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?
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.
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.
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.
Isn't it like a speech input for an Infocom game?
Some of these games also were able to understand pronouns like "it", "him", "there" ...
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.
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!
In addition to hearing your unwanted conversations now we also hear you navigate your UI.
Playing a nintendo nostalgia app: "UP UP DOWN DOWN ..." "I SAID UP UP DOWN .."
Perhaps, but isn't that the point?
Every so often someone comes along trying to reinvent the wheel on computer interfaces, and it usually falls flat - like the "arms up in the air Minority Report UI", or 3D UIs etc.
Taking a bunch of features that people use all the time and combining it into a system that you can interact with quickly and easily when you're not "actively using" your device might be exactly what we need.
Being able to pick up your phone and say "remind me to call mom when I get home" and then put it right back down and have the phone be able to work out what you want is a great idea. It takes you about 5 seconds and then you can go back to whatever you were doing.
I don't think we'll be using it like Star Trek just yet as the main way we interact with computers, but for simple things like that I think it could be awesome (dare I say, "magical (TM)").
As many people will point out here, this is not Apple's original technology, they weren't the first to do it, there will be use cases where it won't work, you can do it much more cheaply and non-walled-garden-y with a rooted Nexus GTi Turbo running cyanogen, Apple steals everything, they're an evil empire tracking your every move and other such tiresome memes etc etc, but Siri is one of the first attempts to really pull this sort of thing together cohesively. Whether it is successful or not, who can say yet? It's certainly interesting and I expect we'll see it on many other smartphones in a similar guise - it's not like the technology is unique.
...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.
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.
"'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.
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!"
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 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.
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.
The iPhone is the first Apple product that could be said to appeal to the mainstream, and it is already losing ground there.
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.
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.
"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.
You have heard of the iPod haven't you? How is Apple "losing ground", with 66% of the worldwide industry profits in cell phones?
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"
Maybe start liking turtles. (remember Apple LOGO??)
Nope. I remember some logo-turtle-functional-programming-thing. But what does it have to do with Apple?
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."
Design is important but marketing sells product. Without Jobs, Apple nearly went out of business and they still had their original designs. Jobs was a viral marketing engine because of his persona. Other computer makers employ professionals to do their marketing and that works too.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you are a hacker, want power, or are smart, Apple makes mediocre products.
(What do I mean? The command line, emacs, etc.)
Exactly. If only someone could merge a *nix box (with niceties like the command line and emacs and such) with good hardware and a nice design aesthetic.
That would be awesome.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
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).
But you aren't the mainstream. There will always be nerds. But for the average Joe or Jane, Apple's approach is better.
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.
are you kidding?!?
Mac computers are the closest thing to Linux you're going to get off the shelf.
If you're really smart, you want as little friction between you and doing what you want as possible. get a Imac with a 27" screen, shipped to your door and working out of the box.
That said, I hate the OSX UI, but if you're really looking for a powerful command line out of the box, OSx is the way to go.
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
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.
is we all know what comes next
I don't have a sig.
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
I wonder how you will tell the difference.
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"
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
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.
Windows phones weren't popular because they were crap and marketed towards the average consumer.
Jonathanjk.com
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.
WHOOOOOSH
I've bought more monitors in the last 10 years than computers...
iWhoosh.
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?
confirmed
If all you value is ease of use, Apple makes fine products.
If you are a hacker, want power, or are smart, Apple makes mediocre products.
(What do I mean? The command line, emacs, etc.)
My iPhone is a phone, yes I want ease of use in my phone. The iPhone is a very good phone first, and a very good smartphone second. I think that's where they really won. Before the iPhone smartphones didn't really do anything right. They weren't good at being phones and they weren't really all that "smart", and the market was fragmented. I remember having a Motorola Q smartphone running Windows Mobile 5. Nice phone for email and such (similar to blackberries) but it wasn't a touchscreen and unfortunately at the time there was no "market" for apps, you'd have to search for them online, and 9 times out of 10 the app would be for Windows Mobile 5 but it wouldn't say whether it required touchscreen or not. So I spent a lot of time downloading apps that required a touchscreen and would not work on the Motorola Q for that reason. I mostly gave up as most WM5 apps were designed for a touchscreen since there were almost no WM5 devices that didn't have a touchscreen
iPhone came along and fixed all that. Now you have a app store and every app on that store will work on your phone.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
...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
The tech industry is still very engineer-driven, and as a result few companies focus on the consumer as much as older industries like, say, the car industry. Much of the tech industry thinks it's still okay to give its products a mishmash of marketing and engineering names, like AwesomePhone XZ IIc (and the customer has to figure out the difference between IIa, IIb, and IIc).
They didn't suck. People just didn't really know about them. I know because I've been using smartphones since 2004 starting with the Tungsten from Palm. Often it requires great marketing to get people to really adopt something.
What the...? How is it losing ground? Apple is the #1 smartphone vendor and had its highest sales ever with the iPhone 4, even in spite of the phony antenna controversy. In fact, with the iPad and iPod touch counted, iOS is the #1 mobile OS by a large margin.
So, the corollary is that iPhones are popular because they're less crappy and marketed towards the average consumer.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So?
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.
People said the same about Microsoft when Windows was first released, and then again when Windows 95 was released... The first time a person sees an interface that they like, and that is significantly better than the one they previously used, they believe it is a revolution. Of course, it is nothing of the sort, merely incremental advances on previous achievements.
