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Apple's Siri As Revolutionary As the Mac?
hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review is running an article on Siri, the speech recognition technology inside the new iPhone. They make the case that Siri's use of artificial intelligence and speech recognition is going to change the way we interact with machines. From the article: 'The advantage of using speech over other interaction paradigms is that we have honed its use over thousands of years. It is entirely natural for us to talk to one another. Talking is one of the first things we learn how to do as children. It's second nature for us to ask a colleague or a friend a question and for them to answer the same way. Being able to talk to a phone like it's a personal assistant is something that people are going to get very used to, very quickly. It's a much more natural approach than using a mouse on a desktop. And I highly doubt the impact is going to stop at phones.'"
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?
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
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" ...
But can you actually talk into the mouse?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Yeah, I can see how this is going to make my life easier:
"page up, page up, down, down, down, shift o, slash splat quot FIXME -- who wrote this shit ques ques splat slash quot CR escape"
A good touch typer can accurately do 60 wpm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing). I've seen ones that can come close to 100 wpm with relatively few errors, at least in short bursts.
Typical speech rates are 140-200 wpm, depending on the subject and the speakers mood (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005018.html). Pretty much everyone can speak and comprehend 300 wpm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute), and some people can speak as high has 500 wpm. You can read around 300 wpm.
I suspect the reality is you type at somewhere between 25-50% of the speed you can talk, and that's for ordinary words. Throw in special characters that require you to do complex keystrokes and your typing will tank, but your speech will not. For instance, check your words per minute typing something like this vrs reading it (assuming you have a standard US keyboard).
Please tell Mr Muños that it is £200 or ¥20,000; and Mr Schröder would like a response immediately.
I bet you can say that as fast as any other sentence, but typing it will require you to look up a character or two unless you type international stuff a lot.
Daily I wish people would indeed stop doing this.
"Can you honestly see this being used in an office environment?"
You're right. Nobody ever talks into phones in an office. /s
Of course. Half the point of Apple's gadgets seem to be to draw attention to them all the fucking time. Case in point: the story above.
Totally!
Posted from my iPhone
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Now you just think what you want to do, and it will be done.
No need for that. In the utopia of Jobsism, in a few years your iThings will not need a control interface because they'll just tell you what to think.
There is a difference in text-to-speech which has been around forever and natural speech recognition and contextual responses. For example, you can say "Call Susan mobile." That's not new. But that's not Siri. The promise to Siri is: "Call my sister. Which sister and which phone? Susan. Her mobile. [Dialing]" Apple video makes it look like Siri is much more advanced than your 2000 Nokia. At least that's the promise. Whether it lives up to the expectation, we'll see after tomorrow when the first people start using it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Pistol missed your moon Otis 200 bouncer 20,010 and mistress rotor would like a responsibility.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
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
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.
The Mac was not really that revolutionary. However it did greatly popularize an existing revolution in graphical user interfaces started by Xerox PARC.
Just because you can't eat soup with a fork doesn't make a fork a bad eating implement.
Speech recognition isn't for saying the name of keystrokes whilst editing a document. You use a keyboard for that. It's not for drag and drop tasks, you use a mouse or trackpad for that (keyboards suck at dragging and dropping). It's for requesting the kind of things you might as ask of a secretary. Including dictation, calendar, to-dos, simple enquiries etc.
A toolbox doesn't have only one tool, it has many. Siri is another way to interact with an iPhone - it not intended to replace the other ways, but add another option to them.
I can type almost as fast as i can talk
Not on a phone you can't.
I bet you can say that as fast as any other sentence, but typing it will require you to look up a character or two unless you type international stuff a lot.
Now, dictate a letter. You think anything short of a human being currently could possibly punctuate it correctly, filter out any thing that wasn't intended for the letter...
The reason typing is faster than dictation is that I can type exactly what I want. And if I decide to revise it the user interface is ideal for that. Copy/paste, select, delete... try doing that with something dictated.
Your particular example is pretty cherry picked too...
Care to dictate that faster than I can type it and expect anyone to get the intended spelling, and punctuation in the ballpark? Cherry picking goes both ways.
"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"
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Nonsense. Apple invented the home computer, GUI, mp3 player, smartphone, tablet computer, and now voice recognition. Everyone knows that!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Actually, Linux computers are the closest thing to Linux you're going to get off the shelf. Netbooks, some Dells. Also if you order from PC builders you can easily get Linux out of the box with anything.
If you're really smart, you buy your 27" monitor separately rather than built into a computer that's going to be obsolete in a couple of years.
which is totally what she said
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.
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 world changing when the masses can easily use it, or when it impacts everyday life. An honest-to-God working teleportation device wouldn't be world changing if it never got out of the research lab and only a few scientists used it.
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?
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
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.
> 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
"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
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"...
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
There is a difference in text-to-speech which has been around forever and natural speech recognition
Yes, text-to-speech and speech recognition are very different technologies. So different, in fact, that they're virtually exact opposites.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I remember when Apples were sold with instruction manuals and board schematics. Since they stopped, it's all been downhill.
IIRC, the hardware was invented by the Israeli company, and the software was made by Microsoft Research.
as written in CAPS.
(FYI, SIRI is the abbreviation for Sirius XM satelite radio)
iPhone + satelite radio FTW
New Economic Perspectives
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.
'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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
You mean multi-touch? Yeah, nobody bought into the capacitive screen/multi-touch thing....
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?