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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.'"
Yes, because only Siri can do this. No-one else can. Arsehole.
http://siriouslyweird.tumblr.com/
http://sirisaysthedarndestthings.com/
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http://www.xda-developers.com/android/enter-iris-so-long-siri-we-hardly-knew-ye/
Just letting you know that android has a similar service and it was only made in 8 hours time.
So I suppose this will get alot better
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
"Voice commands" on Android are markedly the Siri interface. If you think that's all this is, you clearly have done absolutely no research on the tech.
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline." - Frank Zappa
What a crock of BS. Has nobody seen Google's voice seach? It already does 99% of what Siri does, and all they have to do is make a different app with the same code as google voice and just add a series of lookup tables that convert common phrase fragments into Android commands. Easy Peasy. If I had the source code to google voice search, I could do it easily. (I am a professional programmer, btw) it should be fairly easy for Google to duplicate everything Siri does just by adding a little additional code. It would take them days, not years. I love how the author doesn't know jack about anything.
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
Siri is the best jedi mind trick Apple has pulled so far. It is amazing how much press this one feature is generating. My prediction is that in 6months nobody is using it anymore.. just like facetime (anyone still remember what that was?).
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.
I just see this as a confirming instance of large advertisers being able to control the content of publication. I know from personal experience that if I advertised enough in a publication they would let me write the stories. When you are at Apple's level it looks like they give you a reporter to do it for you.
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?
Even Microsoft has this now. I was playing with voice recognition on a WP7 device and it worked pretty well. "Find Pizza", or "Call Norman" worked as expected. When I asked "What is the meaning of life?" it searched and found a couple of news stories about Siri being asked the same question. It might have been more fun if it came back with a canned answer like Siri does, but I have to wonder if that would've truly been more useful.
Microsoft's capabilities are also server based and they'll be able to tweak the capabilities fairly easily. All-in-all, I think the VR from iPhone, Android and WP7 are mostly a wash. Google appears to be ahead in other languages though.
Talking to a device is just awkward. You try popping out your iPhone 4s in public transport and start giving voice commands to the thing. People will look funny at you. And this won't change in the next two years. So that's why this 2 year head start (assuming that's not hugely over-estimated) is a head start in a direction that's dead to begin with.
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
uhh.. did anyone actually know the program is collection data? for me this would be a big reason to stay the hell away from Siri.. also it's typically Apple, claiming something as if they invented it, even though there have been many likewise applications/designs on the market already.. Yes they are very good at marketing...
...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"
One thing that really took me by pleasant surprise was Google's non-English transliteration engine built into edit boxes/text compose windows of all google sites. English has just five vowels with y and w coming in very occasionally to support vowel sounds . Most Asian languages have distinct glyphs for at least 12 vowels (long and short forms separated and a few more). Google allows me to type using an English key board, when I hit a space, it changes text to the selected Indian language. If the text is not exact, I press backspace, and it creates a drop down box that typically has a few variations, and I am surprised how good its guesses are about what I was planning to type.
If Google has been collecting such data about the most common english transliteration for the most common words in other languages, it has a treasure trove of stuff. If that probability engine could be adapted to voice, it would have a global reach. If Siri has an American English focus, its lead is definitely not two years. Do not count the non-native English speakers out. Hispanic population is increasing and they use smart phones to access the net mostly. On the high end, the median family income of Asian Americans is the highest for any ethnic group. Almost double that of Hispanics, the lowest. That probably would make the ratio 3 or even 4 when it comes to disposable income. Citation provided. Unless they tackle both ends of the income spectrum, siri is not going to make as big a wave as these talking heads are talking about.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'll give Google six months to catch up. Android has had voice search and voice actions for awhile now, so it really only needs a few interface tweaks to make it as user friendly as Siri.
But, seriously, Slashdot should really stop posting articles from Forbes. They're not a technology magazine, and their technology news seems to be little more than regurgitated PR press releases from the technology manufacturers.
Here: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/10/22/2219258/siri-envy-iris-brings-some-voice-assistant-features-to-android
Search RapidShare and MegaUpload!
Two year advantage? How about NO advantage? I've got a Samsung Galaxy S II in my pocket right now that I can talk to in "natural language" -- it's every bit as functional and accurate as Siri and I don't have to handcuff myself to the phone's manufacturer to use it.