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.
There has been plenty of great technology with good HCI over the last 30 years. You are just unaware or unwilling to acknowledge it. Think: Nokia, Nintendo, Sony, Bang & Olufsen, IBM, etc. In software, Windows, OS/2, Borland, BeOS, Netscape, all had interfaces that were supposedly "revolutionary" in their day.
(remember the old search engines??
I remember Google search looking pretty much like Altavista, except with better results.
let the PC die
Huh? You do realise that the modern Mac is just a PC with some software pre-installed? If it weren't for the PC, there would be no Intel Macs.
> 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."
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)
As a happy iPhone 4 owner I'd say: maybe less Crappy, but still mired in crap.
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.
Nelson: Siri! Take a memo! Beat up Martin!
Siri: Ok. Eat up Martha.
Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
To toot my own horn, in a small, insignificant way, I kind of predicted this very app in a cyberpunk story I wrote last year. I predict all phones will have such an app. Furthermore I predict this type of app will be ubiquitus and ultimately customizable. Various voices and even images (english butler, japanese geisha, etc.) via lcds that will also be ubiquitus. Imagine that as soon as you walk in a hotel room (or any room) your phone will detect the available i/o (lcd screens) for example, connect to them, present its pre-configured image, and ask you what you need. A sort of personal, mobile, concierege kind of a thing.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
"Losing ground" = higher sales year-over-year?
Why not? RIM has been growing year-over-year, though if you listen to the tech-press and slashdot commenters you'd think they were on the verge of bankruptcy.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I shouldn't get in the middle of this, but losing ground != no longer #1. They can still be the #1 mobile OS provider, the #1 smart phone manufacturer, and the #1 tablet manufacturer, but still lose some ground in regards to market share.
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.
"Are there absolutely NO actual designers at any other tech company? Do they only hire engineers? Is that it?"
Nearly always engineers and designers lose to monetizers.
Most other tech companies don't have very much money and so they can't do anything remotely like what Apple can do, and actually giving all power to monetizers is rational.
Most other companies with lots of money also have even more bureaucracy and so they also can't do great things.
Technology like Siri is very expensive. It probably took 20 PhD's and 80 programmers 5 years, with only a modest chance of success. What company today would do that? IBM---yes, there's Watson. Bell Labs is dead. Microsoft Research actually would try something like this, but rarely anything they do makes it into commerical production (Kinect is their best achievement).
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.
Ah, if the damn thing actually works and works well, trust me that alone IS revolutionary.
I remember going to computer conventions 15 years ago with people selling various voice recognition software, promising that the keyboard will be a thing of the past, and yet here we are years later still banging away on these little clicking squares, mainly because most solutions suck at being anywhere near "natural"...
iPhones were much much much much much less crappy than Windows Mobile phones were, about the difference between a root canal and a quite different kind of oral procedure.
I had a Windows phone (got it for free when a friend bought an iphone). I thought Palm OS circa 1997 was better.
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"
Also, they sucked.
Like I said, everyone else in the tech industry sucks at design. It's almost obscene how bad the tech industry is at design.
If you want to be cool, you have to first not suck.
Apple gets to be cool because they didn't horribly suck like everyone else.
The tech industry is still very engineer-driven, and as a result few companies focus on the consumer as much as older industries like, say, the car industry. Much of the tech industry thinks it's still okay to give its products a mishmash of marketing and engineering names, like AwesomePhone XZ IIc (and the customer has to figure out the difference between IIa, IIb, and IIc).
If only the tech industry were as clear as the auto industry:
Honda Account 2010 model line: http://www.paulmillerhonda.com/models/Accord
EX-L V6 Sedan
EX-L Sedan
EX-L V6 Coupe
EX-L Coupe
EX V6 Sedan
EX Sedan
EX Coupe
LX-P Sedan
LX-S Coupe
LX Sedan
SE Sedan
Yah. They sucked.
Repeat after me: Window Mobile sucked.
Go on. You can say it.
It may be revolutionary but for people who stutter - like myself - and others with speech impairments it's disconcerting.
i'll take that off your hands for the cost of shipping.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
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.
"Losing ground" = higher sales year-over-year?
That's fully possible and plausible. Losing ground does not mean dropping sales, but not gobbling up the market as fast as others do.
The obligatory car analogy should serve to illustrate this: A car that starts out ahead and does every lap faster than the last can still lose ground to a faster car. It can even be overtaken.
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
I thought they bought the kinect tech from an Israeli company....that initially wanted to sell it to Apple.
they sucked. I k7ow, I had one, but thank god eventually CM7 came out for it, ridding me of the ridiculous desktop ui that did'nt work at all on a small touscreen.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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."
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.
Many Apple products and technologies were acquired: Rosetta, iTunes, Final Cut Pro, Garageband, hell even OS X itself. The magic is in how they transform the software to make it Apple-like and fold it so completely into their ecosystem that it seems a natural fit. Not a lot of companies in the industry are able to get such milage out of their acquisitions.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
not to untoot your own horn, but that stuff has been in scifi for ages. 2000 ? Alien ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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.
>How hard would it be to let the pad track where you tap on the button area and have an option let it send left/center/right events?
Have you used a macbook recently? You seem to be running on very dated information. That goes for the rest of your post too.
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.
Until OSX can copy more than 800 MB from a network share without the OS locking up to the point that I have to hard boot the machine, I think your claims may be a bit premature...
