if youre unfamiliar, its an accessibility app made by google, for controlling your phone with your voice. this is different to the “OK google” thing.
I’m disabled, and I avoided owning a phone for many years because they’re so painful to use. but this year I finally had to get one, so I got a samsung s10e. but this voice access app is just… terrible? its really buggy, struggles to understand me way worse than Talon (a PC voice control program), and loves to do things I don’t tell it to.
it also doesn’t even make my phone fully accessible, theres tons of gestures it just can’t do, and I can’t add custom ones.
basically… am I doing something wrong? is there some trick I don’t know about? or is android accessibility really this bad? is there anything I can do?
I’ve actually found voice recognition to be worse than it was prior to Android 12. As soon as I got that update, it started having more errors.
It could be coincidentally in line with you getting gunk in your mic or something. Or it could be that your particular phone doesn’t handle android 12 very well. I’ve had less issue with voice recognition on android 12 and 13. Maybe try re-training the voice model.
I have one of the newest Google pixels, so it’s probably not that. I’ve retrained it a couple of times and gave up. 🤷♂️
I swear, google’s quality control on the pixels is just bad. I had a Pixel 5a, when I got it, the phone was a year old. Out of the box it was slow, I tried so many things to get it working correctly and it just never did. Then 7 months in it just died.
After a ton of back and forth with support and them trying to tell me I had water damage when I didn’t, I finally got another Pixel 5a. That one works super well in comparison. I didn’t use it much because I was so fed up with the whole debacle with Google that I switched to an Asus Zenfone 9. But the little I did use it, it was faster than the other 5a ever was.
My first pixel 5a almost never picked up my "ok Google"s whereas my Asus Zenfone 9 works while it’s playing music full volume, or while I’m playing music in the car, and a ton of other situations where my pixel and my galaxy s9 I had before never did. It’s so odd.
That being said, the Zenfone is way worse at shazaming things for some reason. I definitely think it’s not only a per phone model basis but also a per singular phone basis thing.
Yeah, I’ve had three Pixels now and I won’t be getting another. I mostly just went with them because I need something small (and even their a series Pixels are not really small).
I recommend the Asus Zenfone line, flagship processor for a reasonable price (relatively speaking) in a small form factor. It’s a godsend for someone like me with small hands. I’ve had mine for a year or so and I really love it! And I hear the Asus Zenphine 10 is even better.
I am actually planning to get that when the new one comes out. Thanks for the recommendation, though!