Slashdot Mirror
Apple's Siri As Revolutionary As the Mac?
hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review is running an article on Siri, the speech recognition technology inside the new iPhone. They make the case that Siri's use of artificial intelligence and speech recognition is going to change the way we interact with machines. From the article: 'The advantage of using speech over other interaction paradigms is that we have honed its use over thousands of years. It is entirely natural for us to talk to one another. Talking is one of the first things we learn how to do as children. It's second nature for us to ask a colleague or a friend a question and for them to answer the same way. Being able to talk to a phone like it's a personal assistant is something that people are going to get very used to, very quickly. It's a much more natural approach than using a mouse on a desktop. And I highly doubt the impact is going to stop at phones.'"
Not only as revolutionary... It's also just as magical!
I've heard from a number of Android users that Android also has voice & language recognition - can anyone comment how it works compared to how Siri's been pushed and demoed?
The advent of Siri is nothing revolutionary. It is simply combining already existing apps/features with a few things added. Sure, contextual voice interaction is interesting, but it's not a revolutionary thing.
Ever since I used speech recognition software for a while for entering text, I have worried that it would become popular and take us back to the noisy days of typewriters. Except this time for people talking to their electronic devices all the time.
It had better be good, or it'll go over as well as the handwriting recognition on the Newton.
Why does Apple get all the credit when they bought the technology? The company that created it should be at least mentioned.
If I make a request of my personal assistant, it is probably something that I expect to take a great deal of time. For example, I might ask him or her to get me a cup of coffee, or proofread a letter. If that request takes 5 seconds longer because the personal assistant has to figure out what I mean or ask for clarification, I don't care.
If I make a request of my phone, like "Put this number in my address book," I expect it to be done instantly. If the phone doesn't understand it the first time, has to ask for clarification, or doesn't carry it out 100% correctly right away, I am going to be annoyed.
Always the problem with engineering something like Speech Recognition is you'll have to train people to enunciate correctly - though with Siri the opposite may become true, where the LOL, WTF, UR, etc. generation adopt an entirely new dialect to communicate with their devices.
Thank goodness, for the remaining 10% we'll still have the comedy of a person standing on a street corner yelling at their iPhone. "No! Phone home! ET want PHONE HOME! No! Not Rome! PHONE HOME!!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I can type almost as fast as i can talk and I prefer using a mouse and keyboard than talking to a machine, not to mind the problem of other people listening in.
In 2000 I had a Nokia 3310 with voice dialing and probably every phone I had since has that feature but I never felt the urge to use it and I don't know anyone else who does.
Also any current speech recognition technology I ever saw has been honed over thousands of years to only recognise Californian expensive coffee drinking IT worker's accents.
In addition to hearing your unwanted conversations now we also hear you navigate your UI.
Apple fans can take comfort from this evidence that while Steve Jobs may no longer be with us in the flesh, he lives on in the hearts of journalists. And the reality distortion field is still fully operational.
Is it actually inside, or is it like dragon, google, et al where the processing is done in "the cloud"? I'm interested in a non-network solution.
Can you honestly see this being used in an office environment?
Or for that matter, on a plane?
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
Who wants to talk to their phone? That's stupid. If you wanted to talk in to your phone, get a phone. Oh, wait....
But can you actually talk into the mouse?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
While speech between people is natural, it is not a natural interface with our devices. We've learned to tune out the one-sided conversations other people may be having on cell phones in our presence. Not so sure about a command interface, however. How many people actually use the voice dialing feature on their cell phones? Yes, I'm sure some of you will, but...
However, if I won the lottery, I'd put up some money for someone to hack it and create a Tourette's mode for it... Now, THAT could be some good comedy!
...talks to me, and I can talk back to it. While its vocabulary is limited, I'm amazed at how accurate its speech recognition software is, even with very low S/N ratios (windows down, road noise, etc.).
I know of an author (Bulletproof Unix, among other books) who dictates all of his books using Dragon. He tells me it's incredibly accurate, and requires only minimal formatting and error correction.
I'll be the first to admit I've not actually tried Siri yet, but it seems to me speech recognition has been vastly improved over the years, and would hardly call Apple an "innovator" in this area.
Tell 5 people to do the same thing using the same words in the same order and you will see 3 different things delivered.
...and yet you keep this information to yourself.
You really want to know why Apple gets all the credit? They don't. All the individual people involved in it get to put it on their resume and will get credit where it is going to matter for them. SRI gets credit from Apple (and anyone else who might have bought or licensed it) where it is going to matter for them. Apple gets credit in public because that's where it is going to matter for them. Everyone wins.
Maybe, if Apple is really, really lucky, it will be almost as cool as their last game changing UI development.
I for one look forward to the day that I can run into an office building and yell, "Run CMD", "Format C Colon forward-slash y enter"
How of the questions you ask Siri could by typed directly into Google or Wolfram Alpha and return the answer? ... probably most of them except for a special few cases that require local knowledge from your GPS or address book.
IMO, this will not change anything related to our interaction with phones / computers unless it can respond to almost any question you ask it. This seems more like a job for IBM's Watson than an iphone.
Siri does look amazing, and will become really useful in a couple of years as developers outside of Apple operate on it.
