Should I install Instagram’s Threads?
If you’re looking for guidance on installing any new software, you should always review the privacy policies, data retention policies and methods of deleting that data for any company providing a service. Let’s explore.
Instagram and Meta
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, wholly owns Instagram and now the new companion app released for Instagram called Threads. Threads is not a new app. It is, in fact, an old Instagram app that was discontinued in 2021… only to be born anew in 2023 with a new Twitter-like interface.
The problem with this app isn’t that it looks and feels like Twitter, but that is a problem which might born legal issues for Meta. No, the problem with Threads is who owns and operates this app.
If you already have an Instagram account and you enjoy using it, adding on Threads is likely not a problem. You likely already understand the pitfalls of owning an Instagram account.
On the other hand, if you have dropped using Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and all other apps produced by Meta, then downloading Threads is out of the question.
Data Retention and Data Removal
We already know that Meta never removes any data on request. The best that Meta will ever do is disable an account. That’s it. Data stored on Meta’s servers remains there forever. Meta never purges data not even upon request.
What that means is that if you’re on the fence about installing Meta’s new Threads, you should be extremely cautious about installing this app and agreeing to those services. Threads may look like Twitter and act like Twitter, but the data you input into Threads will be stored and collected by Meta forever.
Even users who have attempted to delete Threads data or their account have already run into a roadblock over this issue.
Another, who already apparently signed up, was similarly displeased: “We can’t delete our threads account without deleting our Instagram? They knew people would instantly hate it so they made it a saw trap.”
Source: Fortune
What that means is that if you already have an established Instagram account, you cannot delete anything you write into Threads without also deleting your Instagram account. Be cautious when thinking about installing Threads.
Knowing Who You Are
Because Meta acts much like LexisNexis in data gathering involving its users both on and off Meta’s sites, Meta can easily correlate all of their stored data and know exactly who you are just by having their app installed on a specific phone device. This means that there is no way to hide who you are from Meta. Meta’s data aggregation and collection goes way beyond normal and into the frighteningly dangerous territory.
It’s even worse than it sounds. Meta collects data on everyone it possibly can, whether they have an account on Meta’s platforms or not. What this means is that if you become a new user to Facebook, Meta will find and link any previously collected data about you to your new Facebook profile. You may think your account is new, but in reality Facebook might have years worth of purchase history, web browsing history and other rather creepy, stalking data about you now attached to your brand new account profile. All of this data you have absolutely no control over. You might not even know that it’s attached as Meta is great at hiding the fact that they perform data collection and aggregation in the first place.
What does this mean for Threads?
Threads may seem like an innocent application to install, but because of the sheer ugly way that Meta handles its user’s data, it could actually turn into a nightmare for you. It only takes one “problematic” Threads message and you may end up with real world consequences. Attempting to delete your Thread data seems impossible at the moment.
Deactivation
What Meta typically tends to offer is hiding of data. What that means for you is that if you deactivate your account, the best that Instagram offers at this moment is that your Threads data should no longer remain visible to the Internet through Meta’s interfaces. However, your data still sits on a Meta server somewhere for a data breach to occur and be leaked to the public.
What deactivation means is no security at all. It simply covers Meta’s method of wanting to retain all data it collects, but at the same time attempts to placate users by hiding that data from prying eyes, at least for this moment in time.
Data Value and Threads
Unfortunately, Meta values its storage and aggregation of data more highly than it does user privacy. This means that should you choose to install and use Threads, you’re at the mercy of Meta’s lack of data privacy. As I said above in the deactivation area, it’s all about placating the user instead of actually doing the correct thing and expunging data on request.
It’s clear that Meta never expunges data. In fact, asking to have your Facebook account deleted doesn’t work. A Facebook account is never deleted. It is simply deactivated. Even if you fill out the correct forms and request a total data purge from Meta’s servers, Meta simply won’t do it.
How do I know? Because I still, to this day, receive emails from Meta requesting that I reactivate my Facebook account. If Meta had actually purged all of my data, that would include purging my email address from their system. Yet, they STILL haven’t done so in the 8 years since I requested my Facebook account deletion. Facebook still sends me emails!
