"One of the biggest issues with Siri is that it requires access to Apple’s servers in order to work. In Jelly Bean, however, Google will provide full offline voice dictation to users. Granted, that’s not a full Siri competitor, but the fact that the search company has been able to take it offline in a mobile setting is very important."
I wonder whether the offline performance is comparable?
If it was then surely you'd do all the voice parsing locally so I'm guessing that it's not. Unless anyone can think of another reason you'd push it through the servers?
- online should have more training data and can be improved much more easily. Don't see that advantage going away.
- power efficiency and/or speed. Sending 5s of audio across the net can be less strain on the device (esp. older ones) versus parsing the audio locally.
Pure speculation, here, but some of the transcription looked like it relied on pretty heavy statistical inference stuff (like knowing that "Worcester" comes before "Mass" but "Wooster" comes before "College," even though they're both pronounced the same). I would be really surprised if the client-side recognition was that smart, so I'd guess that they do it server-side if they can.