Apple makes shiny hardware, and nice UIs if you want to do exactly the 10 things they have decided to allow you to do. Try anything else, and you run into the walls reaaaaaally quickly.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
...which is fine so long as you aren't really interested in powerful GUI apps.
At which point, you could just use FreeBSD.
If you think power and flexibility requires dumping the GUI, then you are doing your GUI wrong.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> The iPhone is a very good phone first, and a very good smartphone second.
No it isn't.
It's a pretty good pocket computer first (assuming you don't run afoul of it's limitations), and a BAD phone second.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
It is very much like speech input for an infocom game.
Required reading for internet skeptics
"How hard would it be to let the pad track where you tap on the button area and have an option let it send left/center/right events?"
You need one of the multitouch trackpads, but....
Right Click: System Preferences -> Trackpad -> "Tap Trackpad Using Two Fingers Sends Secondary Click".
Alas no builtin solution for middle click, but try this: http://clement.beffa.org/labs/projects/middleclick/
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
This isn't the discussion about who invents things. The actual invention is the least important aspect of technology. What matters is this: "Who is going to pay to make sure people actually end up using it?"
No it isn't. That is the first time anyone has brought up the distinction between inventing something and paying for it. The sentence "It's staggering how much they've advanced society on their own and all their profound technical achievements" sounds more like it is about invention to me.
It was Apple that took a risk to market it to normal people instead of Defense contractors.
What makes you think that an application targeted to iOS, Blackberry and Android was only going to be sold to defense contractors? It seems to me like they were planning to make this available to the general public, and by making it cross platform they wanted it to have a large audience.
These things don't happen on their own, and success wasn't guaranteed, especially when you have so many people that were against their ideas.
Who is on record as being against Siri? The concepts behind it are not new. Phones have had voice commands for over a decade and computer interaction using natural language has been a goal even longer than that. Siri is not a controversial or radical idea that only Apple could try, anymore than Bing using Wolfram Alpha to do natural language searches is controversial or radical.
Apple thought that natural voice interation would be a good idea, they waited until someone came up with a quality implementation and then they bought them. Simple. It was not a stroke of genius, nor an example of their "profound technical achievements". It was just good business strategy.
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.
Mac computers are the closest thing to a usable Linux you're going to get off the shelf.
FTFY.
I remember when Apples were sold with instruction manuals and board schematics. Since they stopped, it's all been downhill.
At this point in time, I think still making this kind of point is pedantic. Linux IS part of the Unix family for all purposes, except maybe to some some shady attorneys.
I would even dare to say Linux is truer to original Unix than OS X in spirit, through its cheapness, pervasiveness and divergent implementations.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
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?"
Secondly:
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.
i can't comprehend why you would say this when you seem well aware that apple pretty much invents fuck all, and without these entities whom you think should give up they'd have nothing.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
i can't comprehend why you would say this when you seem well aware that apple pretty much invents fuck all, and without these entities whom you think should give up they'd have nothing.
Because startup companies produce products with the goal of being bought out, like say, by Apple.
You're welcome.
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
Because startup companies produce products with the goal of being bought out, like say, by Apple.
This may be true for companies that develop technology that they cannot afford to commercialize (assuming that they do not want to license the technology to others), but this was not the case with Siri. They were actively developing a product for sale on multiple platforms. There is no indication that they were looking to be bought out by anyone. That is just speculation on your part.
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."
And you think Apple is the only one who does that? You're a fool if you do. But I expect that you know that they're not alone in that behavior and you're holding Apple to a different standard... bashing them for their perceived wrongs while ignoring the exact same behavior from.. say... Google.
For example:
What we now know as Google Music used to be a company/service/iOS app called Simplify Media. Google bought them last year and promptly killed the service for the iPhone and pulled the app from the App Store. And now, you can upload your music library to Google, and have it streamed anywhere you like for your listening pleasure with an app that's available in the Android Marketplace (but not for/on iOS.)
But no. Apple deserves to be castigated for buying a technology, discontinuing it for other products, and rolling it into their own, but it's A-OK hunker-dorey when Google does it because they have that little slogan: "don't be evil", which obviously means that Apple, and only Apple, *IS* evil, right?
Imagine all the people...
Much of the tech industry thinks it's still okay to give its products a mishmash of marketing and engineering names, like AwesomePhone XZ IIc (and the customer has to figure out the difference between IIa, IIb, and IIc).
Like the Apple IIc? When customers had to figure out the difference between the Apple II, II+, and IIc?
IIRC, the hardware was invented by the Israeli company, and the software was made by Microsoft Research.
It's a safe bet. Most startup companies business plans include a goal of being bought out. They were obviously not happy with the sales level of the stand-alone app itself.
In addition, the Siri technology gained a lot more by being bought out.
What Apple does is create something larger than the sum of its parts.
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
What the...? How is it losing ground? Apple is the #1 smartphone vendor and had its highest sales ever with the iPhone 4, even in spite of the phony antenna controversy. In fact, with the iPad and iPod touch counted, iOS is the #1 mobile OS by a large margin.
I believe Android has it beat. Apple may be gaining traction but it's not number one. A quote from BusinessWeek July 29:
Apple increased its market share to 5.6 percent in the second quarter, from 2.6 percent a year earlier, IDC said in an e-mailed statement today. Nokia, Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc., the three biggest vendors, all lost market share, making Apple the only one of the top-four to post a gain,
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
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
Apple is very good at recognizing good technology. However, much of what Apple has done is from what they have obtained elsewhere. The hyperlink, mouse, and Siri as well as other innovations were developed at SRI International initially. So, no, Apple is not "going to be the only company in the world that gets human interaction". SRI has been doing human factors design for decades -- it just hasn't been recognized as the source.
