[Galaxy S III General] digital_elysium:
I certainly didn't buy the phone for S-Voice, but it was definitely a sweetener in the deal. The idea of snoozing an alarm without even opening my eyes or having to move was a lazy man's dream.

After a week of practical usage, I am now resigned to the fact that the implementation is simply too flakey and inconsistent to be useful.

For a start, the literature seemed to promise that you could wake the phone into S-Voice mode by saying "Hi Galaxy". This isn't quite true. You can UNLOCK the phone by saying it (or another preset voice command), but (unless I am missing something obvious) you can't wake it. You have to press the Home or Power button to wake the phone, then you can use a voice command to unlock it. But to be honest, this is completely redundant. If you've gone to the trouble of retrieving the phone (think: while driving) and pressing a physical button, the additional effort required to simply drag your finger across the screen is negligible.

Then there's the lack of consistency in the phone's ability to listen. Sometimes it responds instantly and positively. Other times it has selective deafness. The first morning I tried the "snooze" command, a lesuirely, tired utterance was all it took to snooze the phone (which I was very pleased with). The next morning, it was a case of: "snooze.... snooze.... SNOOZE!!" before an elbow in the face from my wife told me that this wasn't going to work, and I had to drag myself out of my pit to physically turn off the alarm.

It's same in the music player. Sometimes a gentle and casual "Next" has the desired effect. Other times, after the 10th attempt of screaming "NEXT!!" at the phone, you realise it just isn't going to work. There's no pattern. It simply listens sometimes, and not other times.

Finally, there's the odd inconsistency in the way the other phone software responds to an S-Voice command. There are times when S-Voice understands exactly what you are saying, but when it switches to another application to carry out the command, something gets lost in translation.

The music player is a perfect example. When attempting to show off the new found features to my wife, I instructed the phone to: "Play artist Adele". Which S-Voice understood. Music player then started.... playing Kelly Clarkson songs. Cue a derisory snort from the wife.

I've tried this dozens of times, variations of "Play song [x]", "Play songs by [x]", "Play artist [x]", "Play song [x] by [x]". Some times it works, as expected, instantly. Other times it will switch to the music player and play whichever song was last played (regardless of what you ask). Other times it will just play something completely unrelated to anything. Switching back to S-Voice always confirms that the phone had correctly understood the request.

All in all, it's just not quite there as a viable mechanism for controlling the phone. You simply can't rely on it. Which, unfortunately, resigns it to the "gimmick" bin.

In terms of comparisons to Siri, I would say the vocal "hit rate" is similar, the list of integration to phone features is better, but it lacks the personality and humour - which shouldn't be completely overlooked.