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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.'"
Voice Actions, it works exactly the same. Maps, Nav, post updates to social, schedules reminders/ calendars. send email / sms. Its been there since the start of 2.3
Except it doesn't have a fancy interface . it just shows a big microphone icon on the screen and lights up green when you talk
Works fine as a speech to text engine, but doesn't infer what you want done from what you said.
The real issue with it is how much of a dork you look like talking to your phone.
Android's 'Voice Actions' can only understand a predefined set of phrases and keywords. Siri can understand very natural language, and even follow context. Siri is far more advanced. But Google has some of the best engineers on the planet. A nice upgrade for Voice Actions will likely come sooner than later.
This is what makes Siri revolutionary in my book. Yeah, it's been out in app form for a while now, but this is the first platform to really show off this kind of natural language recognition.
You don't have to manually launch anything.
Just start voice search and say "Navigate to McDonalds" and it will launch your navigation app and plot a course to McDonalds for you.
This also works with your other example: "Text Bob Dole Hey man" will launch your messaging app and put "Hey man" in the message.
It's pretty neat once you start using it a lot.
Looked basically the same, but with some extra commands added that, while they look sexy on the marketing blurb, I would never use. That said, I use the shit out of Voice Actions on Android, and I love them to death. Still, Siri isn't going to be the killer app that pulls me over to the iPhone side.
Sent from my CR-48
(Reply written before most other posts, was distracted by work, going to post anyhow even with some now redundant info. Hope it helps.)
Android's voice recognition is mostly a search input box, driven by voice instead of text. It's pretty clever how Google built the system, they used voice input from the old GOOG411 number to help adapt it to different languages and accents. For the most part though, it will parse what you say and do the equivalent of "I'm Feeling Lucky" on google.com.
It also does dictation for typing in notes, or other apps. Basically anywhere the keyboard will appear, voice can be used as a dictation input.
Siri is a step beyond what Google offers, due to the conversational style of input vs just basic voice commands/dictation. You can say "Joanne Moore is my mother" to Siri once. Later, saying "Text Mom that I'll be late for dinner", and Siri remembers mom = Joanne Moore, or whoever. This just scratches the surface, the other power of Siri is the capability to understand questions like "Do I need a raincoat today?". It turns that into a search of the weather at the current location, scanning the days forecast for the possibility of rain. A followup of "what about Saturday?" would cause Siri to recognize this is a followup request, and it would link it to the previous weather query. The logic is in the Siri system, not in a search engine being queried. Minor detail, and either approach can work.
Google can improve their services on Android by improving what Google.com does, and this benefitting web users as well. For Apple, they have to decide what services to tie into. Many queries in Siri are farmed out to Wolfram Alpha. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_(software) has more info on other services it integrates with to try and answer questions. If none of those work, it defaults to running a web search similar to Android.
According to the writeup on wired (reprinted at cnn), they already addressed that problem by having you hold the phone to your ear when talking to it (instead of at arms length as when typing into it) to make it look normal.
(I would imagine this was also done to improve the quality of speech recognition by putting the microphone closer to your mouth.)
"Losing ground" = higher sales year-over-year? Record sales to the tune of 1,000,000 units preordered in one day for the 4S? Android has more market share, but that doesn't mean that Apple is hurting. At all. The market is growing, and both Android and Apple are doing well.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
I'll never forget the day when people walking around gesturing and talking to the air apparently stopped being crazy behavior and began to be perfectly acceptable behavior. It was sometime during 1999, right before the internet bubble burst. I miss those days. Now people don't look up from their smart phones to do the things they need to do, such as cross the street, disembark an elevator, talk to their families, etc.....
music lover since 1969
Incorrect. It's done in the cloud, just like Android's implementation. You need a data connection for it to work. Apple stated this in the introductory announcement.
Siri can understand very natural language
Did you seriously fall for that? All this means is that they have multiple predefined phrases that mean the same thing. Siri is *not* new! At all! Ignoring the fact that it was an app that Apple acquired, there are nearly identical programs for both iOS and Android. All they did was integrate it a bit more with the OS, and removed the app from the app store, forcing people to upgrade to the 4S if they want to use it, even though previous hardware is perfectly capable. The other apps speak back, at least one can access Wolfram Alpha, and do everything I've seen Siri do.
