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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.
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.
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.
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
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.