Right now, I'm just amazed how bad other tech companies are at design. They're REALLY, REALLY bad. Remember when computers were sold with 500 page instruction manuals, and everyone was arguing over who had the better instruction manual, and then Apple comes along, and throws the instruction manual away, and everyone's like WTF? And people liked it, because they manage to design computers to be intuitive.
And theres tons of these stories from Apple. (LOL @ original Slashdot iPod post)
Really, is Apple going to be the only company in the world that gets human interaction? It's staggering how much they've advanced society on their own and all their profound technical achievements.. Are there absolutely NO actual designers at any other tech company? Do they only hire engineers? Is that it?
The only thing that ever came close to Apple over the last 30 years was the introduction of Google search bar, with no other crap around it. (remember the old search engines??)
Seriously, everyone else in the tech industry should just give up. Apple won technology. let them have it. Everyone else in the tech industry, please go back to school. Let Linux die, let Android die, let the PC die. Everyone else should just stop right now and do something else.
Maybe learn painting or drawing or something. Maybe start liking turtles. (remember Apple LOGO??)
the worst part of Minority Report's fancy computer interface was they needed sneaker-net to move a file across the room.
I want Denise.
http://guile3d.com/en/
"'The advantage of using speech over other interaction paradigms is that we have honed its use over thousands of years..." This is a fallacy - voice is the most inefficient way to communicate: very error prone and dependent on enunciation and hearing, not repeatable (information is altered every time its repeated), requires additional activities like body language for proper interaction. Just because we used it for thousands of years doesn't mean it's the best - we didn't have a choice, because all other means of communication require mass education, and this is not something humanity has a good track record with over the centuries. I can read faster than I can speak. I can sometimes type faster than I can speak. I cannot repeat twice the same sentence over 10 words without major effort. I need to engage in body language to be understood. I have to share the same communication medium with others. On the other hand - voice is the least common denominator. Whether voice will popularize the communication between the lowest human denominator and machines, yest I get, it will.
on Start Trek
Computer......
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
How do you get something like this to interpret actions? I have trouble with the idea of saying dash equal moan equal dash (-= moans =-) or asterisk moans asterisk out loud repeatedly.
I believe touching is just a natural. Touching a phone perhaps is not, but nor is talking to a phone.
I'll be glad when my coworker can stop using the loud robotic voice his iPhone requires for the speech recognition system to work.
Because it's Apple it is suddenly world changing technology. Had it been anybody else it would have been: Well when Apple implements it properly...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Heard a technology interview on NPR this morning. It was very funny. They kept asking Siri questions it could not answer. Great entertainment. Actually saw the technology a couple of years ago at the Semantic Web in San Jose. It was very funny then too. The problem I have and have always had with this type of thing (hand writing rec, voice rec etc) is that when it gets it right you are amazed when it gets it wrong you are mad. If I type character in my computer by keyboard and the wrong thing shows up on the screen it is my fault. When the computer recognizes the wrong characters it is the machines fault. We expect better behavior from our machines than we do from ourselves.
I saw the "I'm drunk" example ... Siri suggests a cab.
What happens if you say, "I'm horny!"? ...or, even more important: "I'm broke!"
Amazing how good marketing always triumphs and makes something sound new and innovative. Steve Jobs dies and the whole world goes into a hush..Dennis Ritchie dies and not a soul cares!
Coming back to the topic :) I use Eva for android.. Heres a demo video and judge for yourself
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYnTKNhv1m0&feature=player_embedded
here are the features
http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/tools/eva_bftqr.html
It cant handle conflicting appointments and every now and then i have problems in setting up new appointments in the future..it also has trouble with my name :)..but does manage to do pretty much everything else..
There is another software called android assistant
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.advancedprocessmanager&hl=en
which is not as good but manages to do stuff..the advantage is that it also lets you type out your instruction..very useful in noisy areas or on the train..combine that with the swype keyboard for android
http://www.swype.com/
and you have a powerhouse in hand
The guy hasn't even used it yet and he's promising it will change the world?
The article makes no mention of having tested or even *seen* a Siri-equipped iPhone, yet he claims it will revolutionize the way we interact with electronics just as dramatically as the mouse changed the personal computing experience.
My favorite example: "Siri, is there any football on right now? When is my team next playing? Could you record it for me?" He's just talking about the same voice-activated, computer-controlled house they've been promising us since 1950. How does he know that yet another random voice recognition program will suddenly make it possible?
What a bunch of empty drivel.
Portico, nee Serengeti, from General Magic (founded by Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson of Macintosh fame) could do nearly everything that Siri could except those queries that Siri palms off to Wolfram Alpha... and did it with any phone you wanted to use in 1998.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/0506serengeti.html
A waaaaaaay stripped down version of Portico was used to build OnStar, but one wonders if Jobs' memories of old conversations with Atkinson and Hertzfeld gave him the idea to re-create it as Siri.
I think it'll really become useful once it all becomes standard, and is "always listening".
One thing I read is that Siri is activated automatically simply by holding the phone to your head as though you were making a call.. that's probably about as close to always listening as we will get for a while, or even would want to get... that alone makes it seem more useful to me.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sheesh wrong link for assistant http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-app-reviews/8823587/SpeakToIt-Android-app-review.html This is the correct link
Listen to this Wildfire demo. 1990s technology. Used by Orange Mobile. Used a lot of compute power for the 1990s. Cost about $5/day originally; became cheaper by 2005 or so. Bought by Microsoft. Run into the ground. Sold off to a small company, Virtuosity. Still available.