Threads
What exactly is Threads? Threads is a reincarnated and redesigned version of an older app that Instagram had formerly released, but that shut down in December of 2021. This older Threads app was pulled from the platform and, or so we thought, was gone until today. Today, July 6th, 2023, Threads has been reborn as a Twitter clone.
I have never used the older Instagram version of Threads, so I cannot tell you how it worked or how close it might have been to Twitter’s interface. However, this 2023 version of Threads, by all accounts, mimics Twitter far too closely. Threads is actually so close to working like Twitter that Elon Musk is now threatening Meta with lawsuits over the release of Threads. I have no sympathy for Elon or Twitter as of now. I dumped Twitter months ago and haven’t looked back. If Elon is suffering at the hands of Meta’s Threads app, that’s really a problem of Elon’s making.
If Elon had continued to produce a robust, safe, trustworthy social networking application, Threads couldn’t succeed. Clearly, Elon’s Twitter is completely failing at being a “safe space.” Thus, Threads is taking off like wildfire.
This statement about Twitter’s lack of safety is not meant to imply that Threads is a “safe space”. Oh, no no no. It’s way too early to know exactly where Threads will land on the safety spectrum as yet, but I have my doubts.
Data Grab Twitter Clone
Twitter clones are not a new thing. Truth Social looks and acts far too much like Twitter. I don’t know why Musk hasn’t chosen to sue Donald Trump over Truth Social. Yet, Elon Musk feels the need to throw down the gauntlet on Meta? Unfortunately, since Musk’s takeover, Twitter has become a toxic cesspool of hate with right wing MAGA extremists.
Further, it also seems that Musk has slowly fallen into the MAGA right wing extremist camp himself, to the detriment of Twitter remaining a “safe space”. Musk had originally proclaimed to be mostly center politically, but his MAGA conspiracy actions have spoken far louder than any of his hollow words when claiming Twitter is a safe social space. To be honest, Twitter will remain an unsafe social space so long as Musk remains at the helm.
Twitter Killer?
Will Threads be the Twitter killer? Perhaps in a short term. Users flock to anything that’s new, particularly when the current mainstay is so completely toxic, inappropriately managed and is effectively being run into the ground. Anything that seems more stable and less toxic is likely to garner a lot of attention. Unfortunately, toxicity exists everywhere, including within Meta’s app spaces.
Jumping out of Elon’s Twitter dumpster fire and into Threads; this is simply just another dumpster fire in the making. It’s new, yes, but it’ll just as quickly become a toxic cesspool of hate speech. It remains to be seen if that toxic cesspool becomes a liberal hate ground or a conservative hate ground. The only way Threads can avoid the hate speech outcome is to ban political speech entirely on Threads.
If people want to talk politics, they would need to go somewhere else. Unfortunately, Meta doesn’t have the ambition to do that. Removal of political speech would remove too many people from their platform. Meta can’t afford to alienate that many people. Thus, it’s only a matter of time before Threads becomes the new place for political hate speech. That kind of hate speech is likely to come to Threads sooner rather than later. It’s highly unlikely that the Instagram team is prepared for the onslaught of garbage speech, moderation and removals required for what will become the new toxic application to hang out on.
Dumpster Fire
Unfortunately, Threads is already a dumpster fire and it doesn’t even yet know it. Meta understands what it takes to operate a large platform, but it clearly doesn’t understand how to properly manage social discourse. If the moderation tools in Threads are anything like Twitter… moderation which requires involvement of an Instagram staffer, then Threads will fail as spectacularly as Twitter.
The only way Twitter, or at least a platform like Twitter, can survive is to change the entire way it handles microblogging. Instead of requiring Meta’s staffers to handle removal requests, Meta should push the burden and consequences of moderation success or failure onto the thread creator. What this means is that as soon as a person creates a top level thread, it becomes that producer’s responsibility to police what’s said in that thread.
