are correct. I ended up using an OTG cable. This cable allows the phone to act as a host and control other peripherals. Such as a mouse, keyboard, game pads and even external storage . So I carried a mouse around with me for two weeks just so that I can use my phone. The most challenging was typing a message  because voice typing does not work for me. Mainly become I not only text in English but I also mix my native language in to it. Swiftkey’s predictive word suggestions saved my butt on this. With the mouse every thing was just as usual except there was a cable hanging out of my phone all the time. Other than that it was mostly like using the touch screen.

 

Now there are some problems that I wish would get addressed by Google and some from third party apps.

 

Like i mentioned before, I can not figure out why Google would not let their own virtual assistant interact with their own apps. Specially the important once like hangouts. If it was possible to specify what kind of call or message is to be send and using what app. This will make using the phone with voice so much more sense and even safer. Think about when you are driving and you need to send an IM.

 

even though google now was introduced back in 2012 it still feels like its not baked in to the operating system enough. if the user could at least set up some rules and select that app to chose when a specific command is used. that is not a perfect solution but its better than nothing.

 

Google now is not the only thing that needs improvement. While using the mouse I noticed that android does not support the right click at all. It does support the scroll but it was very inconsistent. what frustrated me the most was the lack of a contextual menu on the right click. at least on top of text where it makes sense to add copy and paste? and where is the functionality to select text? if google hope to push the productivity angle this is a must have function and it will make android tablets much more viable to do actual work on.

 

in conclusion, right now the mobile experience is primarily on the touch screen and we are no way near where we can just use our voice. looking at the other side of the spectrum where more input devices are concerned  a lot more support is required by the software developers. think about a android powered console that have good controller contestability to all games? wouldn't that be useful?

 

anyway those are my thoughts on google now and my experience as a whole. let me know what you guys think.

[Guest]

Shouldn't this be in 'Member Reviews'?

[Sidiox]

Or maybe even in general discussion. 

 

Anyway Google Now still isn't that sophisticated. It works for very basic stuff but that is about it. Although I love it for setting my alarms, so much easier then using the default app for that. 

[amintha1992]

Shouldn't this be in 'Member Reviews'?

some one already moved it. thanks and sorry.

[cesrai]

This is supposed to be in the member reviews. Derp.

[zacRupnow]

You think Hangouts for Google+ is important?! Or useful?!

[amintha1992]

You think Hangouts for Google+ is important?! Or useful?!

what are you talking about?

 

are you talking about the live streaming to youtube thing? i dont use it.. but i have seen other people (youtubers) use it...