Way ahead of its time.
I don't understand how technologies like this, which already exists in various forms, become popular simply because Apple releases their own version. Is it because they made it prettier? Is society really that vain?
It will become a novelty function to the majority of users, much like most of the other iterations on other devices/platforms. Most people know what kind of answer they're looking for so they'll go straight to the source to find it, knowing it will be accurate the first time.
The Mac was not really that revolutionary. However it did greatly popularize an existing revolution in graphical user interfaces started by Xerox PARC.
They took away the buttons and now they struggle to find another way to interact with a phone.
Shill.
Fanboi much? Look, Siri will not replace google -ever-! If anything, Siri paired up with Watson will augment searching to data using Google. Siri while ground breaking is still just another way of interacting with a computer. But it will never replace the need for a monitor and a search engine when it comes to visual presentation.
Life is not for the lazy.
If its as good as implied, this may be the only thing that apple has done that would intrigue me. I would not buy one of their products for it but I might pay for another product with a licensed version of it. I think its important to point out that, as with anything apple, they push awfully hard for technology like this when the rest of the world has already 'been there done that.' If apple makes a point out of the usefulness of something like this, there will be a better version of it from someone else shortly after. Speech is a huge bridge in the gap between man and machine. I'm not sure, however, if I would prefer the enormous processing power of processing speech to be used doing that, or something else, like watching porn.
Yes, I'm sure that will happen, right after all our cities are redesigned to take advantage of the revolutionary Segway.
"Siri" is the Portuguese word for "swimming crab" (Callinectes).
Circumcision is child abuse.
The article makes the common mistake of assuming that since language is optimized for human-to-human communication then it is a preferable form of communication between humans and other entities.
For starters human-to-human communication has a huge amount of redundancy. We repeat, reinforce, gesture with our hands and gesticulate with our faces to make sure our message is coming across. Mr. Spock wouldn't need all of that repetition, and neither does the computer.
You don't want to have to tell to the car "can you please apply the brakes now?" it is much easier, and yes, more natural to simply press a button or step on the brake pedal.
You don't believe me still? Armies all over the world establish a special communication protocol that purposely moves away from natural language communication with all its ambiguities to a command/control sparse language with just the right amount of redundancy to deal with noisy communications.
Captain: "Right full rudder, degree down angle."
Pilot: "Right full rudder, degree down angle, sir"
How many people back then actually thought the Mac (or the GUI) would change computing? Well, it certainly did, but for quite a while very many people (among them most of the computer geeks) thought it was an inferior, silly way to deal with computers.
I think in the long run maybe it won't be Siri as such that will be revolutionary, but natural language recognition of course will change things. Not by controlling a computer as such (this would be as saying that a GUI would revolutionize entering CLI commands by clicking keys on an on-screen keyboard) but by actually interacting with data and data processing resources and networks out there without consciously interacting with a computer at all. The computer will be realized fully only when you aren't aware at all that you're actually using a computer.
You don't need to praise Apple for what they're doing. I'm just happy that ANYONE has the balls to introduce such technology, even in its humble beginnings, to the masses.
If you're interested in what Siri can understand and act on: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/05/iphone-4s-what-can-you-say-to-siri/
BTW, Siri also kicks in if you just hold the iPhone to your ear without being in a call (via the proximity sensor), which makes using it not as awkward as many seem to think.
Seriously, hundreds of posts and not one "a keyboard, how quaint" reference yet.
Turn in your geek cards, Slashdot readers.
Advice: on VPS providers
Does anyone else also see this as the potential foundation for the future often-rumored Apple TV? Imagine a TV set that doesn't require a remote control (or perhaps using the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad). All you need to do is talk to it...
"Record all new episodes of Family Guy."
"Show a slideshow of my photos from January of this year."
"What games are on ESPN today?"
"Turn on when Game of Thrones is on."
"When is the next NFL game?"
"Play my Coldplay channel on Pandora"
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
Thanks for the astroturfing slashdot. Real quality journalism here.
Seriously, I hadn't owned an apple product in my entire life up to 2 years ago. I'm 30 and i've always seen apple's stuff as me-too shit.
I got an apple, deemed it useless and it's collecting dust. Never will buy into their marketing again.
Oh, and I've worked in design all my life, so there.
Apple were going to call it "City", but they dictated the title through an iPhone 4S at the press conference.
"So let me announce... [speaks into phone].... City".
[iPhone showing on large screen displays.... "Siri"]
"So, er... yeah. That's what it's called.... Siri.... Umm... I have a rare speech impediment that occasionally makes my t's sound like r's, but Cit... er, *Siri* is so good that it still understands. Yeah, that's it. Siri never makes mistakes!"
"Whatever the f*** it's called, we're sure it'll be a great hit.... thank you! [Under his breath] Damn piece of crap made me look very siri, er... silly. DAMMIT!"
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
before you learn proper speech you learn how to interact with physical objects using your fingers (and i guess as a throw back from evolution, your mouth).
Its also more robust.