They did everything a "modern" smartphone does. I look for functionality when deciding whether or not something sucks. AND I could install whatever I wanted on them by downloading the file from a website. It was just like a computer in mini. So no - they didn't suck.
And you think Apple is the only one who does that?
No, I do not. In fact, I even mentioned another company by name that acts the same way. I also did not say that it was a bad thing to do (although I would rather they licensed the technology rather than gave themselves a monopoly on it). The point of my post was to show that Apple didn't invent the technology themselves to show which proves that they are not the only company to innovate in the tech market.
But I expect that you know that they're not alone in that behavior and you're holding Apple to a different standard... bashing them for their perceived wrongs while ignoring the exact same behavior from.. say... Google.
Actually, my point was exactly that we should not hold Apple to a different standard; we should not elevate the company to god-like status (like the original poster did) and blindly ignore their faults (or at least the faults in the products made by that company), and we should not attribute inventions to them that they did not invent. I do not have a beef with Apple, just with their evangelistic users.
I do have a beef with Google for some of their practices in the area of privacy, especially given their slogan. But that does not stop me from recognising that they have made some pretty nice products too.
Microsoft have employed some crappy practices (especially in the early days of the PC), but that does not mean that everything that they do is wrong like a lot of people around here state. And they do have good products too.
So I would like to think that I am pretty even handed with the companies.
Of course Siri is going to launch the next stage of human evolution. Apple, after all, created human speech, didn't they?
Actually it is. You have that kind of money and all you can hope is to come up with a good idea and get offered enough money to have it called an Apple product. Those that do not innovate have to make Android, Windows Phone 7, or even WebOS products!
Indeed much of the core technologies were invented elsewhere.
But this is the discussion about who took the risk in designing the system so that untrained people would use it. Xerox played it safe by pricing the 8120 at $20k-$80k. They targeted professional office users, like every other computer system at the time.
Who else besides Apple decided computers should be intuitively usable by untrained home users? (and therefore, grow the computer industry 100x?)
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'd rather have a more powerful system that forces me to learn something about it.
Oh, so you'd rather work on your computer than with your computer? Grow up. I got all that out of my system thirty years ago with my Apple ][. Wrote tens of thousands of lines of Assembly code. Designed and built interfaces for everything from home control to stage lighting. etc, etc, etc. Still an embedded developer to this day. BUT... I am ever so glad to not HAVE to play IT Guy on my Mac.
I want to get things done; not become an expert in (yet another) piece of arcane OS-dom that will be nothing but wasted brain cells. There are plenty of other puzzles much more worthy of our geek skills. At this point, if a simple PC requires any sort of "attention" more than once every few years, it is because of a serious failing on the part of the OS (or possibly app or peripheral) designer, and I for one will move quickly away from that sort of unnecessary bullshit.
Unless it is your job to do so, life's too short to waste it troubleshooting peripheral drivers.
I wrote specifically about a cell phone application just like Siri, not anything like a plain old talking computer like Hal or Mother.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Yes, if only you had the option to send center/right events, you know maybe by using the option button or using two fingers to tap or using a dedicated area of the mousepad.
Thinkpad was taken over by Lenovo and has gotten crappier ever since, the only thing left of the IBM heritage on those machines is the clit-mouse. Maybe for tinkering you want to be very flexible in your choices but for most business and consumer devices you WANT to have the same machine and the cost of maintaining a single image and support line for everyone is a lot less expensive than saving an extra $200 (trust me, I've been there, once you include all the costs and features, the difference is not more than a couple of 100 if there is one at all). And then you haven't included yet the cost for Bluetooth support, uncrappy DisplayPort/HDMI output, 802.11n, battery life, a proper GPU, driver support etc.
Simply try re-imaging Windows onto a different machine. Even if properly sysprepped you still run into issues if your XP image didn't have support for the latest SATA controller or the HAL changes significantly or the network card changes from a generic Intel or Realtek to an obscure Broadcom and even within the same line of certain-brand-name computers (starting with a D) you can get those issues.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You're doing something wrong, then. Out of about 30 Macs doing heavyweight video program editing, we push about 40TB a week through them over the network. They're MUCH faster than our Windows servers and don't lock up. Might want to change your brand of hard drive.
Most of the stuff on
Don't forget CoverFlow in that list. Separate product that used to run as a plugin for iTunes. Now they've based Finder around it.
Like GLaDOS
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
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.
Agreed. Have you ever seen anyone actually hold an iPhone up to their head?
And what's with the lack of custom SMS alert sounds? That's a bog standard phone feature completely absent on the iPhone. I need a loud, long noise to wake me up if I get paged in the middle of the night, not a tootle on a bicycle horn.
Actually it is.
Actually what is? There was a lot in that post, so I don't know to which part you refer.
Are you suggesting that Apple is in fact the only company in the world that innovates with good ideas? If your evidence is that other companies with innovative products just hope to be bought out Apple then that directly contradicts your assertion.
Most startup companies business plans include a goal of being bought out.
Citation required.
What Apple does is create something larger than the sum of its parts.
No, it destroyed a product on Blackberry and Android. The technology world is less than it was before because this innovation is now locked away with one brand.