Of course, there will be reporting options to report clearly violating speech to Meta. However, the thread creator will need to handle the burden of dealing with any comments. If a user in the thread begins spewing hate speech, the thread creator should be responsible for taking care of that user’s speech and removing it, not Meta. If the thread creator fails to manage the thread, then the thread creator will get penalized for that lack of management… meaning, throttling, banning and ultimately suspension.
If you write microblog texts that elicit such negative user interactions and you choose to do nothing about those responses, then you as thread creator take equal blame when those comments are reported and removed by Meta. This forces the burden onto you, the thread creator, to limit who can comment on your threads to avoid such negative engagements.
Additionally, moderation tools need to drastically improve. Meaning, if a user comments, the comments should be held in a moderation queue until the thread creator can approve, delete or report the comments. If the thread creator must take the burden of comments in a thread, then moderation tools are required to help the thread creator manage those comments.
Unfortunately, I’m fairly certain that Threads didn’t design their app this way. Instead, it likely works just like Twitter, where Meta staff are required to manage bad actors.
Real Names
One thing that Meta does that Twitter doesn’t do is require the use of real names on its platforms. This means that if you sign up for any Meta service, you are required to supply your real name. This means that when using Meta’s services, your real name is easily seen. Whether Threads allows the user to hide this information is currently unknown, but I’d guess not.
Will this blog author sign up for Threads?
No. I’ve already pulled myself out of Meta’s universe of apps. I have no intention of signing up for Instagram simply to use Threads…. only to put myself right back into Meta’s garbage system all over again? No, I will not sign up for Threads.
Would I recommend anyone else to sign up for Threads?
No. Meta’s application universe is so majorly problematic (you can’t delete your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account), I can’t recommend anyone to sign up for or use any services that Meta supports, especially if you value your family’s privacy. Meta’s top apps to avoid include:
- Threads
- OculusVR
- Onavo
- Beluga
It’s also worth noting that Meta owns many, many small subsidiaries that you should avoid as well. Check out this list to see what other apps you should avoid. If you’re really, really interested in testing what Threads is all about, then I’d strongly recommend signing up for a brand new Instagram account under a different email address. Unfortunately, Instagram may determine that you already have another Instagram account and link them together. Be careful.
However, it should now be crystal clear that Meta’s newest Threads is a must avoid.
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Why Rotten Tomatoes is rotten
When you visit a site like Rotten Tomatoes to get information about a film, you need to ask yourself one very important question, “Is Rotten Tomatoes trustworthy?”
Rotten Tomatoes as a movie review service has come under fire many times for revitew bombing and manipulation. That is, Rotten Tomatoes seem to allow shills to join the service to review bomb a movie to either raise or lower its various scores by manipulating the Rotten Tomatoes review system. In the past, these claims couldn’t be verified. Today, they can.
As of a change in May 2019, Rotten Tomatoes has made it exceedingly easy for both movie studios and Rotten Tomatoes itself to game and manipulate the “Audience Score” ratings. Let’s explore.
Rotten Tomatoes as a Service
Originally, Rotten Tomatoes began its life as an independent movie review service such that both critics and audience members can have a voice in what they think of a film. So long as Rotten Tomatoes remained an independent and separate service from movie studio influence and corruption, it could make that claim. Its reviews were fair and for the most part accurate.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. In February of 2016, Fandango purchased Rotten Tomatoes. Let’s understand the ramifications of this purchase. Because Fandango is wholly owned by Comcast and in which Warner Brothers also holds an ownership stake in Fandango, this firmly plants Rotten Tomatoes well out of the possibility of remaining neutral in film reviews. Keep in mind that Comcast also owns NBC as well as Universal Studios.
Fandango doesn’t own a stake in Disney as far as I can tell, but that won’t matter based on what I describe next about the Rotten Tomatoes review system.
Review Bombing
As stated in the opening, Rotten Tomatoes has come under fire for several notable recent movies as having scores which have been manipulated. Rotten Tomatoes has then later debunked those claims by stating that their system was not manipulated, but then really offering no proof of that fact. We simply have to take them at their word. One of these allegedly review bombed films was Star Wars: The Last Jedi… where the scores inexplicably dropped dramatically in about a 1 month period of time. Rotten Tomatoes apparently validated the drop as “legitimate”.