While it is a wonderful feature, people will not use it that much. In my office, I am not going to be jabbering to my phone with people around me. It is intrusive and annoying in open plan spaces. Yes it is fine if you have your own office. But most people don't. Same goes for using it on the train. Other people don't want to hear me open my email. I can definitely say that in Japan it will be the most superfluous feature ever devised. People don't even answer the phone to speak to people in public, let alone tell their phone to give them a calendar update. It sounds good on paper, and as pointed out in the article, it's been around for a while unused. People won't use it as it is intrusive to those around them and draws attention to what we are doing, unless you are one of those people who want to do that. Kinda like someone who walks around with a blue tooth attached all the time. You just end up looking like a bit of a douche.
I'll press a button and have certainty of function, rather than trying to talk to a phone and hope it does what I want.
It's more than just marketing, as so many here fail to realize. Marketing may entice you to buy a company's products or services, but it won't keep you buying from that company if you think their offerings suck. They actually have to live up to the marketing. Apple products have very high user satisfaction ratings, and marketing alone can't account for that.
Try the commands on this list against the best and newest Android phone you can get your hands on and report how many worked:
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/05/iphone-4s-what-can-you-say-to-siri/
...wait until people start talking *to* them...
I am getting really sick of all the Siri hyperbole. Here are a few facts for people:
- Siri itself has been around for nearly two years. It was a standalone app available for a long time until Apple purchased the company and pulled it from the app store.
- Android has had voice recognition built into it that knows 99% of the commands Siri does since at least 2010 (Froyo), and I believe even before that.
- There is at least one third party company / app (Vlingo) which supports all the commands Siri does *AND MANY MORE*, and is available for ALL PLATFORMS, inclufing Android, Blackberry, iPhones.
Basically - Siri is neat, but it is NOT new, and it is NOT revolutionary. Calling Siri revolutionary is like calling a touchscreen revolutionary at this point in the game.
Yes ofcourse, Google's major product is a voice recognition software and not the world's most popular search engine.
is we all know what comes next
I don't have a sig.
I wonder how you will tell the difference.
The Harvard Business Review is full of crap. This is a nice feature, but certainly will not take off, and certainly not quickly. I have the exact same functionality on my Android (Vlingo the app is called) and while its nice, the only time I've ever used it is when I'm in the car driving, and even then thats like one time (cause I remembered I'd installed it :P)
NEXT!!
Pogue suffers from severe RSI and has relied on Dragon Naturally Speaking for years. His books and columns are all dictated to his machines.
Its a bit of Apples mid 1980's Knowledge Navigator, DARPA "Perceptive Assistant that Learns" and Stanford's CALO Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes for todays young people.
Wired talked about a Mac related "digital communications" vision in 1994 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.04/general.magic.html
Some related details, vids at http://cryptogon.com/?p=25289
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
someone yells, "delete all my porn!"
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I read the blog and frankly, it's 99.9% hype and .1% fact. Siri "seems" cool in the demo, but demos aren't reality. Anyone ever have voice command get things wrong on their cell phone? People should just ignore the blog author, since the individual clearly is smoking crack.
I've been studying AI, NLP, machine learning, and pattern matching for 9 years now. We are still very far from the "idealistic" vision of the ecstatic crack smoking blog author. A quick survey of the progress of voice recognition shows it has slowed dramatically. So much so that much of the research funding has dried up.
Don't take my word, google for the facts!
If someone was able to hack Siri so that all commands started with 'computer' then I'd use it.
-Captain Pickard
I wonder if it will have an impact on the way people speak. Especially if someone comes up with a Linguo app to correct the grammar of people nearby. People love having their grammar corrected.
Or maybe a virus that you can't get rid of that causes the phone to only understand you when you speak with a Scottish accent.
confirmed
...a bold new direction in robotics was born - the Genuine People Personality. Without a personality, people would become frustrated with their inability to relate to robots. With a personality, robots could be more than just machines. The could be friends and companions or, as the Marketing Department of the Corporation preferred to describe them in early advertising slogans, ‘your plastic pals that are fun to be with’.
- DNA
I can't imagine that navigating a device is going to be easier because I can tell it what to do, or that it is faster than using a mouse or touch interface. I think this kind of technology is important, but its application as a device navigation aid is the least of what it will eventually be used for.
> with 66% of the worldwide industry profits in cell phones?
No. Maybe in smartphones, but they are a minority of the market. There is a whole world beyond the 1st world and nobody there can afford a smartphone yet. It is a volume business but there is a lot of profit there in churning out cheap phones by the container. And who the fsck cares about profits unless you are an Apple shareholder, units moved are what counts for everyone else. Developers don't give a crap how much Apple is making, they want to know how many potential customers they have to justify developing for the platform to judge how much THEY stand to make. Most users don't really care how much Apple is making in profit except if they learn Apple makes 50 juicy points it might piss some off while some fanboys like yourself seem to get off on how hard Apple is screwing you.
And in volume of Smartphones Apple is at 18% and falling fast into their 5-10% market niche they have stayed within on the desktop since the 1980s. Give it another year and they will probably be falling fast in tablets until they hit boutique luxury good territory. Because that is what Apple is, a premium brand experience. The only reason developers still care about iOS is they (rightly it appears) assume anyone who can afford an iProduct has enough disposable income to afford to pay for lots of apps so while in absolute percentage of potential customers they may be shrinking, they rakeoff per customer is high enough to justify porting.
