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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.'"
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.
You had me until the second to last paragraph. Macs wouldn't evolve nearly as fast if there wasn't Windows (and to some extent, Linux) adding new stuff. With a lot of the cool things Apple do, they aren't the one to first do something, they are the first to do it in a way that appeals to the mainstream. Look at smartphones, Windows Mobile phones were around way before the iPhone, but they were never popular in the mainstream because they didn't have the "cool factor". And if it weren't for webOS and Android, iOS would quite possibly still have the crap notifications system that just got replaced with iOS 5.
So, yes, Apple are great at what they do, but to say that they would be where they are without the competition is ridiculous.
The Mac was not really that revolutionary. However it did greatly popularize an existing revolution in graphical user interfaces started by Xerox PARC.
Just because you can't eat soup with a fork doesn't make a fork a bad eating implement.
Speech recognition isn't for saying the name of keystrokes whilst editing a document. You use a keyboard for that. It's not for drag and drop tasks, you use a mouse or trackpad for that (keyboards suck at dragging and dropping). It's for requesting the kind of things you might as ask of a secretary. Including dictation, calendar, to-dos, simple enquiries etc.
A toolbox doesn't have only one tool, it has many. Siri is another way to interact with an iPhone - it not intended to replace the other ways, but add another option to them.
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.
Nonsense. Apple invented the home computer, GUI, mp3 player, smartphone, tablet computer, and now voice recognition. Everyone knows that!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Actually, Linux computers are the closest thing to Linux you're going to get off the shelf. Netbooks, some Dells. Also if you order from PC builders you can easily get Linux out of the box with anything.
If you're really smart, you buy your 27" monitor separately rather than built into a computer that's going to be obsolete in a couple of years.
which is totally what she said
> 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
which actually is another way to say that merging computers and their displays is dumb.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The manuals that used to come with DOS and Windows were actually useful. The fact that they existed didn't mean that Windows was inherently difficult. It's like how people said that the Tucker was unsafe just because it had seat belts. The only significance of Macs not coming with any real documentation is the fact that Apple left something out of the package. They can save a few cents on ink and paper and push off the problem to someone else (like the Genius Bar).
PCs that don't have any documentation anymore aren't easier. Corporations are just too cheap to include a manual.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So?
Did you not read the post to which I replied? It starts off by saying that "Siri does look amazing, and will become really useful in a couple of years as developers outside of Apple operate on it" and yet Apple have deliberately prevented developers outside Apple from being able to use this on their platforms.
It suggests that Apple is the only company that innovates in terms of creating intuitive user interfaces, and asks "Are there absolutely NO actual designers at any other tech company?". My point was that obviously other companies "get human interaction" because it was another company that created this very technology under discussion, and that Apple just bought it out.
The original poster was seeing the tech world through Apple-shaped, rose-coloured glasses. I am not saying that Apple have done anything wrong. Nor do I claim that Apple do not innovate themselves at all. I am just correcting the misperception that it is the only company in the world that innovates with good ideas.
This is patently false.
Techcrunch: Yes, others have done voice controls before — even Apple has had them baked into iOS for a few years. But most, including Apple’s previous attempt, have been awful. Others, like Google’s voice services built into Android, are decent. Siri is great.
In the coming weeks and months, we’re going to hear: “both fill-in-the-blank-Android-phone and the iPhone 4S have voice control functionality”. But that’s like saying both Citizen Kane and BioDome are films. True on paper. Decidedly less true when you have to actually experience them.
You really have to use it yourself to see just how great Siri actually is. Using it for the past week, I’ve done everything from getting directions, to sending emails, to sending text messages, to looking up information on WolframAlpha, to getting restaurant recommendations on Yelp, to taking notes, to setting reminders, to setting calendar appointments, to setting alarms, to searching the web. The amount of times Siri hasn’t been able to understand and execute my request is astonishingly low. I’ll say something that I’m sure Siri won’t be able to understand, and it gets it.
Look at smartphones, Windows Mobile phones were around way before the iPhone, but they were never popular in the mainstream because they didn't have the "cool factor".
This is a reassuring geek fantasy (goes along with the 'great marketing' fantasy I suppose), but completely untrue.
Smartphones were made popular by the iPhone (and to some extent the blackberry before it) because it was better - better to look at sure, but more importantly better in design, better to use, and actually incredibly useful for the users who tried it. WM was a buggy, mediocre, hack-handed mess - people tried it and quite rightly gave up on it and went back to a simpler phone; not because it wasn't cool but because it crashed all the time, *and* top people at MS have no taste so it looked and felt awkward to use.
So, yes, Apple are great at what they do, but to say that they would be where they are without the competition is ridiculous.
Completely agree with you there - some things Apple do are duds (notifications in early iOS are a good example, they were terrible modal distractions), and some things they do are just OK till they see someone doing something better and copy it. Siri was bought in so it was not even developed at Apple, but they do know how to integrate things like that well, and how to steal ideas from competitors and do them better (Notifications from Android for example). One thing they do better than all of their competition though is to actually design their products (as opposed to letting them organically grow), throw out old ideas that aren't working, and to refine ideas which other people have had till they work really smoothly.
None of that is really 'cool', it's hard work and a willingness to go their own way when it suits them and shamelessly steal ideas when they see a better product. There's a lot of work that goes in behind the scenes to make iOS a pleasure to use (not just programming work).
They do need competitors to keep them at their best, without question.
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.