Really?? Intuitive?? Dragging a CD to the trash can to eject is intuitive?? Spinning a jog wheel (if you've never seen one before) is intuitive?? Then tell me why my wife, after receiving a nice 'intuitive' iPod, gave it away and went back to her Creative 'brick' player because she could figure it out better, and preferred the software that came with it?? (Why is it that iTunes still doesn't have duplicate song detection???) I have friends that have had the sad job to service 'intuitive' Apple computers for upgrades and such .. they are anything but intuitive except to people that use them.
... the mouse, windows, MP3 players, gestures, and dozens of other things Apple gets credit for were already done before. Everything they did has been INCREMENTAL changes, not evolutionary changes. What Jobs did was make it 'cool' by making it sleek, integrating better, raising the price, and strangling the supply. Why can't I just buy Apple OS and load it onto any PC?? Because the Apple license forbids it. Why can't anyone just build an Apple from scratch, they are just PCs. Because Apple license forbids running their OS on anything but Apple products. Why can't I load any program onto an iPhone??? Because Apple forbids it.
... no, not magnify up, scroll up), when my thumb is much better at flicking it around. I already have voice on my Android, and have found it takes more time to use it than to type. Maybe people just need to learn how to setup their phones so they are more efficient.
Get real
Welcome Comrade to the Union of Socialist Apple, where they tell YOU what you need for requirements. Any color, as long as it's black or white. And this shape. And you don't really need a phone with a keyboard.
As for using voice to control a phone?? Nope, not interested. I have no desire to 'talk' to my phone to send a text message, that is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. I might as well just CALL THE PERSON! Why would I want to control a map or browser (down, down, left, left, magnify, up
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
'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.
And that's why we only have PCs in our house, I get to build my own that are upgradable and easily maintained, and never have any problems. Or, if I wanted to, I could just go out and select from hundreds of different models with a host of options, selecting one that meets my needs best. Apple strangles their market and artificially inflates their price(profits) by keeping choice to a minimum and refusing to license the OS to run on non-Apple hardware. It's a good thing they don't have a larger market share, or the government would be screaming anti-competitive behavior. Same is true of their phone.
.. it doesn't even have 4G yet. Sure, you can use video as long as there is WiFi close by and the person you are talking to also has an Apple. Meanwhile, Android is open and connecting to everyone who isn't an iDrone because they have more choices and Apple products just don't have the edge. And THAT is why they don't have market share.
I don't suggest they don't have the right to do it. But look at all of the different options available for Android, then look at Apple. Heck
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
And Apple fixes that by not giving consumers any choices. Yeah .. that's SOOOO much better.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
What's truly incredible is that you believe that what you have just written is a coherent, well thought out and backed up with evidence, retort to the previous statement.
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
Have you ever seen Apple's packaging? They really aren't bothered about trying to save a few cents.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
The walled garden approach sucks so badly that, to me, it stops the entire discussion.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
will become really useful in a couple of years as developers outside of Apple operate on it
I honestly can't see it happening because voice will always have major social problems. I mostly use my phone in public places, at work or in my home where there are other people around. They don't want to hear everything I am doing, and for privacy I don't want them to hear it either.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Windows Mobile smartphones didn't have "cool factor" because they were shit to use. Sucked. Don't make this about fashion and coolness. Usability is what drove the cool factor up.
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 think his point is that if a monitor can last as long as the computer to which it is integrated then he would have bought less over the same time period.
Computers are on a rapid race to commodity pricing. I just bought a 23" 1080p screen for £70. I could buy a new PC with good specs, peripherals, screen etc for noticeably less than my partner and I spend on petrol each month (~£450). As they get cheaper the need to be able to replace individual sections becomes less important for normal users. Hell, computer repairs are being threatened by the fact that it can cost a large proportion of the cost of buying a new PC to diagnose and fix an old one.
I'll give you credit for the patience you've shown by responding repeatedly to politely explain the point. I don't know if you're being trolled or if the people you're responding too really do believe what they are saying. Frankly it doesn't matter, anyone who thinks the entire tech industry bar one company doesn't innovate isn't worth your time.
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.
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.
Almost. They are usually not the first ones to make something, but they are usually the first ones to make it good.
I used to own a Palm III back in the days. Extra geek credits if you remember the year without looking it up, I think it must've been 1999 or so.
I tried to run Linux on a HP iPAQ.
When the iPhone came out, my first thought was: There's the PDA I've always wanted. And, in fact, it still is. I don't really use it as a phone all that much, though it's handy that it's a phone as well.
It's not just "mainstream", it's that Apple is usually the guys who get all the usability and design right.
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".
Actually, it was because they sucked. I've had work colleagues with windows mobile phones. It was painful just watching them use it. I'm sure I would've experienced actual physical pain if I had been forced to use the crap myself. I don't know the latest windows mobile incarnation, but the old ones were horrible abominations on par with Vista and with a usability you couldn't measure because your scale was lacking negative numbers.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
...so? They saw its potential and did something with it, what Siri is now, tightly integrated into the OS, is nothing like what it was as an app. I'm seeing a lot of "Anrdiods has this years" comments around the web and they clearly don't grasp just how different Siri is.
