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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!
Voice Actions, it works exactly the same. Maps, Nav, post updates to social, schedules reminders/ calendars. send email / sms. Its been there since the start of 2.3
Except it doesn't have a fancy interface . it just shows a big microphone icon on the screen and lights up green when you talk
Works fine as a speech to text engine, but doesn't infer what you want done from what you said.
The real issue with it is how much of a dork you look like talking to your phone.
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.
Android's 'Voice Actions' can only understand a predefined set of phrases and keywords. Siri can understand very natural language, and even follow context. Siri is far more advanced. But Google has some of the best engineers on the planet. A nice upgrade for Voice Actions will likely come sooner than later.
This is what makes Siri revolutionary in my book. Yeah, it's been out in app form for a while now, but this is the first platform to really show off this kind of natural language recognition.
PCs have had it for ages too, I tried it 10 years ago... Felt like a dork (and that was all on my lonesome in my room, not in a crowded street), was slower than typing (on a keyboard though, not a touchscreen), and misunderstood me enough to make it a pain.
It's indeed also on my Android phone, never cared until Siri, tried it out when it seemed to be the next magical thing... dropped it as fast as the first time around.
From what I've read, Siri might be more accurate and more intelligent, but my guess is, not enough to override the basic dorkiness and inaccuracy of a speech interface.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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.
The real issue with it is how much of a dork you look like talking to your phone.
Back in the olden days, talking into your phone was all you could do with it.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
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.
You don't have to manually launch anything.
Just start voice search and say "Navigate to McDonalds" and it will launch your navigation app and plot a course to McDonalds for you.
This also works with your other example: "Text Bob Dole Hey man" will launch your messaging app and put "Hey man" in the message.
It's pretty neat once you start using it a lot.
Android speech-to-text actually works pretty well. I'm using it now to write this and I find bark bark shaddup I find that it bark bark shut up damnit bark bark don't make me come down there I find that bark bark okay that's it I'm coming down there argh crash thud bark bark bark bark bark bark
Shamelessly stolen
"Can you honestly see this being used in an office environment?"
You're right. Nobody ever talks into phones in an office. /s
Android speech-to-text actually works pretty well. I'm using it now to write this and I find bark bark shaddup I find that it bark bark shut up damnit bark bark don't make me come down there I find that bark bark okay that's it I'm coming down there argh crash thud bark bark bark bark bark bark
Troubles with the wife?
The real issue with it is how much of a dork you look like talking to your phone.
Once upon a time, before they became internet terminals, everybody talked into their phone. I hadn't realised it had become so rare!
You don't have to press the home button and talk into it like a walkie-talkie you know. The proximity sensor will switch Siri on if you put the iPhone to the side of your head, if you're not making a phone call. And you can also operate it via the handsfree kit.
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
there is the major difference, natural speech. I think it'll really become useful once it all becomes standard, and is "always listening".
.. imagine if your cloud collected web services could always access and record everything that happens around you, without pushing a single button.. wouldnt that make facebooks and google plusses even more awesome .. i mean who needs browser tracking cookies if you have access to microphone ..
That would be awesome
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Looked basically the same, but with some extra commands added that, while they look sexy on the marketing blurb, I would never use. That said, I use the shit out of Voice Actions on Android, and I love them to death. Still, Siri isn't going to be the killer app that pulls me over to the iPhone side.
Sent from my CR-48
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.
Even better, if you press and hold the search button, it'll automatically start voice actions. I don't think I've sent but five typed text messages since I started using it.
Sent from my CR-48
The real issue with it is how much of a dork you look like talking to your phone.
Back in the olden days, talking into your phone was all you could do with it.
Thats so 2007.
I had computer graphics on my computer back in 1982. So these modern day "consoles" can't be anything special, eh?
Every product with speech recognition is not the same, just as every product with graphics is not the same.
And whilst people might feel dorks talking to a desktop, they're very used to holding a phone up to the side of their face and speaking into it. It's not seemed like a bizarre occupation for many decades.
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.
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.
Works fine as a speech to text engine, but doesn't infer what you want done from what you said. The real issue with it is how much of a dork you look like talking to your phone.
Yeah, it's hard to believe people actually talk into a phone...
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
(Reply written before most other posts, was distracted by work, going to post anyhow even with some now redundant info. Hope it helps.)
Android's voice recognition is mostly a search input box, driven by voice instead of text. It's pretty clever how Google built the system, they used voice input from the old GOOG411 number to help adapt it to different languages and accents. For the most part though, it will parse what you say and do the equivalent of "I'm Feeling Lucky" on google.com.
It also does dictation for typing in notes, or other apps. Basically anywhere the keyboard will appear, voice can be used as a dictation input.
Siri is a step beyond what Google offers, due to the conversational style of input vs just basic voice commands/dictation. You can say "Joanne Moore is my mother" to Siri once. Later, saying "Text Mom that I'll be late for dinner", and Siri remembers mom = Joanne Moore, or whoever. This just scratches the surface, the other power of Siri is the capability to understand questions like "Do I need a raincoat today?". It turns that into a search of the weather at the current location, scanning the days forecast for the possibility of rain. A followup of "what about Saturday?" would cause Siri to recognize this is a followup request, and it would link it to the previous weather query. The logic is in the Siri system, not in a search engine being queried. Minor detail, and either approach can work.
