A little over a month after launching the Nothing 4a series, the London, UK-based tech giant is finally unveiling its next big thing. This time around though, it isn’t new hardware.
The company just introduced a new AI-powered voice-to-text tool, and while that sounds boring at first, the tool is actually anything but a standard transcription tool.
I reviewed the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro, and Google and Samsung look dull next to it
A breath of fresh air in a stagnant space
Highlighted in a new blog post, the voice-to-text tool’s name is Essential Voice, and it aims to make voice the first choice of interaction on your devices.
The premise here is the fact that the main way we communicate on our phones is through typing. However, speaking “is more natural and four times faster.”
Traditional dictation has its cons, including the fact that it registers all the ums, uhs, and stutters. Essential Voice overcomes that issue, and does more.
It turns speech into clear, ready-to-send text in real time – the speed and ease of talking with the clarity and flexibility of text. Integrated into the keyboard and the Essential Key, it’s a step towards voice-first interactions with our devices.
Instead of dumping text word-to-word, the feature intelligently scrubs interjections, stutters, and repetitions, essentially refining your thoughts. The tool can handle formatting too, allowing your spoken-dialogue to be written out into lists, steps, or bullet points.
Elsewhere, the tool supports over 100 languages, which means you can speak in English and have the tool type it out in a different language in real-time.
Most importantly, the tool can understand ‘shortcuts’ for things that you say often. You can hard-code the tool to register small phrases as triggers for more complex information. For example, you can map “office address” to actually type out your lengthy office address.
Alternatively, you can tell the tool about your favorite restaurant and map it, and whenever you say a relevant trigger word, the tool will type out the restaurant’s address alongside a link.
Essential Voice is rolling out now on the Nothing Phone 3. Expect the feature to land on the Phone 4a Pro later this month, and subsequently on the Phone 4a in early May.
We’ll have more to share once we get to try out the feature.
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Like no other Nothing phone before it