If your company is growing at a rate slower than the rest of the market, then this is usually a bad sign, so this is what Wall St commentators pick up on. They miss the fact that many of these tech markets go from being niches owned by one or two companies to being large commodity markets over a short period. During this time, it's more accurate to say that the old market is part of a growing new market, rather than that the old market has grown. It should be a wakeup call for the companies in question though. SGI was in the state that RIM is in just around the time nVidia was formed: they were doing well in a market that was just about to shrink a lot.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That is in a good part due to management stupidity. No, let me re-phrase that: Idiocity.
A huge problem with our economy is that management, and I'm talking C-level and above here, bases many of their major decision on anecdotes and make-believe. For example, in many markets the acting top-players believe that there is only room for 3 players. The top-dog will do fine, the 2nd one will be doing ok and the 3rd one will barely manage. Everyone after that will be losing money, and thus be forced to leave the market or close down sooner or later.
That sounds nice and rational. Many mergers are done because #4 and #5 are joining forces in order to become #2 or some such.
The problem is that aside from anecdotes and "personal experience", there's no evidence that this is true at all. When you think about it, there is nothing magical about positions in a market. If the top-dog is a near-monopolist, he can split into two companies who would then be #1 and #2 - now tell me how doing so can push #3 from profitable (if just so) to making a loss. Of course it wouldn't. The whole thing is a rule-of-thumb that has some truth to it, but is at best a vast oversimplification of complex interactions.
And still, massive mergers are orchestrated, thousands of people losing their jobs, because top management goes by rules like this.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Bullshit.
Windows Mobile phones were not popular in the mainstream because they frankly *sucked* to use.
Before the iPhone, there were "smartphones", but they were "geek, power user, nerd phones" -- phones that required sophistication in the user to even kind of use or understand, and even then it was a struggle. The iPhone totally changed smartphones to where the smarts didn't need to be in the users, and thus the users could leverage with minimal effort the power and ease of the platform to grow what they could do, easily.
I was a big PocketPC hopeful for awhile; I had huge hopes for Windows Mobile. It was always an utter failure, and NOT because it wasn't "cool". Apple changed the smartphone market not because of mere "coolness" or marketing, but because they changed user expectation on a broad level -- that you could pick up and simply /use/ a device as a tool with minimal understanding of how things worked, from "desktop metaphors" to filesystems to applications.
I'm not saying Apple exists in an innovation vacuum. They don't originate all or even most of their ideas, what's different about them is their focus.The focus on the regular person using their products.
I agree completely, Apple wouldn't be what they are without competition -- but I think you totally miss where "they are" and "how they got there" in your analysis. Your very understanding of /what/ they are "great" at is completely wrong. Its not "being cool". To dismiss Apple's success as mere marketing is just kinda pathetic.
I had PDA's, and Smartphones, before the iPhone. Palms, PocketPC's, Windows Moblie, others. Its laughable to read someone comparing "smartphones" pre-iPhone to post-iPhone. Apple doesn't try to be the first to do something; they try to do what they DO, right. It doesn't need to be every possible feature on a list. All that matters is that what they /can/ do, they do well. They then evolve, one thing at a time, focusing on steady improvement over a need to drastically change (much to the chargrin of pundits, who whine at the 3GS and 4S despite huge consumer appreciation). One thing at a time. Better to wait until its ready then push it out half-assed.
Until OSX can copy more than 800 MB from a network share without the OS locking up to the point that I have to hard boot the machine, I think your claims may be a bit premature...
I just set up a NAS, and I have two Macs here that have copied over 100GB to it and over 10GB from it in the past couple of days...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Amen to that. Apple fanboys are notoriously bad at understanding that Apple is a stellar integrator and marketer of technology, but very little of what they have integrated was actually invented by them. Kudos to Apple's marketing and physical design teams, but the rest of it is just integration and hard work, not actuall innovation or invention.
If there ever comes a time that Apple really is the most inventive and innovative company out there, then I'll worry -- because it means all the billions spent on R&D by Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and a host of SMBs is being incompetently wasted and resulting in nothing useful. And that flat out ain't gonna happen.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I guess that you are not aware that Apple purchased the company that made Siri
They do that all the time. The multitouch technology was developed by a company called TouchStream, which Apple bought. I happen to own a multitouch keyboard that TouchStream developed before Apple bought them, and long before multitouch was "hot".
But TouchStream only had the technology. They built keyboards and touchpads with it. In fact, one of their products was pretty much a Magic Trackpad, just 10 years earlier. But they didn't realize that people weren't ready for multitouch yet, and the lack of tactile feedback was a killer. Apple was who realized that merging display and multitouch would break that barrier down and not only be a killer product by itself (others had realized that as well), but would also open up people to accept multitouch.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Replace generic "cents" with "value added cents".
A flashy package adds value to the product. A manual hidden in a box that is only seen after the user has bought the package and opened the box has no added value.
This is exactly the kind of things companies are cutting out.
The average person doesn't want a small mobile computer. Hell, plenty of them don't want any computer. They want an appliance. Apple is the first company to "get" that.