Unfortunately, Rotten Tomatoes has become a bit more untrustworthy as of late. Let’s understand why.
As of May of 2019, Rotten Tomatoes introduced a new feature known as “verified reviews”. For a review’s score to be counted towards the “Audience Score”, the reviewer must have purchased a ticket from a verifiable source. Unfortunately, the only source from which Rotten Tomatoes can verify ticket purchases is from its parent company, Fandango. All other ticket purchases don’t count… thus, if you choose to review a film after purchasing your ticket from the theater’s box office, from MovieTickets.com or via any other means, your ticket won’t count as “verified” should you review or rate the movie. Only Fandango ticket purchases count towards “verified” reviews, thus altering the audience score. This change is BAD. Very, very bad.
Here’s what Rotten Tomatoes has to say from the linked article just above:
Rotten Tomatoes now features an Audience Score made up of ratings from users we’ve confirmed bought tickets to the movie – we’re calling them “Verified Ratings.” We’re also tagging written reviews from users we can confirm purchased tickets to a movie as “Verified” reviews.
While this might sound like a great idea in theory, it’s ripe for manipulation problems. Fandango also states that “IF” they can determine “other” reviews as confirmed ticket purchases, they will mark them as “verified”. Yeah, but that’s a manual process and is impossibly difficult to determine. We can pretty much forget that this option even exists. Let’s list the problems coming out of this change:
- Fandango only sells a small percentage of overall ticket sales for a film. If the “Audience Score” is calculated primarily and solely from Fandango ticket sales alone, then this metric is a horribly inaccurate metric to rely on.
- Fandango CAN handpick “other” non-Fandango ticket purchased reviews to be included. Not likely to happen often, but this also means they can pick their favorites (and favorable) reviews to include. This opens Rotten Tomatoes up to Payola or “pay for inclusion”.
- By specifying exactly how this process works, this change opens the Rotten Tomatoes system to being gamed and manipulated, even by Rotten Tomatoes staff themselves. Movie studios can also ask their employees, families and friends to exclusively purchase their tickets from Fandango and request these same people to write “glowing, positive reviews” or submit “high ratings” or face job consequences. Studios might even be willing to pay for these positive reviews.
- Studios can even hire outside people (sometime known as shills) to go see a movie by buying tickets from Fandango and then rate their films highly… because they were paid to do so. As I said, manipulation.
Trust in Reviews
It’s clear that while Rotten Tomatoes is trying to fix its ills, it is incredibly naive at it. It gets worse. Not only is Rotten Tomatoes incredibly naive, this company is also not at all tech savvy. Its system is so ripe for being gamed, the “Audience Score” is a nearly pointless metric. For example, 38,000 verified reviews based on millions of people who watched it? Yeah, if that “Audience Score” number isn’t now skewed, I don’t know what is.
Case in point. The “Audience Score” for The Rise of Skywalker is 86%. The difficulty with this number is the vast majority of the reviews I’ve seen from people on chat forums don’t rate the film anywhere close to 86%. What that means is that the new way that Rotten Tomatoes is calculating scores is effectively a form of manipulation itself BY Rotten Tomatoes.
To have the most fair and accurate metric, ALL reviews must be counted and included in all ratings. You can’t just toss out the vast majority of reviews simply because you can’t verify them has holding a ticket. Even still, holding a ticket doesn’t mean someone has actually watched the film. Buying a ticket and actually attending a showing of the film are two entirely separate things.
While you may have verified a ticket purchase, did you verify that the person actually watched the film? Are you withholding brand new Rotten Tomatoes account reviewers out of the audience score? How trustworthy can someone be if this is their first and only review on Rotten Tomatoes? What about people who downloaded the app just to buy a ticket for that film? Simply buying a ticket from Fandango doesn’t make the rating or reviewer trustworthy.