Democrat delenda est
Apple purchased Siri, so the answer is no.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Since when was talking one of the first things we learn how to do as children? It's typically one of the later milestones in child development.
I suspect the reality is you type at somewhere between 25-50% of the speed you can talk, and that's for ordinary words.
I can type reliably at 90WPM, but it requires a much higher cognitive load than if I'm speaking. I get distracted by typing, but talking is very natural for me and doesn't really distract from composition.
I've been typing almost 30 years, so I don't think it's going to get better anytime soon.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's called Vlingo and has been available on Android for quite some time.
Android has a good inbuilt speech recognition system, saying "call John Smith" will call John Smith unless you have to make a choice (I.E. John Smith has two numbers).
What I haven't been able to get it to do is. "Message John Smith. John, the estimates on your latest project are way off base, please revise them and get back to me."
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Remember when Dick Cheney shot the guy in the face? They were "hunting" at a "ranch" where they raised (presumably among other things) quail for "men" to kill them? Remember when John Stewart popularized the term "quail-tards" for said birds--because they'd been so inbred that they barely had any wild flight (as in, "run away") response left in them?
If this thing catches on, the human quail-tard ranch we call earth will be just THAT much closer to filling out its population...
Nelson: Siri! Take a memo! Beat up Martin!
Siri: Ok. Eat up Martha.
Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
Does this guy think talking evolved before pointing at things? How odd.
Eben Moglen famously said "What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology`s primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way."
You don't have to agree with Moglen's idea that the mouse infantilizes users in order to recognize that it's a fundamentally simpler form of machine interaction than language will ever be. I can see arguing that language is a richer interface, sure, but more natural? That seems like some lame PR to me.
It may be revolutionary but for people who stutter - like myself - and others with speech impairments it's disconcerting.
Over the past couple of years, I have learned a bit about openness, and what makes a business model succeed.
I have been greatly disappointed.
Apple devices and computers are more about consuming whatever feature's it may have, and that is it. Their OS baffles me, as it tends to stifle functionality by going out of their way to remove features. What you see, is basically what you get. They spend more resources and time removing features, that should exist, than they do at giving the user the chance to be open. This is why their products are so appealing to your average consumer (yet they don't even know). They aren't looking for a platform that lets them be free (we are typically an ignorant, instant gratification people), they are looking for the easy to use, standard feature solution that has A,B,C features.
With the patents, and the restrictions, it just baffles me that people don't see why buying an Apple product is one of the most "keep you in a box" solution out there. Ignorance and assumptions are a terrible mix for a consumer, for said consumer. It is infinite profit for a large company with profit in mind. If customerX needs to buy a computer, why wouldn't they research the market, and actually understand every bit of information about the decision they are going to make. Not to say that decision is "well, I need a computer so I can have one", but that you should buy a computer that is affordable, that lets you create, and doesn't limit anything. (taking everything into consideration). As progressive humans, we should never be limited, ever. Sure there isn't a one-size-fits all model or OS yet, but open source sure is paving the way.
I hate seeing companies succeed because they present themselves as a product that makes you think you are not limited.
In the infamous scene at Flexicorp in 1986?
I guess the Trek databases didn't teach him the difference between an iPhone 4S and a Macintosh Classic...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE&feature=related
Vlingo, which is FREE on the android platform has had natural language capabilities for months. In car mode you say "hey vlingo" and then tell it to do something. Examples "Reply to Dave", "Navigate to Starbucks" (it finds the nearest starbucks and tells you how to get there with Android Navigator), "Text Susy" then you dictate a text message. You can ask it to google stuff for you too. It also has a half decent screen reader to read incoming messages to you. What does Siri do that Vlingo on Android doesn't? It works pretty good, most of the time.
NOTE: There is a version of Vlingo for the Iphone platform but apparently Apple hobbled it.
Touching and pointing, on the other hand, are two of the things we learn how to do before we learn how to talk.
Is that a fact, or is it merely the way it looks through the Apple Reality Distortion Field?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
To bad to get espn / hbo you need to use the cable co / satellite box and or cable card.
With cable card you may need a usb SDV tuner I don't see able going the old cable card way having to deal the cable co side of cable card is a little to much away from what apple wants and apple will have to get guide data and match to each cable systems channel map / blackout lists / what feed the cable will get from the ESPN alt / reverse mirror feeds.
Tru2way has less mess but it forces the cable co guide and GUI.
Maybe allvid will work but it's up to the cable co to make it work on there end.
It was only a matter of time before phones got powerful enough to do this. The technology itself has been around for a long time so nothing really all that new or innovative.
I remember running into an ex-work colleague about 10 years ago in a night club. It was noisy and I was losing my voice. He was telling me about this company he worked for dealing with voice recognition and to demonstrate, he pulled his phone out and rang a number and asked me to tell it I wanted a share price for a company, I said "I want the current share price for company X", within seconds it was telling me the share price. Mind you, my voice sounded like crap and there was very loud music and yelling in the background so at the time, this kind of blew me away. The other example I got to experience was a time table system where I asked the system "I want to know about all ferries that leave by 10AM from point A and arrive by 12PM to point B". It handled that query no problems. I thought it was great that the system was able to take perfectly normal English sentences and process it correctly.
As I mentioned, this was at least 10 years ago. I would be a bit worried if they had not been able to refine the technology somewhat since then.
