Speech to text option? (#1 desire for development)

@urszula @Bartosz_sp2fet Can you confirm that the mudita pure physically lacks the necessary hardware to receive either a data or WiFi signal? Is there any chance that internet operations that function in the background (such as cloud syncing of messages sent via the desktop app or using the phone as a mobile hotspot) might ever be possible in the future?

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Data can be used (for tethering, apps on the phone don’t use data), but there is no Wi-fi antenna.

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If data can be used, why must i plug the phone in to provide internet to another device? Why can’t it be a mobile hotspot?

Also, why can’t the desktop application cloud sync the messages? Why must I plug the phone in to my computer to type a longer SMS?

Both of these seem like a needless nuisance, if data is enabled on the phone.

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Data can be used, but the components for a WiFi hotspot (a WiFi module) do not exist on the phone.

Because they haven’t developed a cloud system and also they are not using any data on the operating system. Even if the phone can access data, it doesn’t mean that the OS is made with data usage. It’s a design choice and they are keeping it that way so far.

The OS is made to be simple and disconnected. That’s what they have been saying all this time and while I understand that it is a nuisance, it is what it is at this point.

I think if you are looking for more “smart” features, maybe a power user Android device would be a better option? Idk you situation, but the Mudita has very little RAM and some of these extra smart programs would potentially break the stability of the OS.

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The Pure just is never going to be the most efficient, time-saving way to do things.
If you’re gonna write 1000 messages, the Pure is gonna be really slow. The time it saves you is by forcing you to not write those messages.

It can text, but, it’s for emergencies and stuff, when you absolutely can’t get to your computer in time. I used to text a lot before smart phones, and then after smart phones (I got back into dumbphones four years ago) I found that I had been so spoiled by touchscreen keyboards that I couldn’t go back.

Instead, I email, which I can do much more intentionally and with a real keyboard.

Ideally, the intent of the Mudita Pure is that the Mudita Center is going to work really well for texting on your computer. It’s not quite there yet (maybe a third party client that’s not Electron based is gonna be the ticket?) but the basic functionality is there. So if you have some conversations that have to happen over text, do them on your computer. “Diving in” to focused internet sessions and then going offline again.

All that presupposes that you have some amount of say in when and how you have these conversations. It’s a big ask and you should take it seriously. It’s like. IDK, going vegetarian or joining a monestary something. There’s gonna be hoops—the hoops are the point! They’re the scaffolding to lead you into a directed and intentional life.

If you wanna do email in the taxi or do your taxes in the checkout lane at the grocery store, a dumbphone is gonna be painful. If you need a hyper effecient always-on pocket computer—and I can think of many professions that do!—that’s not what the Pure is.

People use texts instead of calling because they wanna be polite and non-intrusive and “they’ll see it when they see it”. If you are responsible for dispatching urgent text communication, a dumbphone isn’t gonna be your friend (and probably SMS isn’t gonna be your friend either, over something like Delta or Jabber).

The Pure is for when the full moon is bonkers beautiful and you want your phone to be quiet in your purse. It’s for when the wind is on your face and the sky is silent.

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I’ve already bought the Mudita, and am waiting for it to arrive. I’m reading these forums everyday, because I’m trying to understand what I bought, and whether I will actually be happy with it.

To be honest, I like a lot of things about the Light Phone better than Mudita. I like the touchscreen, the voice to text, the directions function, and podcasts. I like the size better than the mudita, too. I also think the system of buttons on the Light Phone is simpler and more logical. That said, I bought a Light Phone, and it crashed after 24 hours. A replacement was sent, and that crashed after only one hour. So, everything I’m saying is good about the Light Phone is just “in theory.” As I know you have owned a Light Phone for years, I believe that at least some users have had success with it, and not all of their units are so useless. But two tries is too many for me, and I’ve moved on…

All of that to say that I am very much interested in an e-ink minimalist phone. I just don’t understand some of the design/aesthetic decisions of the Mudita.

