IDG Contributor Network: Here’s the one crazy thing Apple might reveal next week

Voice-activated commands don’t always work. In fact, because of that simple fact, it’s not something that has entered the mainstream. I recently went to the grocery store and noticed multiple people tapping away on their iPhones, but none of them were dictating a text message or even asking Siri about movie showtimes, even though both of those activities work fine (for the most part). If you talk to your phone in public and it doesn’t work, you look stupid. It’s hard to pretend your phone understands you when it doesn’t. (Insert a joke about marriage here.)

That all changes in the privacy of your own home and at the office. I tend to talk to my phone more. I’ve experimented with a British accent, asked Siri about weird Alfred Hitchcock movies, and engaged in conversations with Google Now, which seems to understand context. (Try it for yourself sometime — you can ask about your favorite sports team, then say “who is the catche?r” and you will get the right answer.) At work, in the privacy of my office, I also use Google Now, and I just started dictating articles using the Voice Typing feature in Google Docs.

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