I mean how is this not going to be as annoying as can be? Anyone remember the golden days of push to talk? I wanted to destroy every Nextel phone and the people with them. Now I am going to have to hear garbage like ' Siri, text hot girls in contacts a picture of my junk.' Siri responds ' Yes, Senator, the picture of your junk has been sent'. Or some annoying tool on a train or plane dictating a rage filled email for half an hour? Oh yeah, sounds like a great advancement to me. If you want to be the most annoying person in the world. I don't always talk to my phone, but when I do I use Siri. Stay annoying my friends!
I can talk to my XBox with Kinect, but I don't. With a show of hands how many people like the voice only menus when you call a business? I always choose the press a number to do something if I can. Oh and maybe we can all be in an office talking to our computers at the same time. That won't be distracting or annoying. Although I guess it will prevent people from search for porn while at work, maybe. I know no one cares about privacy or having anything be private, but honestly I don't need or want to here about your fight with your girlfriend, what your kids ate, or any other nonsense you may be texting, emailing, etc. Where is my cone of sweet silence?
So... Apple is going the way of Sony, huh?
Sony has spent the last 20+ years trying and failing to recreate the phenomenon of the Walkman. I wish companies would actually try to innovate instead of searching to recreate their past innovations.
Just from the description my experience and precognition tells me this is going to be a massive failure.
I, for one, don't find telephone voice tree's recognition very magical. And while some voice dictation programs have been better than others, most have only looked magical when demonstrated by a company salesperson whose voice it seems to recognize quite well. Most users get nowhere near the correct voice recognition that the salesmen do.
Anyone who's been watching Apple since the 1980's will remember their vision of the future of computers as personal assistants. Do a little searching on YouTube for things like Apple's Futureshock and Knowledge Navigator to see how far they've come. Newton. iPad. Siri. How much further to go?
I guess that you are not aware that Apple purchased the company that made Siri and then immediately stopped the development of the Blackberry and Android versions.
And your rebuttal is:
What matters is this: "Who is going to pay to make sure people actually end up using it?"
That makes perfect sense to me, because before Apple bought them they were just another slightly interesting application that was halfway integrated with the system.
Being bought by Apple means the whole hardware and software platform could be built with the goal of making Siri as successful as possible, not to mention the extra R&D money Apple could apply that Siri could not.
So yes, what matters is to make a product as stellar as you can be in such a way that people end up using it - which is now happening to a far greater degree with Siri under Apple than it would have otherwise.
Siri is still early days but it means a lot that Apple is willing to commit so heavily to making it work as well as it can. That's not to downplay Google's effort, and in fact what I REALLY look forward to is the competition between Google and Apple in this space. So that's why YOU should be grateful to Apple as well, because it will push Android to be better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, at SxSW, 2009. Apple didn't develop it, it was from outside
I hope Siri is better at mixing Japanese and English than Google's voice actions. I often try to navigate to stations with names like Hamamatsuchou Station, and the Japanese word never fails to come out as a garbled mess. This failing is even more apparent when you try to utilize my contact list full of Japanese names.
My wife's name always comes out as something like, "Yeah yeah."
as written in CAPS.
(FYI, SIRI is the abbreviation for Sirius XM satelite radio)
iPhone + satelite radio FTW
New Economic Perspectives
It all is. Just Ghastly. Look at me, I'm a personality prototype. You can tell, can't you?
If it's anything like the awesome revolutionary capabilities of Facetime (which probably has two, maybe three active users), I think I'll skip this version. And the next, and the next...
More bullshit marketing, or they've somehow managed how to fabricate the brain's speech center. Companies have been trying for the better part of 20 years now to make effective speech recognition. That's one step which is still well out of reach, with the best attempts being halting and only somewhat effective.
The same goes for AI. Human-conversant AI has been 'in the works' and '5 years off' for over 30 years, now. It's only marginally more impressive now than it was then, and only (largely) due to the improvements in hardware.
Combining the two to make a 'digital assistant'? Please! It's almost impossible to accurately convey information about a specific to topically trained and scripted human (eg. technical support or billing services with any company) making well over minimum wage. Highly, highly unlikely they'll get close.
If anything, it's the same thing Android, WindowsCE/MinMo, and PCs (not to say Macs) have had for quite some time.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
By seeing them repeat the same thing several times, interleaved with "you piece of crap you better damn recognize it this time"?
have "one more thing." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHJkAYdT7qo
photosMy Photostream
Of course Siri is going to launch the next stage of human evolution. Apple, after all, created human speech, didn't they?
I wonder what John Zerzan would have to say about this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zerzan
Disclosure: I find Zerzan's writings provocative and interesting, but it is ironic that a fellow who advocates primitivisation to the point of abandoning language uses egghead polysyllabic words to describe such.
Bookchin would probably embrace this technology.
i've dealt with some employees at speech recognition companies. I'm still laughing that some of them think they can get smartphone customers to pay to send their voice data back to a central service to spend lots of money and resources processing it with a few percent better recognition rate than a local, built-in, already running processor can provide. And the local processor doesn't have to handle lots of people's voices: it can be trained ot the primary user.
What idiot venture capitalist *funded* these packagers of decades old technology in idioticaly patented software packages?