Rethinking Rotten Tomatoes
Someone at Rotten Tomatoes needs to drastically reconsider this change and they need to do it fast. If Rotten Tomatoes wasn’t guilty of manipulation of review scores before this late spring change in 2019, they are now. Rotten Tomatoes is definitely guilty of manipulating the “Audience Score” by the sheer lack of reviews covered under this “verified review” change. Nothing can be considered valid when the sampling size is so small as to be useless. Verifying a ticket holder also doesn’t validate a review author’s sincerity, intent or, indeed, legitimacy. It also severely limits who can be counted under their ratings, thus reducing the trustworthiness of “Audience Score”.
In fact, only by looking at past reviews can someone determine if a review author has trustworthy opinions.
Worse, Fandango holds a very small portion of all ticket sales made for theaters (see below). By showing all (or primarily) scores tabulated by people who bought tickets from Fandango, this definitely eliminates well over half of the written reviews on Rotten Tomatoes as valid. Worse, because of the way the metric is calculated, nefarious entities can game the system to their own benefit and manipulate the score quickly.
This has a chilling effect on Rotten Tomatoes. The staff at Rotten Tomatoes needs roll back this change pronto. For Rotten Tomatoes to return it being a trustworthy neutral entity in the art of movie reviews, it needs a far better way to determine trustworthiness of its reviews and of its reviewers. Trust comes from well written, consistent reviews. Ratings come from trusted sources. Trust is earned. The sole act of buying a ticket from Fandango doesn’t earn trust. It earns bankroll.
Why then are ticket buyers from Fandango any more trustworthy than people purchasing tickets elsewhere? They aren’t… and here’s where Rotten Tomatoes has failed. Rotten Tomatoes incorrectly assumes that by “verifying” a sale of a ticket via Fandango alone, that that somehow makes a review or rating more trustworthy. It doesn’t.
It gets worse because while Fandango represents at least 70% of online sales, it STILL only represents a tiny fraction of overall ticket sales, at just 5-6% (as of 2012).
“Online ticketing still just represents five to six percent of the box office, so there’s tremendous potential for growth right here.” –TheWrap in 2012
Granted, this TheWrap article is from 2012. Even if Fandango had managed to grab 50% of the overall ticket sales in the subsequent 7 years since that article, that would leave out 50% of the remaining ticket holder’s voices, which will not be tallied into Rotten Tomatoes current “Audience Score” metric. I seriously doubt that Fandango has managed to achieve anywhere close to 50% of total movie ticket sales. If it held 5-6% overall sales in 2012, in 7 years Fandango might account for growth between 10-15% at most by 2019. That’s still 85% of all reviews excluded from Rotten Tomatoes’s “Audience Score” metric. In fact, it behooves Fandango to keep this overall ticket sales number as low as possible so as to influence its “Audience Score” number with more ease and precision.
To put this in a little more perspective, a movie theater might have 200 seats. 10% of that is 20. That means that for every 200 people who might fill a theater, just less than 20 people have bought their ticket from Fandango and are eligible for their review to count towards “Audience Score”. Considering that only a small percentage of that 20 will actually take the time to write a review, that could mean out of every 200 people who’ve seen the film legitimately, between 1 and 5 people might be counted towards the Audience Score. Calculating that up, for very 1 million people who see a blockbuster film, somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000’s reviews may contribute to the Rotten Tomatoes “Audience Score”… even if there are hundreds of thousands of reviews on the site.
The fewer the reviews contributing to that score, the easier it is to manipulate that score by adding just a handful of reviews to the mix… and that’s where Rotten Tomatoes “handpicked reviews” come into play (and with it, the potential for Payola). Rotten Tomatoes can then handpick positive reviews for inclusion. The problem is that while Rotten Tomatoes understands all of this this, so do the studios. Which means that studios can, like I said above, “invite” employees to buy tickets via Fandango before writing a review on Rotten Tomatoes. They can even contact Rotten Tomatoes and pay for “special treatment”. This situation can allow movie studios to unduly influence the “Audience Score” for a current release… this is compounded because there are so few reviews that count to create the “Audience Score”.
Where Rotten Tomatoes likely counted every review towards this score before this change, after they implemented the new “verified score” methodology, this change greatly drops the number of reviews which contribute to tallying this score. This lower number of reviews means that it is now much easier to manipulate its Audience Score number either by gaming the system or by Rotten Tomatoes handpicking reviews to include.
