LG announces Quick Voice; aims to compete with S Voice and Siri

Not to be left behind in this new voice assistant race founded by Apple and followed by Samsung, LG has announced its new intelligent voice recognition system called Quick Voice. The company has announced this new service in Korea and chances are that it will be rolled out soon to the Optimus family of smartphones. A couple of voice-based assistants are already available for the Android platform and it seems that LG have come pretty late to the party, but this service is planning on integrating new features, including using it when the phone is turned off, along with increased customizations. While we’ve not reviewed it, we did review Apple’s Siri, and here’s what happened. We tried getting contact information for one of our contacts named ‘Krishna’. So we told Siri, ‘Krishna’ and she came up with a reply saying, ‘I would ask that you address your spiritual questions to someone more qualified to comment. Ideally, a human.’ A big identity faux pas. It does have some difficulty recognizing Indian names and we just couldn’t get Siri to give us information on this one in particular. With Siri, there’s still a lot of improvement required. And next time, it would be better, if they’d just leave the ‘Beta Tags’ to Google.’

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If you have a clear voice and anything, but a thick or a peculiar accent, voice recognition will impress you quite a lot. For simple things, like placing alarms, reminders, calls and text messages, it works quite well. But sometimes you’ll have to repeat, repeat and REPEAT what you want the assistant to do, if you’re speaking in a conversational tone. Which will really make you wonder, if you could just do it the ‘old fashioned’ way - type it out, and finish it yourself! Voice recognition has loads of potential, but it’s still a major WIP for Indian shores. However, we’ll definitely give the companies the benefit of the doubt on this one, because in terms of functionality, you’d rather have it than not. The one thing that voice recognition can definitely improve on, is having offline support. We’ve seen it on PCs, but it still hasn’t come to smartphones, owing to the storage constraints and other hardware limitations. Sending the voice to a remote server and waiting is a pretty long process still and we’re hoping somebody manages to get full blown offline voice support, pretty soon. 

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