92 MACWORLD MARCH 2020
FEATURE iOS 14 WISH LISTexecs to get on stage at
WWDC with a giant Siri
2.0 logo behind them
and talk about the “all
new Siri” that takes
everything the company
has learned over the last
nine years and built a
whole new digital
assistant for the next
decade. One that is
smarter, faster, works
offline (it’s shocking how
often Siri does not!),
better understands both
your words and your
intent, and is more proactive about doing
things on your behalf if you want it to.
I would also like Apple to make users
choose a Male or Female Siri voice during
phone setup (or when they first upgrade to
iOS 14), without defaulting to the female
voice.
- I M PROV E D D I C TATI O N
When Google demonstrated its new
Recorder app on the Pixel 4, we couldn’t
help but feel jealous. The phone was
doing exceptionally accurate text-to-
speech trascription, live, and entirely
on-device. It was even smart enough to
put in periods between sentences.
Of course, there’s no magic hardware
in the Pixel 4 to enable this feat. It’s just
software, and it’s even coming to older
Pixel phones (go.macworld.com/olpx).
Apple’s dictation feature (tap the
microphone on the keyboard) is a handy
way to input text almost anywhere, but it’s
slow and inaccurate enough that most
people don’t bother. To Apple’s credit, it
does work without a network connection.
But it can’t keep up with a normal talking
pace, and it doesn’t do a very good job of
making a sentence (with proper
punctuation) out of your string of words.
Apple should step up its game here.
Make the dictation dramatically faster and
more accurate (especially with accents),
and use some intelligence to improve
word choices. If I say, “you have a funny
accent” and the dictation thinks I said, “youGoogle’s live transcription is impressive, but there’s no reason
Apple couldn’t do this on most modern iPhones.