I don’t care anything about SAR. Even if it’s a real problem, the fact that I will own a low-SAR device, surrounded by thousands of people with smartphones, seems like there’s no possible benefit, in fact. Worse, if it means the phone has limited functionality due to low signal, then it’s actually counter-productive.

I don’t meditate and don’t need a phone in order to meditate, but if that’s a useful feature for others, fine.

Choices like long ringtones for messages, or poor audio quality for phone calls seem to me like aesthetic choices that significantly reduce the quality of the Mudita.

I like the Mudita desktop application (already downloaded it, and it looks excellent) but I don’t like the idea of having to plug my phone into my computer whenever I want to type a longer message. I’m still trying to understand if this is actually necessary, or just an aesthetic decision, which makes the phone less useful.

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I see. Sorry to hear about your LP2 experience.

Do you still have the units? We can help you hack it and fix it on the Light Phone Reddit or discord. We have done so with many people who had their phones “crash.”

Mudita will be better in certain areas than Light phone and viceversa. But if you are looking for those extra functions and you still have the units, I don’t mind helping you out to get them fixed and restored for optimal use.

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Thanks, Jose. I wish I had reached out directly to you when I was dealing with the Light Phone. I feverishly scanned Reddit for solutions, and couldn’t get anything to work, so I sent them back for a refund.

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It happens. If you give it a spin again, let me know. Always willing to help basic phone enthusiasts :slight_smile:

I assume your issue was the dreaded “Go Light”?

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Yes, the dreaded “go light” endlessness was what made me return the phones. But I did have other glitchy problems, which led to me trying to turn the phone on/off. Both the music and podcasts froze at different points. On the replacement phone, the contacts didn’t all sync properly, and also I was getting notifications about text messages, but not the actual messages. So, these were the nuisances that led me to try to reboot. Rebooting got me to the “go light” screen, and I never got out of that.

The company claims that this happens to very few phones, and so I had remarkably bad luck to have it happen twice in a row, but I suspect the problem is larger than they are admitting.

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Yeah. It happens to around 2% of phones in my estimation. I am actually in the middle of putting a guide as to how to fix it without having to return it to Light.

It’s a 10 minute process to get your phone back to normal and it doesn’t require tons of tech expertise. I helped someone the other day to do it and they were back in business super quick. But I understand that the frustrations led you to return it. You wanted the phone to just work and it didn’t.

Light has improved tons in the past 2 years and more stability is coming for sure. That’s why the early bugs with Mudita will be tore lable for me because I hope the phone will get better over time. I just hope they are not super behind because they’ve had 2 yrs to develop this. But patience is key haha

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It seems that you may have misunderstood the point/purpose of the Mudita Pure phone; it seems to me that you won’t really be at all happy with it.

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This is a very narrow-minded and judgmental reply.

We don’t all need to have the same reasons or motivations for wanting a phone like Mudita Pure. I’m not a meditator. I don’t care about SAR value. I don’t want to own a phone that I actively don’t use 99.99% of the time.

I understand that these are the aims and desires of some people… just not me.

I own an iPad and a Mac mini. I will keep using them. I use signal and WhatsApp. I teach on zoom and use video calls for friends and family. I’ll keep doing those things. I use google maps to find my way, especially when traveling. I’ll keep doing that.

I don’t use facebook or instagram or any other forms of social media, and I’ll keep not using them.

I’m not wanting a Mudita Pure because I’m an “addict” or feel afraid of technology, or scared of its impacts on my health.

I want Mudita Pure because I want the primary device that I carry around with me to be simpler, more beautiful, and functional without being cluttered. I want to use a phone to make phone calls and to write some amount of messages (I don’t have dozens of friends or family members that I connect with; just a few). I want to listen to high quality music by plugging my headphones in and playing FLAC files that I love.

In short, I want the phone to do a few things, easily and efficiently, on a beautiful e-ink screen.

I want to use the Mudita Pure. Not tons. Not obsessively. But I want to be able to use it, consistently, on a daily basis, as my only phone. I think this is a reasonable desire, and one that the Mudita community ought to understand and support.

