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Siri Gives Apple Two Year Advantage Over Android
Hugh Pickens writes "Gary Morgenthaler, a recognized expert in artificial intelligence and a Siri board member, says that Apple now has at least a two-year advantage over Google in the war for best smartphone platform. 'What Siri has done is changed people's expectations about what's possible,' says Morgenthaler. 'Apple has crossed a threshold; people now expect that you should be able to expect to speak ordinary English — and be understood. Siri has cracked the code.' The threshold, from mere speech recognition to natural language input and understanding, is one that Google cannot cross by replicating the technology or making an acquisition adds Morgenthaler. 'There's no company out there they can go buy.' Morgenthaler's comments echo the recent article in Forbes Magazine, 'Why Siri Is a Google Killer' that says that Apple's biggest advantage over any other voice application out there today is the massive data Siri will collect in the next 2 years — all being stored in Apple's massive North Carolina data center — that will allow Siri to get better and better. 'Siri is a new interface for customers wanting to get information,' writes Eric Jackson. 'At the moment, most of us still rely on Google for getting at the info we want. But Siri has a foot in the door and it's trusting that it will win your confidence over time to do basic info gathering.'"
Not only that, he completely disregards for no apparent reason those existing services that are exactly like Siri was before Apple acquired it (read: same functionality, inferior interface/design). Speaktoit allows you to speak english to your phone and will do almost the same that Siri does. Google would need to buy them and integrate it in a nice way with Android. The current interface is a bit lacking but the technology is definitely there.
This is obviously a VERY biased opinion from a Siri board member.
Remember Siri was available on all phones until Apple bought it and shut it down on competing phones.
Bill would be proud.
I find being offended by me offensive.
...and it seems that it doesn't loose signal strength
And you know this because the nice software told you so? Handset vendors have been 'fixing' signal strength problems for years by simply redefining the scale of bars to signal. Apple included,
You declare them to Siri. Tell Siri, "Ellen Jones is my sister." Siri will remember the association.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
By a strange coincidence; the Register has a round up of four voice assistants for Android several of which are older than Siri (and so presumably where Apple copied the idea from, if we follow Apple's lawsuit logic) and several of which were better than Siri, at least in categories the register tested.
What's telling about this is how much the Apple / Microsoft press is coming out as if Siri was a big new thing. It's pretty clear that the big boys who divided up the computing market are out to get Google for disturbing the peace. This kind of false "Apple is an innovation leader" story is pretty clearly designed to play to the judges and juries in cases such as the ones about the Samsung tablets.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();