Comment by tomwphillips
1 day ago
The video demo is so strange. A waitress spoke too fast - just act like a normal person and politely ask them to repeat themselves, instead of reading a transcription on your watch. My goodness.
1 day ago
The video demo is so strange. A waitress spoke too fast - just act like a normal person and politely ask them to repeat themselves, instead of reading a transcription on your watch. My goodness.
https://youtu.be/Pe2ugye7Ya4?si=qhGPselIm7sZkXyP&t=558 (
My father has hearing aids and in some environments, it doesn't work well (directional vs omnidirectional ... but directional requires the person to directly address him while omnidirectional tends to pick up too much background clutter). In doctors offices (for example) he has handed his phone in dictation mode to the receptionist and asked them to speak to it and then he reads the transcription and responds... and this repeats. In a restaurant environment, sometimes another person orders for him.
This sort of thing could be useful in such cases.
Of course it can be useful! Even the situation from the stream is useful! This doesn't make it a good feature that should be so easy, so prominently advertised, and impossible for others to tell that it's on.
Has he tried these? https://www.fortell.com/
Or are they the directional ones you were referring to?
He has proper hearing aids - I'm not sure of the specific brand. They can be controlled via an app (and bluetooth). He's got a clip on microphone that goes directly to the hearing aids which sometimes goes on the table if he remembers to bring it so that we can talk to it and it does a better job... it's also used when he and my mother are out cycling and my mother wears it clipped to her shirt so that he can hear what she says.
One of the features that the app can control is the "environment". When out and about it's set to omnidirectional so that someone next to him doesn't need to be talking directly to him, however that picks up a lot of background and when in a building that causes.
He's also wired up their house with an audio loop. There's a microphone at my mother's craft desk that goes directly to the hearing loop and he can hear it anywhere in the main rooms of the house.
However, going out to places where he needs to be able to talk to people with less assistive technology available, things like the dictation mode on the phone area used. Also, sometimes he'll miss words (the start of a sentence until he realizes someone is talking to him, turns his head and the directional hearing aid mode gets them in focus). Being able to review the last 15 seconds of what was said on his iWatch would a technology that he would use.
As someone whose hearing has been degrading fast, this sounds like a feature that would be immensely useful. At some point you get tired of asking everyone to repeat themselves and start guessing by context (you've probably seen an old family member do this).
And even if it weren't super weird and creepy, it's 15 seconds, right? So what, that waitress rolledup, read the menu for less than 10 seconds, and then zoomed away, giving you a couple of seconds to get to and run the replay?
I've definitely had situations where I zoned out for a few seconds during a meeting or seminar, and want to see what was just spoken. That seems like a much stronger use case where you wouldn't want to interrupt the whole room to ask what was just spoken.
That doesn't seem to be a use case that I would use - now assuming someone is still speaking, you look at your watch (just bad form to me) you will very likely miss what is being talked about while reading what you previously missed. At least my one channel brain would.
This happens to me too and I enable 'Live Captions' (not meeting transcriptions) so that I always have a scroll back in case I miss something.
It's built into the meeting software I use and probably in most mainstream ones.
I tried OS transcription but those don't split out who's talking (since it's a single audio stream) so much less useful.
Anyways all that to say that at least in online meetings this problem is solved and addressing this problem in a stack that doesn't have meeting context is going to result in a worse experience.
1 reply →
It's gonna make a loud ass chime when you do that, so I don't think that's the use case Apple was imagining.
Life saving feature for ppl with ADHD. M
Is it super weird and creepy if you I tell you I remember the last 15 seconds of what you said?
If I wasn’t talking to you, but you were eavesdropping and taking notes of everything I was saying to another person, yes.
That’s what the wrist computer is doing.
If I wasn't talking to you and you were just listening to me in public, yes.
That's how you know no one in charge has a real life, they're all so disconnected from the reality of the bottom 90% that they think this is how we live.
Same with the "airpod live translation" thing, they probably spent more time implementing/testing it than the feature has been used in real life
Man I love live translation. I was traveling in the Middle East and went to see a movie and… it worked. My Spanish is mid, my Italian is barely there, my Arabic is near zero.
It’s hard for me to imagine not wanting language barriers to disappear.
This reminds me of the last time I saw an Arabic movie. It was last week. I used subtitles.
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The demo of the woman at the train station listening to a concert promoter in Spanish, taking a flyer, saying “thank you” in English and walking away came off as quite geocentric.
> came off as quite geocentric
Did you mean to use another word here? I mean, the vast majority of people are still on Earth so many things are geocentric and that's rarely considered a problem.
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Yeah, they're always leaving the Martians out!
It feels like a made for TV ad for accessibility.
What is a normal person?
It's so funny how the HN crowd is so quick to shout down people who are ableist sometimes, and so quick to BE ableist sometimes.
I kept thinking they were revealing glasses the way they gave a feature list before describing the item in question.
oh man, you have not been keeping up with the anti-social joneses.
Interactiving with people is so pre-covid!