Skip to main content

Android Voice Commands for Cyclists Listening to Podcasts or Music

Disclaimer: I do not recommend using earphones while on your bike, but there are times or roads where I think it's OK. Pull out your earphones when nearing potentially dangerous situations (like intersections). At least pause the audio.

These tips also apply to anyone unable to look at and touch their device, leaving voice commands their only option (useful for visually impaired people, people wearing thick gloves, etc).
First of all, you need an Android with a fairly new version of Google Now installed, like Lollipop.
You'll need a headset with a microphone button. I’ve got an iphone headset that works great with my old Moto G, excluding the volume control.
You need to make sure that a connected headset can bypass the device’s lock mechanism. It’s in:
        Settings -> Language & input -> Google voice typing -> Hands-free
Your audio playback software has to work with the Google Now commands. I’ve tried Google Music and BeyondPod successfully.
So, off we go! You’ll want to practice a bit before doing this on your bike: 
  1. Lock your phone and put it in your pocket with the headset connected.
  2. Hold down the mike button until you hear a bell like “ba-ding!”. 
  3. Let go of the button.
  4. Enter the voice command clearly (you don’t have to say “OK Google” first)
  5. Wait until you hear another cheery ding sound, followed by Google Now’s voice confirming your command.
If you hear “Bong bong bong bong…”, that means there’s no signal or something. Just try again later. If Google Now doesn't grok what you're trying to say, start over.
Here are the commands I’ve found useful on the bike so far:
  • “Resume” - this will start audio playback in whatever state you did previously (I think). Also un-pause.
  • “Pause” - self-explanatory. Note that tapping the mike button will also pause/resume, but I have found it to be a bit unreliable when resuming especially.
  • “Skip to the next track” - self-explanatory, some variations in how you formulate it is OK I noticed.
  • “Open beyondpod” - opens the app BeyondPod. This could be useful if I want to get out of Google Music.
  • “Tell my wife on hangouts, I’m on my way home” - I always forget to tell my wife when I leave work on the bike, so this is handy. If you leave out the “on hangouts” bit, it will just send a text message. Not sure if other IMs are supported.
  • “What time is it” - handy to see if I’m running late.
  • “What’s the weather like tonight/tomorrow” - always good to know when cycling.
  • “What’s my schedule today/tomorrow” - I haven’t tried this but could be useful.
  • “Help” - this one will make Google Now explain some voice commands for you.
If you’re cycling with some speed, you’ll need to cup the mike with your hand to avoid overloading your command with noise from the wind. For the same reason, I try not doing phone-calls while on the bike.
Any useful commands that I’ve missed? 
There are various lists of possible voice commands online, but unfortunately most of them are just useful when you’re looking at the phone in your hand. More can be found here:
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant
6 comments
Read more

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some
Post a Comment
Read more

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --
12 comments
Read more

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o
Post a Comment
Read more

Leaving eyeo

Thirteen blog posts later, this one notes my departure from eyeo after 4 years and 3 months. I joined eyeo around the headcount of 80 employees, and now I think there's just over 250 people there. My role coming in was as operations manager, doing a mix of infrastructure engineering and technical project management. I later on took on organizational development to help the company deal with its growing pains . We introduced cross-functional teams, departments (kind of like guilds), new leadership structures, goal-setting frameworks, onboarding processes and career frameworks.  And all of this in a rapidly growing distributed company. I'm proud and happy that for a long time I knew every employee by name and got to meet every single new-hire through training them on company structure and processes.  At some point, we had enough experienced leaders and organizational developers that I could zoom back in on working in one team, consulting them on  Git and continuous integration
4 comments
Read more