I like speech to text as a feature because it’s easier and more efficient; it takes less time and effort. I think the value of that beats whatever benefit comes from disabling the data signal that I pay my mobile carrier for.

I like the idea of using the phone as a mobile hotspot because that will allow me to do more complicated internet tasks on a device that is better suited to it.

I like the Mudita desktop app and would love to be able to type longer SMS messages on the computer, without having to plug my Pure into the computer to do so. I think that’s a worthwhile goal, which would benefit many users.

I know the phone is called “Pure,” but I am not a Purist. I’m not a monk or a renunciate (as I’ve said, I don’t even meditate).

All the same, there’s still a lot that I would like about the Mudita phone, and I would appreciate if others could understand that, rather than trying to chase me away, in the name of purity…

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Confirmed, we don’t have a WiFi module on board.
I’ve responded about the data in Pure here: Reviews of Mudita Pure, so I’ll just focus on the speech-to-text functionality.

At first, let me explain to you how such a functionality works (in most cases):

  • you speak to the phone, the voice is recorded
  • the audio data is being processed (offline or online)
  • the result is speech converted to text

The first point can be concerning - we have to record the words that you want to convert into text. It might be a privacy issue for some of the users, but alright, that’s not too bad. And then the second point comes in - data processing.
To be able to do this offline (without using any 3rd party services), the processing would require pretty huge computing power for analyzing the audio samples and using/training the neural network. Please consider also that every new language will require a new dataset, which is also occupied with increased power usage.
Of course, it could be done via 3rd party service such as Google Speech-to-text API, but we don’t use the mobile data inside our OS and we don’t want to send private data to Google.

We can’t ignore the fact, that those companies had trained the systems for years to have such accuracy.

Hope that sheds some light on this complicated functionality and explains why we don’t have this right now.

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Thank you for this explanation, and my apologies for not responding sooner.

Looking again at the Mudita Pure product description on the webpage, I see that it mentions a voice recorder. Will I be able to send messages that include my recorded voice?

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I don’t think that’s possible, because the phone cannot send or receive MMS messages. Only text is supported.

As @john_dumpling has said, it is not possible since MMS are disabled. It’s two different kinds of processes from recording something only, to recording and sending something it to someone else. Different protocols and necessary tools for it to happen.

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It’s possible that one could send a link to a mudita space storage version of the recording if you are using mudita center. Sending voice would be very nice and I think would work well with the device. The low SAR and no wifi bent of this device though probably conflict with a lot of the server processed things like voice to text. Though you end up with much more privacy with your data as it’s not being sent all over the place.

I want my phone to be a tool again and not a distraction device. A cut down android device might work better for the purpose of putting all the functions into one device. There are some companies providing devices more like this. Instead though I have decided on the Mudita Pure because of the openness of MuditaOS. I will be taking pictures with a Sony RX100. I removed my music from my Android phone to a Fiio M5 portable audio player. It’s interesting as neither of these devices advertise anything nor have any inbuilt distractions. I can use these tools without anything else on them distracting me from the task at hand.

I am actually hoping that the limitations of Mudita Pure around texting will make me call them instead when someone is trying to converse with me instead of just facilitate a meet up or send a simple message.

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As @Jose_Briones summed up, It won’t be possible to send the recorded voice via MMS, as the MMS feature is not available now.

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Not having any plan for MMS is a real problem.

  1. The ability for me to send voice messages would greatly reduce the uselessness of the non-T9 numberpad.

But more importantly, having some mechanism for MMS, such as the LightPhone does, of forwarding photos sent via
Text to me to my email - in this case to the Mudita Center - would be a huge deal.

This is why…

It’s one thing for mudita users to decide to go without cameras on our own phones, and to go without the ability to send photos to others. That’s our choice.

BUT, i really don’t want to have to write to all my friends and family and tell them never to send me photos. I want their experience of contacting me to be as seamless as possible. I’m happy to take the extra step of getting onto the computer and checking the Mudita Center to see the photo my mom sent me, but I want her to still send it.

Do you see my point?

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