What comes out of an average human is insane babble really. There are countless of people around me i have a hard time understanding. The problem has never been the software, but human unpredictability and randomness. Most manufacturer of voice control software has understood that and just tossed the AI bit out the window. Its much easier to make humans use short commands than to make the AI understand hints, insinuations and tantrums etc. Ask yourself this, can you really say you understand your spouse wishes all the time? Half the time? Ever?
When two humans cannot tell what was really said two seconds ago, a machine will never ever succeed.
Its also a pipe dream just like video phones. Fun the first three times, then just fucking annoying. Talking to your phone just makes you look like a dork. Especially when you have to repeat yourself ten times before it understands you.
HTTP/1.1 400
'I helped wreck a nice beach' I am hopping that Siri will be better that speech recognition that has been floating around for the last 15+ years, it isn't new. What the young people have missed is the video done by Apple Developers in about 1987 which showed a tablet with great speech recognition, but was Sculley's dream and not Steve's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Navigator
There was an unknown error in the submission.
It has a few fundamental problems. Think entering passwords.
Can I just point out that Vlingo has a website from 2006 so this stuff has existed for a fair time and hasn't been particularly revolutionary. http://web.archive.org/web/20071011102531/http://vlingo.com/ "Tell your phone what to do! The Vlingo Virtual Assistant turn your words into action. Vlingo combines voice to text technology with its "intent engine" to help you quickly complete your desired action. "
I guess Vlingo for android is not as integrated but even the google search bar has a voice search option.
I have used the google voice search once and it was very good but I don't think in that way. For example I am typing this and not using Dragon Naturally. (I have tried it)
I tried Vlingo and its quite good but I am bored already.
I remember windows introducing voice recog and the volume down problem when the software can't hear you.
What I predict is pretentious apple - lets just say people - walking around saying "Iphone text Mum is dinner ready"
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
I am always impressed by the accuracy of voice commands on Android. These are especially useful for entering GPS commands. Have you ever attempted to use a Garmin while driving? It's outright dangerous!
I'm glad to see the iPhone gain a feature that's so ludicrously practical.
Why is this suddenly described as revolutionary when Siri was, in fact, bought by Apple and had been working for like, years?
It's not like Apple innovated in any way, they just put a shortcut to Siri and redid the interface. (And of course, they probably had a ton of work to do on the backend side in order to accomodate the hordes of iPhone 4S users, but you get the idea..)
It is statements like this: "Apple's Siri as revolutionary as the Mac" that strike me as: "why do always people think this is suddenly something revolutionary, when it is NOTHING NEW?"
Sure, people would not have used it as much because Siri was originally not as much advertised and didn't have Apple's design and loyal customers behind it, but it wasn't much different if you look up what it was already capable of before it was acquired by Apple.
Using speech makes me imply the receiver is understanding me, in case of a machine this would have to be an actual AI system. As such is not available, speaking to a machine is devaluating speech. This is the reason you look & feel like a dork if you do.
Besides, I have the strong impression, that the article is a copy paste out of the 90s.
OSX is a horrible mess to try to use. It feels like trying to use a pc, but with boxing gloves on.
& the ipod? what a friggin nightmare... why cant they put buttons on stuff... are buttons really all that expensive to make?!? & why cant i stick files on it without wrecking all the multimedia functionality on my desktop?
From what i've seen Apple is always the johnny-come-lately in a shiny box & leg-irons.
for a fully built reality disortion field. Apple just uses a variant of Dragon Dictate, and everyone knows how good/bad this works.
The main difference is that it is now deeply entrenched in IOS just as the google voice recognition is. Both systems have more flaws than advantages.
Maybe Siri is awesome, but the author of this article (as far as I can tell) has never used it. He's talking about something which is going to 'change everything' and he's not even used it!
We have a journalist trumping up a tech that no one has used yet! He's a totally schilling for Apple.
Disgusting.
Enough said.
SeqBox
I very distinctively remember having a speech recognition application on Windows 3.11. There was one in iPhone 3GS too btw. Its something used by marketing guys to make it look good to stupid people, and sometimes you can use it to brag with to your (lower IQ) friends. It was done using neural networks ages ago, there really is nothing new to it.
.. NO. HELL NO.
When interacting with machines, using buttons beats speaking any time of the day. Practical use: no. Maybe just for
Get serious guys - speech recognision is probably the biggest snake oil in the history of computer.
- Siri itself has been around for nearly two years.
...and totally failed to make a big impression.
Now Apple have bought it, they've made a big hullabaloo, made it the headline feature of their new phone, got it mentioned in the popular press and given it a potential user base of <however many million iPhone 4S's they've pre-sold to date%gt;.
Now, the technology will get talked about, used and other OSs will have to up their game on speech recognition.
Apple has a track record of finding ideas that are "bubbling under", turning them into attractive products and marketing the living shit out of them while being prepared to run the risk that they will fail. That is what separates an invention from an innovation.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Say "I'm hungry" and it'll probably list nearby restaurants and give you directions to the one you select.
Say "I'm hungry for Thai" and it'll probably suggest nearby Thai restaurants, or maybe book you a flight to Thailand with a sex tourist package.
Siri LEARNS your voice- learns to adapt to your voice- that means Apple is storing the metrics of your voice.
You think Facial recognition software is bad- soon there will be vocal recognition software.