Yes, plenty of nerds don't fit that category and want a full blown computer. The average person does not. They want to do tasks, and if an appliance can do that for them, it is often a better fit.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I don't see Apple as cheap when it comes to the extras they put into the package. I usually find stuff inside that I'm pleasantly surprised with. Like the changeable extension cords for the MacBook Pros. In a time where the printers you buy usually come without whatever cables (USB nowadays) you need to actually connect them. I don't think they really worry about a couple cents for paper and ink. And since they still do write them, but only distribute them in electronic form, that's all they would be saving.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Erm... I regularly do that and more and see absolutely no downside. The OS X Lion disk image is 3.7GB and I moved that around network shares between the time capsule (over wifi and cable) and laptops with absolutely no issues. Could it be that your network share is bad. Might it be running a non-mac OS? :P
Oh and about walls. I have yet to see those walls on my Mac Book Pro running Lion. My daywork is doing experimental high energy physics analysis with pretty sophisticated software as well as maintain our Tier 2 compute center (some 1400 cores, 750TB of storage and gazillions of compute hours used globally) and I feel perfectly at home on OS X. I can move around large files with no issues, I can operate in a shell environment without any hinderances and at the same time enjoy a nice and intuitive GUI. I've never been able to do that on Linux no matter that I've used Linux for the past 15 years (my first Linux was redhat 3.0.3) and still need to do so as the HPC part is done on CERN Enterprise Linux and my wife's office uses Linux desktops.
I would even dare to say Linux is truer to original Unix than OS X in spirit, through its cheapness, pervasiveness and divergent implementations.
I would agree with pervasiveness and divergent implementations, but cheapness? When was UNIX ever cheap? Seems to me the whole reason Linux even exists is because UNIX was (is?) anything but cheap.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
The reason I use a Mac is that it is Unix underneath.
Curiously, that's the precise reason I don't use a mac. I perfer my unix (well Linux) on top.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Why?
which is totally what she said
iOS wouldn't be as good as it is now without Android. The opposite is also true. We need competition. Of course, iOS vs Android is just an example.
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.
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?
No, actually, I don't remember PC's coming with 500 page instruction manuals for the simple reason that they never did. The C64, for example, came with a programmers reference (and I learned BASIC as a result). The Apple IIe came with a similar reference (which I still have - green cover, IIRC).
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
... 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".
No. They were a pain in the arse to use. And that was even clear to anyone using them before the iPhone came around triggering thoughts like "I don't think this smartphone thing is such a great idea." Especially when you can't dial a number if you happen to be outside in daylight. Unless you memorised the location of the buttons on your resistive touch screen. Argh.
I got an iPhone 3GS afterwards, and breathed a sigh of relief when every task was easy to perform. "Cool factor"....no. The usability of the thing is what caught on with people.
So what I gather is that interfaces are not important to you because you'd rather use some thing more basic also provided by a bunch of programmers and believe this somehow gives you the illusion of understanding something deep. Computers are not deep, science and philosophy are deep. Scientists and philosophers have more important things to think about than learning some arcane interface vomited out by programmers who cannot be arsed to learn what makes an interface useful to anyone but themselves. That being the case, they will pick the Apple and MS interfaces because they do not get in the way of what they are interested in doing.
Enough said.
SeqBox
Siri - Spun off from SRI, Major system integrator for CALO, DARPA funded project into integrating numerous AI technologies into a cognitive assistant ...had already written this for Andoid and Blackberry ...Until Apple bought them and closed down the integration with other smartphones
Apple just bought and made exclusive a load of government funded research.... Just watch them attack anyone else who tries to use this research you have already paid for ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
You have a problem with people overhearing "Bring up my favorite porno site" ???
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.
They were never popular in the mainstream because they were clunky, non-intuitive, power-hogs, with a UI completely unsuited to a tiny screen, prone to freezing or crashing, and thus practically useless; not merely because they lacked the cool factor (which they did).
It's worth noting, though, that while the Feb 2011 anual report does show growth, much of the doom and gloom news reports we've been hearing stem from recent quarterly reports, which are showing a good bit of contraction. From the Aug 2011 quarterly summary: "Compared to the same quarter last year, Research In Motion Limited has seen revenues fall from $4.6B to $4.2B. This along with an increase in the cost of goods sold expense has led to a reduction in the bottom line from $797.0M to $329.0M."
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
Seriously, everyone else in the tech industry should just give up. Apple won technology. let them have it.
I am trying to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are a troll with a misplaced sense of humour, but I am horribly afraid you are serious.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Bladerunner? The original Star Trek?
Everyone has always thought that voice recognition for computers/devices was a good idea, it's been getting it to work that's the problem.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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?
The hardware is still overpriced.
I find being offended by me offensive.
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.
I'm guessing Vlingo is distilled magic then.
Sheeze. Apple fanboys and their hyperboles...
look at the specs on a macbook - what it actually does. Now, find those same specs on a dell, hp, etc. Compare. Be sure to factor in things like battery life of 8-10 hrs, stores across the country that will fix or swap out your defective laptop with no hassle. I dropped a macbook a month after warranty expired - went into a store, when I walked out I had a new one. Made the mistake of getting an HP laptop recently - can't get service at all, the thing has lots of problems, etc, etc. Overpriced? Really? They're a bloody steal of a bargain.
Agreed. Apple definitely pushes technology forward. Windows and Android probably wouldn't exist without Apple, since both are loose copies of Apple products. But the competition from both also pushes Apple forward. My only quibble is that Windows Mobile failed not because of a lack of "cool" but because the thing really sucked. The stability of Win Mobile 5 on my Palm Treo was atrocious. It would routinely crash when a call came in, requiring battery removal to stop the ringing.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Ever ordered a Mac? You've got plenty of choices in CPU, memory, hard disk, display, software, peripherals and if you don't want to pay for the memory or disks, they are designated 'user-replacable' anyway.