Fading Trust
While Rotten Tomatoes was once a trustworthy site for movie reviews, it has greatly reduced its trust levels by instituting such backwards and easily manipulable systems.
Whenever you visit a site like Rotten Tomatoes, you must always question everything you see. When you see something like an “Audience Score”, you must question how that number is calculated and what is included in that number. Rotten Tomatoes isn’t forthcoming.
In the case of Rotten Tomatoes, they have drastically reduced the number of included reviews in that metric because of their “verified purchase” mechanism. Unfortunately, the introduction of that mechanism at once destroys Rotten Tomatoes trust and trashes the concept of their site.
It Gets Worse
What’s even more of a problem is the following two images:
From the above two images, it is claimed Rotten Tomatoes has 37,956 “Verified Ratings”, yet they only have 3,342 “Verified Audience” reviews. That’s a huge discrepancy. Where are those other 34,614 “Verified” reviews? You need to calculate the Audience Score not solely on a phone device using a simplistic “rate this movie” alone. It must be calculated in combination with an author writing a review. Of course, there are 5,240 reviews that didn’t at all contribute to any score at all on Rotten Tomatoes. Those audience reviews are just “there”, taking up space.
Single number ratings are pointless without at least some text validation information. Worse, we know that these “Verified Ratings” likely have nothing to do with “Verified Audience” as shown in the images above. Even if those 3,342 audience reviews are actually calculated into the “Verified Ratings” (they probably aren’t), that’s still such a limited number when considered with the rest of the “Verified Ratings” so as to be skewed by people who may not have even attended the film.
You can only determine if someone has actually attended a film by asking them to WRITE even the smallest of a review. Simply pressing “five star” on the app without even caring is pointless. It’s possible the reviews weren’t even tabulated correctly via the App. The App itself may even submit star data after a period of time without the owner’s knowledge or consent. The App can even word its rating question in such a way as to manipulate the response in a positive direction. Can we say, “Skewed”?
None of this leads to trust. Without knowing exactly how that data was collected, the method(s) used and how it was presented on the site and on the app, how can you trust any of it? It’s easy to see professional critic reviews because Rotten Tomatoes must cite back to the source of the review. However, with audience metrics, it’s all nebulous and easily falsified… particularly when Rotten Tomatoes is intentionally obtuse and opaque for exactly how it collects this data and how it is presents it.
Even still, with over one million people attending and viewing The Rise of Skywalker, yet Rotten Tomatoes has only counted just under verified 38,000 people, something doesn’t add up. Yeah, Rotten Tomatoes is so very trustworthy (yeah right), particularly after this “verified” change. Maybe it’s time for those Rotten Tomatoes to finally be tossed into the garbage?
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Google Android: How to fix Speech to Text “Couldn’t Connect” error
[UPDATE: 2019-06-25]: Google seems to have retired its legacy speech-to-text (S2T) services for older Android versions including Gingerbread (2.4) and below. If you have Gingerbread and S2T is no longer functioning for you, this is likely the cause. This service retirement likely impacts some newer Android versions, which also rely on this older service. Because Google has retired the service, it will no longer function ever. If you need this feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a device that can run a newer version of Android which supports the “Ok, Google” assistant. It seems that Google is moving forward by replacing this older S2T functionality with its newer “Ok, Google” voice assistant. If you have a Samsung, you may be able to use Bixby. This is Samsung’s own voice assistant. On with the article…
While this isn’t an overly common problem that I’ve found with Android, it is a problem that I have run into that has entirely baffled me.. until now. Note, I am running Android 6.0.1 on my Samsung S5. Even on my S5, the keyboard microphone button links to and uses the “Ok, Google” engine, not the legacy service. Note that this article was written in 2012. Some of the below, particularly as it pertains to downloading keyboard packages likely won’t help older devices. However, the portion discussing why this feature doesn’t work (i.e., Internet) is still valid. If you have an older device, you may find this functionality no longer works even if you DO have Internet available. This is because Google seems to have retired its legacy Android S2T service as of spring 2019.
