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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.'"
Stopped reading after that
People aren't going to use Siri very much, because talking to your phone makes you look stupid. It's been on Android for years anyway, and no-one used it there. That Apple claim it's more useful now means nothing. It's like forward facing cameras - outside of a tiny niche no-one cares.
Really?
Really!?
You feel that a voice interface makes people useless and dependant? Do you intentionally only communicate between other people using morse code via hand signals? (that's just the least user friendly and effective method I could think of)
Sometimes I weep for the stupidity of humanity... I can't even laugh at you because it's just not funny... it's fucking scary
"Their entire product line is aimed at people who can barely power up their computers"
Opinions and assholes, et al. This is simply overstated and wrong. Take it from a ton of users who are a wee more capable than you seem to give credit for. There are some who simply want their tech to Just Work without a lot of configuring and fiddling and other time-wasting nonsense.
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline." - Frank Zappa
The only true finite resource in the world is time. Just because you can afford to pay 2 million programmers doesn't mean that a project that would normally take 5 years can be done in like a week. While voice narration/navigation has been available for years I'd describe the results as lukewarm. SIRI appears to be a leap forward in terms of both recognition and the tasks it can actually perform. It is really pretty cool.
Apple already sends a lot of the SiRi search outside of google. If a lot of smaller data companies sign up to be apple partners then google will lose a lot of search traffic. or at least a lot of the good and profitable search traffic
Wow, board member of company says company's technology is the most amazing and groundbreaking thing since sliced bread. What a surprise. This just in, Bill Gates says Windows is the best OS, and Larry Ellison says Oracle databases are hands-down unbeatable.
I don't blame the guy for saying it, of course he probably thinks his product is the best. Maybe he even believes the thing about the two-year advantage, but he's also got a pretty vested interest in making other people believe it too.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
You are an idiot.
By extending your logic only trained pilots should ever fly in a plane; only mechanics should ever drive a car, only engineers should ever operate machinery, only physicists should ever use electricity.
Technology should empower people. That is its sole purpose. Apple groks this. They don't make computers or gadgets for geeks to tinker with, they make tools for average people to use in their everyday life.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
"Apple's biggest advantage over any other voice application out there today is the massive data Siri will collect in the next 2 years"
Anyone else regard that statement with pure horror?
Seriously, Apple seems to be grasping at straws for any edge over Android phones. I'm not going to make comparisons between Siri and Google Voice Search, as plenty of others are doing that. What I will say is that Siri (and other voice command systems) are gimmicks at best. Unless their entire client base is visually impaired, I doubt that it will see any serious day-to-day use once the novelty has worn off. Texting and twitter are growing because people aren't talking into their phones. What makes Apple think that Siri will change that trend?
...Siri is a decent aggregation of existing voice recognition, grammar based interactivity, and knowledge base retrieval. People, including ourselves, have been doing this for years. Our company does this in a more limited fashion, but technically very very similarly to allow Pentagon staff officers (and others) to navigate the GINORMOUS amounts of documentation that arise from large scale plans (thousands upon thousands of PDFs) - for example: "I need to see all of the documents produced in 2007 relating to humvee mine resistance testing" - "Sure, Dave, I can do that..." - and bingo 27 PDFs show up in a (rather special ;) ) UI.
Siri is Apple's way of drawing attention from the fact that they do not have an iPhone 5, or an iPad 3. It is Apple's way of drawing attention away from the fact that Android phones are out 'innovating' them in the hardware arena. Apple knows that they are winning the individual phone brand battle, but starting to lose the mobile war; ergo, the purchase of Saab defense systems mapping software in order to cut themselves further from Google.
It is the PC market playing itself out all over again. Apple makes a great software platform, but is greedy about it and doesn't let other hardware manufacturer's use that platform (not to mention their greed in the App market - protecting us from ourselves? LOL), locks out Flash, locks out Java (because they're unstable and really not part of the web - LOL again.) All of these decisions work great for Apple in the short run (5 years or so - just like with the PC) - in the long run it literally kills them.
Siri is a distraction akin to "hey, hey! Look over here at this hand, not the hand holding virtually the same phone you've been buying for so long now..."
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And nobody noticed that this means apple is recording and analyzing every Sirius command?! Creepy!
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
It's mostly done for the few people that care. As much as apple would love for siri to sound like an amazing feature, it is far from groundbreaking and most people just don't care.
Essentially what it gets used for is a decent voice command here or there. I forgot what site it was that was analyzing siri's data usage and categorized people by number of uses per day. I think the average was 3. People use their phones more than that in a day, let alone what that shows of siri.
Iris is a weak attempt.
Siri's advantage isn't the speech recognition or ties to Wolfram Alpha, but that it handles natural language (as TFA is referring to). I can tell Siri "I locked myself out of my apartment" and it will show me a list of nearby locksmiths to choose from via Google Maps. Iris will soon be able to do google lookups of math equations or tell me the capital of a country, but Siri goes far more than that.
It's not about knowledge or access to data, but about your device recognizing what you mean. This is unlike even established products like Dragon dictate; it stops becoming LCARS from Star Trek and turns into JARVIS from Iron Man. The various wisecracks that Siri can deliver back were also part of Apple's design to give it some attitude.
Well the original iPhone was about 2 years ahead of the market. It doesn't mean they will start seeing copies after two years, but you will see cheap ripoff products for a few years then finally after 2 years you will get something that is truly competitive.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
>Most financial news stories are PR
An awful lot of all news stories are PR. Start looking for that certain tone, look at links to any sources... you will soon see a great many stories are copies of copies of PR releases
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
While voice narration/navigation has been available for years I'd describe the results as lukewarm. SIRI appears to be a leap forward in terms of both recognition and the tasks it can actually perform. It is really pretty cool.
You realise Apple just bought Siri off the shelf, they didn't spend years developing it in house, it is in fact one of those "lukewarm" solutions you're describing, it's just that we now have enough data and knowledge to make it work better. I know TFA says there's no off the shelf alternative, but I find it a little hard to believe that Siri was one of a kind - Google already has masses of collected voice data and they have the money to buy the best alternative. The real question is whether Siri actually is a massive advantage - how many people will even bother to use it outside of playing around with it for a couple of days? We won't really know that for many six months to a year, it might go silently into the night, in which case it's no real advantage at all, or it might become the next must have killer app (and by god I hope not, idiots having innappropriately loud telephone conversations are bad enough, if they're doing the same for sending text messages, browsing the web, writing emails etc the world is going to get much worse).
[It only needs] interface tweaks to make it as user friendly as Siri.
Some people will never understand what goes into good design and solid engineering.
Voice assistants have been on Android for ages - they pre-date Apple's incarnation of Siri.