Editing 1787: Voice Commands

{{comic
| number    = 1787
| date      = January 18, 2017
| title     = Voice Commands
| image     = voice_commands.png
| titletext = Dvorak words may sound hard to pronounce, but studies show they actually put less stress on the vocal cords.
}}

==Explanation==
In this comic [[Cueball]] has shown [[Ponytail]] something relevant to her on his smartphone and she asks if he can send it to her. He agrees but then says something completely incomprehensible to Ponytail, but obviously his phone understands and sends the message with a beep. 

The caption explains that he was speaking as though he was using a {{w|QWERTY}} keyboard layout and writing as it was a {{w|Dvorak Simplified Keyboard}}. In other words, Cueball is saying keys on a Dvorak keyboard and the phone is receiving the spaces on a QWERTY keyboard that each of Cueball's Dvorak letters uses. Cueball can be sure that nobody else will be able to use voice commands on his phone.

The sentence Cueball tells his phone translates to "Okay Google send a text" - he says it as if he were typing the sentence on a Dvorak layout with the keyboard set to a QWERTY layout. How such words would be pronounced is a mystery, as the letters in the words are merely substituted with others with no regard to phonetics; without standardized pronunciations, a speech-to-text program would be useless. To add to the confusion, one of the words in Cueball's sentence includes a semi-colon as one of its letters despite the fact that semi-colons are punctuation rather than phonemes, which only complicates the pronunciation further.

The title text is a reference to the fact that many users of Dvorak keyboards claim they may be hard to learn, but they are more movement efficient and put less stress on your fingers due to less movement. This makes little sense in the scenario set up by the comic, as speaking gibberish using oddly placed vowels would be equally difficult, if not in fact harder, on the vocal cords.{{citation needed}}

==Transcript==
:[Ponytail is looking at Cueball facing her direction, and he looks down at the smartphone he is holding in his hand.]
:Ponytail: Can you text it to me?
:Cueball: Sure! 
:Cueball: ''Svat ussupd ;dlh a kdbk''
:Ponytail: ...What?
:Phone: ''*Beep*''

:[Caption under the panel:]
:Setting my phone's speech recognition to Dvorak was a pain at first, but it's more efficient in the long run.

==Trivia==
*Using a Dvorak keyboard layout on a smartphone (for actual typing, not voice commands) is possible, but the very features that make it desirable in a physical touch-typing environment are drawbacks on a swipe-enabled keyboard. A placement designed to alternate a typist's left and right hands requires the finger of a swipist to travel back and forth across the keyboard more often. Fitting commonly-used letters onto the typist's home row reduces finger movement but makes many words the swipist enters indistinguishable. On a QWERTY swipe keyboard, four English words can be entered by swiping right to left from P to T: "pot", "pit", "put", and "pout"; however, setting the layout to Dvorak causes this to happen with many more common sets of words.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Smartphones]]
[[Category:Dvorak]]