Dell and some others has imho too many choices - do you want 4GB of RAM in 2x2GB, 1x4GB, 4x1GB, DDR2 (which although available wouldn't fit), DDR3 5300, DDR3 6400. Why would I even want to have a choice in which 802.11n wireless adapter to put into the machine?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Yes, they did suck. I used Windows Mobile 5 on a Palm Treo, and it crashed more than a Hollywood stunt man. Stock phone, no add-ons. My favorites were when it would crash in the middle of a call (hear nothing and look at the phone to find it rebooting) and when it would crash when a call came in. Gotta love having to remove the battery to stop the ringing! It wasn't hardware either. I had the phone replaced three times, always had the same issues. It finally went away when I got a Treo running Palm OS.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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
Yeah, that and the fact that they sucked balls.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
I think you are confused about some of the things Siri can do. It's a lot more clever than just a tiny set of commands.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
If you are technically inclined, and can build web pages on your own, why are you using basic website building software? Dreamweaver still exists you know. Or do you type all your HTML by hand because you are that hard-core?
And what's up with people taking their cars to mechanics? Why don't they go and become automotive technicians themselves, rather than taking the easy and lazy way out and letting someone else do it? Maybe you don't need to pay someone to have a Unix system, but most people do. Life is too short and the world too complex for a person to become an expert in everything. Therefore, it is nice to have simpler versions of things to open up more possibilities to more people. Or we could just criticize everyone for not learning PhD level math.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I use the hard drive that came with the machine, direct from Apple. Shouldn't that be sufficient?
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
"look at the specs on a macbook - what it actually does."
Read email. Surf Web. Listen to Music. Word Process. Watch movies. That's 99% of my personal work flow. That's what it actually does.
I can get at least 2 non apple laptops that do that for the price of 1 apple laptop. Each laptop will have more storage, more CPU, and more RAM than the apple one will.
The hardware is over priced.
I find being offended by me offensive.
well go you for having a workflow that is tethered, I guess. Me, I like laptops that can last an entire workday without being plugged in. Being able to just walk in to any mall in the US and have it your system fixed in minutes works better for my workflow, too - I prefer that over non-english-speaking script-readers in 3rd world countries taking hours of my time just to figure out that yes, I did try plugging the machine in. Call me crazy. If your only need is to browse the web and watch movies, then you can use a phone for that - or, an iPad. :P
Should be, but when strange things like that happen (copy small files and get lockups), I'd still suspect hard drive health. If you can duplicate (command-D) or copy a file like that internal to the machine, it sort of lets the drive off the hook. Otherwise, that's a behavior pattern of drive failure - start copying a file and everything seizes. You'd usually have booting problems too. I have several Western Digital drives here that came out of Macs that all did exactly that. Swapped them for Seagates and they run like a rocket ship. Worth looking into.
Most of the stuff on
Thank You. Nicely put. I come to Slashdot because I dig technology and user interface issues - I dig them when they are done by MS, Linux, or Apple. This hatred of Apple is tiresome. How you can look at something like Siri and not be excited is beyond me.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
Reframing the discussion at every turn doesn't make you right. It just paints you into a corner.
Put identity in the browser.
I can get a laptop cheaper than I can get an iPad. It will have a bigger screen, more storage, more CPU, more RAM, and will be touch screen.
The vast majority of people have the same exact workflow that I do. Doubly so for non-technical non-computer professionals that are Apple's market.
If you have to repair your machine that much I suggest buying for a company that makes more reliable hardware.
I find being offended by me offensive.
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.
A real manual is larger than the kind of machine you are talking about.
No worries though. The n00b can always go to the Apple store to learn about iTunes. They might even pay for the privelege.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Have you ever seen Apple's packaging?
You confuse me with someone that's bothered by blowing $1000 for a piece of gear just to try it out.
Once again this is an argument that comes down to style versus substance with the Apple fanboys fixating on all the wrong details.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Evidently I confused you with somebody who uses facts to come to conclusions. You suggested that Apple didn't include a manual to save money, but in fact, Apple do include a manual and they don't skimp on it. Saving money on that area is clearly not a priority for them.
Out of curiosity I looked in the box for a Macbook Air. What did I find? A nicely bound 72 page manual which comes in a little cardboard envelope with a tab to make it easy to remove it from the box. I'm glad I looked, as when I opened the sleeve it said "hello" on the front of the manual, and that made me smile.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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.
A real manual is larger than the kind of machine you are talking about.
I'd be surprised. We're talking a 30" iMac there. ;-)
No, I know what you're getting at. But it doesn't matter. Size wasn't an issue until you brought it up there. The GP made an entirely different point.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You mean multi-touch? Yeah, nobody bought into the capacitive screen/multi-touch thing....
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Well, Siri was bought out, meaning they were available for sale, ergo it was always an option. Apple might be the big bad behemoth now, but even they can't force startups to sell to them, especially in a market in which three or more other really big behemoth's (Microsoft, Google, Nokia etc) are operating.
Nonsense. Apple invented the home computer, GUI, mp3 player, smartphone, tablet computer, and now voice recognition. Everyone knows that!
Straw man much? Apple didn't invent these things and a few crazies aside, no one thinks that they did. That doesn't mean that they didn't drive major improvements in each. Geeks think that technical capability is the important part of developing a technology. Apple thought that usability was the important part.
For non-geeks, Apple's answer is generally correct. Which, of course, is why Apple has a bajillion dollars and the haters don't.
Don't forget the big ass (multi-touch) touchpad that works !
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?