I’m Stein Bagels … or How Improved Voice Recognition Isn’t

I have a smart phone. Sometimes my smart phone is a dumb phone. Mine’s a Motorola Droid, and it’s mostly cool, most of the time. People are usually impressed when I just talk into the phone and it gives me information like turn-by-turn driving directions, the nearest Mexican restaurant, or the definition of a word, etc. What’s more impressive is that my phone is two years old and has lots of cool features that many people think make it a brand new phone.

Here’s this morning’s brief tale of how my Droid wasn’t so impressive, but fun anyway. It’s my weekend with my girlfriend’s dogs that she has shared custody of. (That would make them my pseudo-step-dogs.) We got up nice and early to take the dogs for a walk (a Toy Poodle and a Maltese) at 7 am, and the brisk walk (not really, it was kind of slow. The pups are little and have tiny legs.) helped us work up an appetite for breakfast.

My girlfriend is a coupon queen. She brought over some coupons for Einstein’s Bagels. Where I live in Downtown St. Petersburg, there are a lot of amazing restaurants, bars, clubs, shops and museums, but no fast food chains and the like. So I pulled out my handy Droid to find the nearest Einstein Bagel shop. When I proceeded to use the voice recognition I received a prompt encouraging me to use the new upgraded personalized system that will recognize my own voice even better … so I did.

Ironically, it doesn’t work better. Every time I said; “Einstein Bagels”, the Droid responded: “I’m Stein Bagels” … over and over and over and over.

So, for the rest of the day, I am introducing myself as “Stein. Stein Bagels.” “You can call me Stein. Or you can call me Mr. Bagels. Either way … either way.”

The closest Einstein’s is at Gandy Blvd., which is 6.5 miles away. I found this out after manually typing the search query. It was too far. I drove 2-miles to get McDonald’s Hot Cakes & Sausage for her, and a Big Breakfast for me. It tasted really good. Maybe we’ll have bagels tomorrow.