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.
Already done. It is called a Mac. The reason I use a Mac is that it is Unix underneath. To get a command line, all I have to do is open a terminal. I can even load Emacs if I wish.
Nothing remains as constant as change.
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
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. They basically did a Microsoft.
Actually, that is not fair - you could say they did an Apple. The question of whether Siri is a revolutionary as the Mac is telling as both of these products were based on groundwork made by other companies. This is not to say that Apple didn't add the pizzazz to them though, but even those pizzazz elements can be found elsewhere (so many of iOS's user interface ideas that people love can be found in other people's work). Apple's great trait is that they can commercialize the ideas of others. Want another example:
Maybe learn painting or drawing or something. Maybe start liking turtles. (remember Apple LOGO??)
Logo was created in 1967 - 15 years before Apple Logo came on the scene. Did you think that Apple invented it?
Heh, you bought that one hook, line, and sinker too. The reason why it's only available on the 4S is because they want to sell 4Ses.
"Encode" the message? It's a freaking blob of audio data. The worst that would need to be done is compression. My dinky little HTC Hero had no problem passing audio data back to the server farm for processing, I'm sure the suddenly-woefully-inadequate iPhone 4 could handle it just fine too.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Oh boy, some people never learn. Android voice functions is literary the same things that has been in the archaic nokia phones from back in the day.
Voice Actions for Android is almost identical to Siri (another example). The iPhone actually had Siri before Voice Actions came out for Android, only difference is now Siri is built into the 4S and Apple bought Siri and removed it from the App Store and made it only for the 4S :( That's a pretty jerk thing for apple to do
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I'd never actually looked at the raw data before, so I decided to based on your post. And...yeah, that's pretty interesting.
Anyone interested... http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/financials.asp?ticker=RIM:CN
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Siri can understand very natural language
Did you seriously fall for that? All this means is that they have multiple predefined phrases that mean the same thing. Siri is *not* new! At all! Ignoring the fact that it was an app that Apple acquired, there are nearly identical programs for both iOS and Android. All they did was integrate it a bit more with the OS, and removed the app from the app store, forcing people to upgrade to the 4S if they want to use it, even though previous hardware is perfectly capable. The other apps speak back, at least one can access Wolfram Alpha, and do everything I've seen Siri do.
Siri does not work based on multiple predefined phrases. Siri actually understands the meaning of words in a given context and the word order does not matter either. You can talk naturally without specific vocabulary or even like Master Yoda and Siri will likely infer the meaning of what you are asking it based on based on an inferred context. That is where the AI comes in.
What is available on Android is barely beyond voice control that shipped with the display-less iPod shuffles which did work based on a combination of predefined phrases and voice recognition and what currently ships on the iPhones prior to the iPhone 4S. Google just integrated a few more services but they still rely on a strict syntax.
You really don't have to take my word for it though, go try it out for yourself after the launch or simply "google" it for youtube videos with first looks/reviews of siri on the iPhone 4S.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Not smartphones, all phones....
http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/29/apple-captured-two-thirds-of-available-mobile-phone-profits-in-q2/
There is not much profit in $30 phones -- ask Nokia
The claim was that Apple was "losing". How is a profit seeking entity losing when it makes 2 out of every $3 in the industry?
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.
Developers care about the people who are willing to buy stuff. The Apple app store generates over 17x the revenue of the Android app market.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/861-5-percent-growth-android-puny/
Well it doesn't matter what "most users care about". A statement was made, I refuted it with facts.
I paid $200 for a $700 iPhone 4 under contract. A high-end Android user paid the same $200 for a $450 phone. We are both paying the same monthly bill. Why do I care that the carrier paid a higher subsidy to Apple than the Android manufacturer?
If by falling fast, you mean holding steady....
Google just announce 190 Million Android devices sold during their quarterly report today. Apple just announced 220 million iOS devices sold during the iPhone 4S launch.
Didn't you just say that developers care about units sold? So which is it? Do developers care about units sold are the number of people who actually have money to buy stuff?