To use the speech to text functionality (specifically voice search or voice keyboard input), you are required to download a package onto Android initially. After downloading, I thought that I would be able to use this functionality all of the time. Let’s explore why this isn’t true.
Text to Speech Input Troubles
On the Android Keyboard (that is, the non-Swype keyboard input), there is a small microphone symbol. Why this isn’t on the Swype keyboard is anyone’s guess? If you click the little microphone, the microphone feature activates and allows you to speak your text. The phone is then supposed to convert your speech into text. This is particularly handy while driving. Unfortunately, most of the time I always seemed to see the error ‘Couldn’t Connect’ when attempting using this functionality. After all, I had downloaded the necessary packages. At first I thought it had something to do with the microphone. So, I plugged in different headsets and different bluetooth devices, but it still only randomly works. Sometimes it works perfectly and other times not. I also tried restarting my phone thinking there was some kind of service that was not working properly. No luck with any of this. For a while, I had given up on even using it. However, I finally decided to get to the bottom of this issue.
This would seem to be a very handy feature while in the car. And, it is, when it works. In my car, however, most of the time it doesn’t work. I couldn’t figure this one out at all. I kept thinking how lame it is that the one feature you absolutely need while driving is Speech to Text. Yet, it is the single feature that is the most unreliable. However, today I have finally realized why this functionality only intermittently works. It requires the Internet to function.
The Internet?
Why would this service need the internet? Apparently, whatever data was downloaded only enables the feature, but it doesn’t actually do the speech to text conversion in the phone. Apparently, the audio input is sent off to one of Google’s servers on the Internet (can you say, “Privacy Issue”) to be processed and the text sent back to the phone after conversion. The phone doesn’t actually do the conversion.
My Rant
While I understand the audio processing needed to decode an audio file may not be capable within the phone (although, Siri seems to do a great job offline in the iPhone), the phone should at least have some offline capabilities. However, the error message here is just absolutely stupid. It doesn’t explain anything. If the Internet is not available and this service requires it, the phone should pop up a message that either explains that no Internet is available or it should simply remove that functionality from the keyboard (grey it out) until the Internet is available. Why try to allow use of this functionality when the Internet is not available? This is both a confusing and stupid design. Google, you need to fix this design fast.
So, you’re probably asking why it periodically worked in my car? First, my phone is not Internet enabled. Second, I refuse to pay $80 a month for a 3G data plan that’s half the speed of my cable service and offers half or less the amount of data at twice the price. Instead, I pay for an ‘unlimited’ MiFi device that I don’t always turn on in my car. Sometimes it’s on, sometimes it isn’t. That explains why this functionality sometimes works and sometimes not.
I use the MiFi specifically because it works with all of my devices and is not locked to only one device. It allows for more data throughput, due to the plan rate. It is also a non-contract prepaid service, so I don’t have to worry about being stuck in a hugely long contract. If something better comes along, I just stop payment and walk away with no penalties. Specifically, I use Virgin Mobile’s MiFi that is actually using the Sprint 3G Network. I digress.
How To Fix
If you’ve been searching all over the Internet trying to figure out why this functionality only sparsely works and how to fix it, this feature requires the Internet. If your phone is not 24/7 Internet capable and you use WiFi for connectivity in select places, like myself, you will run into this problem when trying to use ‘Speech to Text’ from the Android keyboard while there is no Internet connectivity. To fix this issue, you either need to subscribe to a phone dataplan so you have ‘Always On’ Internet service or carry a MiFi device around with you and turn it on when you want to use Speech to Text. A hassle yes, but complain to Google as they are the ones that designed it to require the use of a Google server to decode the audio.
So, there you have it. Problem solved, mostly. At least, it’s solved for Android 2.2. If your have a later version of Android, your mileage may vary.
[UPDATE: 2012-05-04]
My bad. It appears that Siri does, in fact, require the Internet for Speech to Text conversion just like Android. This also goes for Alexa, Bixby, Cortana and even “Ok, Google”. So, I guess this article applies to the iPhone and all other voice assistant devices as well.
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