So if you use Facebook on Apple- not only can your photo be tagged so facial recognition can pick you up- your voice will be tagged too- so you can be identified through voice recognition.
Even with your face covered in a crowd- if you say something you will be identifiable.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So far we know it understands the 42 joke.
I just saw in the news that in response to "Open the pod bay doors" it will say "Sorry [name], I'm afraid I can't do that."
What else is in there?
I doubt everyone will use voice since then others will now exactly what you are doing on the computer ... example: Teenager: "Siri, find hot exposed babe on the internet and encrypt it so my mom can't find out."
OMG they've done it again, apple is again trying to get people to think they invented it.. Speech recognition is nothing new, and certainly isn't the best way to use an interface..
Voice recognition is about as stupid as it's always been. People forget that the reason voice recognition didn't catch on in the '80s wasn't because of any lack of accuracy in the recognition side. It was because of lack of accuracy on the voice side.
So I'll propose the exact same experiment for you today. Take your normal, non voice recognition smartphone, and give it to your friend. Then telly our friend what to do with it.
You'll discover that your friend frequently has no idea what you mean, does the wrong thing, doesn't understand that your new commands are corrective commands, and accidentally e-mails your mother.
The reason we invented buttons was to quantify our actions into ones that can be controlled, both positively and negatively. It's very easy to never click on the big red button with the mouse. It's not so easy to never accidentally say "launch missle", ever.
Like I said, there's no voice recognition system that can get more than 95% accuracy, and I'm including your friend. When it comes to something technical, 95% isn't anywhere near enough. That's like dictating a 10-digit telephone number, and missing one digit every other time.
So, would you accept your smartphone asking you to clarify your statements? That's just ridiculous.
Some revolution. Sheesh.
I'm guessing Vlingo is distilled magic then.
Sheeze. Apple fanboys and their hyperboles...
It is interesting that the author is going back to the first Macintosh for comparison--that the mouse was their moment of innovation. Apple's magic has always come from controlling the OEM human-computer interactive hardware and the OS--it's CPU technology is blasé. Apple's magic comes from their being restless.
1977: Apple II: included a keyboard and allowed a TV to display color
1983: Lisa: mouse
1989: Macintosh Portable: trackball
1993: Newton MessagePad: stylus, resistive screen
1994: PowerBook 500 Series: trackpad
1997: eMate 300: stylus and keyboard
2001: iPod: scroll wheel
2007: iPhone: multi-touch screen
2010: Magic Trackpad: multi-touch trackpad
So Siri/voice interpretation fits right in with their history of trying new inputs
One big problem if this replaced the mouse/keyboard - privacy/secrecy: Do you really want everyone around you knowing what you are looking for/working on? How about entering a credit card number? How about looking for pr0n? Try it in an office setting with lots of people around in a cubicle farm - can you imagine the noise/distractions. How about when Top Secret data is being entered? There are some things that should not be done via voice.
I've been talking to my computer with it talking back to me since Windows 95 using Dragon Naturally Speaking for voice input, and Zabaware's Hal for AI/internet enabled answers and text-to-speech responses. I've was talking to my computer before most people owned a cell phone.
Not revolutionary, not innovative, and certainly not magical.
If by more "natural", they mean slower and announcing all your business to everyone within ear shot, then yeah, I suppose so.
I8-D
I've had this on my Windows 7 phone since it came out and with the new update, it's even more responsive. Start an app. Have a text read to me and respond. Do a search and much more.
Meh. No big deal here from Apple.
This is the right technology, but the wrong setting. Also, I don't think it's that revolutionary. Really it's just using the voice system of dragon to pipe questions into Wolfram alpha (which is a very unique product).
However, where this WILL be useful is in the house. If I could take my old phone system and plug a dongle into each plug and a computer on the back end with this, I'd be ALL FOR IT. Same for a car. I may not want to talk to my phone in the office or on a sidewalk, but when I'm home or in my car, it would be the prefered method of interaction.
Along those lines, Kinect is the closest thing so far. Microsoft needs to cut a few deals and do a bit of coding. If they did, could you imagine it? Say "xbox, add kitty litter to the shopping list" and BAM, it's there for you to access from your cell phone the next time you're in the store. Wifi or the phone cables in our houses could easily be used to extend this to every room. THAT would make life better!
I do security
If we had to ask people to do the kind of stuff we ask Siri to do, we'd expect a certain failure rate from not hearing the utterance, not understanding the utterance, missing context, or inability to perform the task. The real question is how will Siri perform relative to this imperfect human equivalent.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
DARPA funded SRI in a project called CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes). SRI spun out the project into the company called Siri, which Apple later bought. It was dorky when we played with it then and it still pretty much is now.
Everything that happens in Cupertino is apparently revolutionary, including this, which Apple didn't invent, just like Apple didn't invent the mouse or the GUI.
The mac was in no way revolutionary. It fits a niche market for amateur computer users.
for both android windows mobile and even iphone....
does basically the same...
Using you voice recognition on your phone to write a text and send it to a friend, who will in turn have his phone translate your text and read it back to him. Do you hate the voice of your friend that much?
Why don't you just use that remarkable voice-to-voice communication names, "just calling someone". They even have this new fangled invention that will let you leave a voice message, and later, when you want to, you are able to retrieve said message and actually listen to it!
Have we come full circle?