Google can improve their services on Android by improving what Google.com does, and this benefitting web users as well. For Apple, they have to decide what services to tie into. Many queries in Siri are farmed out to Wolfram Alpha. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_(software) has more info on other services it integrates with to try and answer questions. If none of those work, it defaults to running a web search similar to Android.
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.
According to the writeup on wired (reprinted at cnn), they already addressed that problem by having you hold the phone to your ear when talking to it (instead of at arms length as when typing into it) to make it look normal.
(I would imagine this was also done to improve the quality of speech recognition by putting the microphone closer to your mouth.)
"Losing ground" = higher sales year-over-year? Record sales to the tune of 1,000,000 units preordered in one day for the 4S? Android has more market share, but that doesn't mean that Apple is hurting. At all. The market is growing, and both Android and Apple are doing well.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
I'll never forget the day when people walking around gesturing and talking to the air apparently stopped being crazy behavior and began to be perfectly acceptable behavior. It was sometime during 1999, right before the internet bubble burst. I miss those days. Now people don't look up from their smart phones to do the things they need to do, such as cross the street, disembark an elevator, talk to their families, etc.....
music lover since 1969
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.
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.
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?
Oh boy, some people never learn. Android voice functions is literary the same things that has been in the archaic nokia phones from back in the day.
Voice Actions for Android is almost identical to Siri (another example). The iPhone actually had Siri before Voice Actions came out for Android, only difference is now Siri is built into the 4S and Apple bought Siri and removed it from the App Store and made it only for the 4S :( That's a pretty jerk thing for apple to do
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
> 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
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.
Siri can understand very natural language
Did you seriously fall for that? All this means is that they have multiple predefined phrases that mean the same thing. Siri is *not* new! At all! Ignoring the fact that it was an app that Apple acquired, there are nearly identical programs for both iOS and Android. All they did was integrate it a bit more with the OS, and removed the app from the app store, forcing people to upgrade to the 4S if they want to use it, even though previous hardware is perfectly capable. The other apps speak back, at least one can access Wolfram Alpha, and do everything I've seen Siri do.
Siri does not work based on multiple predefined phrases. Siri actually understands the meaning of words in a given context and the word order does not matter either. You can talk naturally without specific vocabulary or even like Master Yoda and Siri will likely infer the meaning of what you are asking it based on based on an inferred context. That is where the AI comes in.
What is available on Android is barely beyond voice control that shipped with the display-less iPod shuffles which did work based on a combination of predefined phrases and voice recognition and what currently ships on the iPhones prior to the iPhone 4S. Google just integrated a few more services but they still rely on a strict syntax.
You really don't have to take my word for it though, go try it out for yourself after the launch or simply "google" it for youtube videos with first looks/reviews of siri on the iPhone 4S.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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.
I asked Voice Actions, "Who would win - Superman or Batman?". It answered (out loud), "Superman, because he has super strength, and Batman only has fancy gadgets and hand-to-hand combat."
Its thoughts on pirates vs ninjas were also enlightening and extensive. And it'll even read you a poem, if you ask for one.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Look at smartphones, Windows Mobile phones were around way before the iPhone, but they were never popular in the mainstream because they didn't have the "cool factor".
This is a reassuring geek fantasy (goes along with the 'great marketing' fantasy I suppose), but completely untrue.
Smartphones were made popular by the iPhone (and to some extent the blackberry before it) because it was better - better to look at sure, but more importantly better in design, better to use, and actually incredibly useful for the users who tried it. WM was a buggy, mediocre, hack-handed mess - people tried it and quite rightly gave up on it and went back to a simpler phone; not because it wasn't cool but because it crashed all the time, *and* top people at MS have no taste so it looked and felt awkward to use.
So, yes, Apple are great at what they do, but to say that they would be where they are without the competition is ridiculous.
Completely agree with you there - some things Apple do are duds (notifications in early iOS are a good example, they were terrible modal distractions), and some things they do are just OK till they see someone doing something better and copy it. Siri was bought in so it was not even developed at Apple, but they do know how to integrate things like that well, and how to steal ideas from competitors and do them better (Notifications from Android for example). One thing they do better than all of their competition though is to actually design their products (as opposed to letting them organically grow), throw out old ideas that aren't working, and to refine ideas which other people have had till they work really smoothly.
None of that is really 'cool', it's hard work and a willingness to go their own way when it suits them and shamelessly steal ideas when they see a better product. There's a lot of work that goes in behind the scenes to make iOS a pleasure to use (not just programming work).
They do need competitors to keep them at their best, without question.
Voice recognition is about as stupid as it's always been. People forget that the reason voice recognition didn't catch on in the '80s wasn't because of any lack of accuracy in the recognition side. It was because of lack of accuracy on the voice side.
So I'll propose the exact same experiment for you today. Take your normal, non voice recognition smartphone, and give it to your friend. Then telly our friend what to do with it.
You'll discover that your friend frequently has no idea what you mean, does the wrong thing, doesn't understand that your new commands are corrective commands, and accidentally e-mails your mother.
The reason we invented buttons was to quantify our actions into ones that can be controlled, both positively and negatively. It's very easy to never click on the big red button with the mouse. It's not so easy to never accidentally say "launch missle", ever.
Like I said, there's no voice recognition system that can get more than 95% accuracy, and I'm including your friend. When it comes to something technical, 95% isn't anywhere near enough. That's like dictating a 10-digit telephone number, and missing one digit every other time.
So, would you accept your smartphone asking you to clarify your statements? That's just ridiculous.