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Possibly map the human language and slang terms ?
Other then that they have to be able to tie it to a service that collects money.
Or maybe they will tie it to heavier data usage and collect a notch of data usage collection from the telco's who have an iphone on their network ?
There are places to make the money. Im guessing that they will start marketing location aware advertising where say dominos gets preference over pizza hut when they ask for pizza ? Maybe trying to steal some of googles worth in that arena ?
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
Maybe. Maybe not. See also, Google Reader overhaul, GMail iOS app. Google seems to be sucking lately at application creation. Used to be yo could count on Google to release new stuff that would be awesome. They're phoning it in now that they are big and corporate.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
>It already does 99% of what Siri does
Siri is the 1%!
Occupy Siri!
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Only licensed pilots are allowed to fly a plane. Only licensed drivers are allowed to drive a car OR if supervised by a licensed trainer. Only engineers can sign off on construction. Only doctors are allowed to prescribe medicine, only pharmacists are allowed to dispense it.
Gosh, the list of things restricted to licensed people is long isn't it.
Oh you meant passengers in a plane? That is like comparing operating a computer with watching a screen.
You analogies suck.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
After 2 years of using Android, going from love to hate, I returned to iPhone with the 4S. I hadn't even heard of Siri til I was leaving the store with the 4S and noticed Siri mentioned on a poster.
Siri is useful in a very limited number of circumstances. I routinely use Siri to set an alarm. S/he seems to be good at understanding stock market enquiries too. But the natural language parsing can be very random at times. For example, try "set a countdown for 10 minutes" -- sometimes you'll get "I don't understand", sometimes you'll get an alarm clock set for 10 mins from now, and sometimes you'll get what you want which is a timer counting down from 10 minutes. Try "set a timer for 10 minutes" and you'll get the same range of mis-understanding.
I'm fine with Siri being how it is at the moment. I know it will get better and more useful, especially when it can work with maps / businesses outside the US. But it is still definitely a beta product that is usually slower than performing the task yourself.
Siri in a year or two should be great. I'm looking forward to it.
Siri is a great demo or toy, it falls on it's face because it does not have an option to deliver ALL responses in voice.
I.E. I am driving and my phone in in my pocket, I should be able to hit the BT answer button to activate siri, ask something or give it a command, the response is completely in speech, I can then continue the commands and all responses are in speech, I should never have to touch the phone or look at it's screen.
Two reasons, First, accessibility, Siri is a utter joke to anyone that is blind... when it displays the result it's useless. The same problem is for normal abled people when in a situation where it is not safe to look at the device.
Second, Honestly voice control over something that returns the result on a screen is an Epic Fail. Come on, This is voice control, give me 100% voice response. I should be able to do all this without looking while walking down the street.
I hope they fix it, but I doubt it. it's really only a toy and done at a server farm instead of in the phone. Maybe when we are walking around with dual quad core processors in our phone they can do it in the phone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Was helping someone at a meeting with their iPad. It was going fine until they needed to send a pdf from a site to someone. I *DEFY* you to send a pdf from safari via e-mail.
Apple's portable devices (laptops excluded) are designed to make the stuff you do 90% of the time extremely easy (take notes, check weather, etc), but everything else (e-mail a pdf, copy a simply link from a google-search, etc) either requires 20 minutes of stupid crap or is simply impossible.
According to the summary, siri is a google killer and makes apple the best smartphone platform.
For those assumptions to be true, that means that siri has to be something that people want. While I admit there is a somewhat star trekian cool factor by talking to your phone. On*Star has had similar features. Ford's respond to voice commands and read text messages, etc. And yet, people aren't dumping their current cars for these must have features.
Granted siri is beyond the capabilities of On*Star and the like, but does the public really want to use a phone where you say everything out load for everybody around you to hear, too?
User on subway: Read Text Message.
Phone: From Sharon, I think it's time we move on and see other people.
User on subway: Damn.
Other riders on subway: Awwwww.
Don't get me wrong, there are times that this would be useful, but is it a necessity? If not, then how will it kill google ?
"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."
kinda creepy
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.
Once the novelty of it wears off, people will realize it isn't really all that much better than Android's current voice search. Meanwhile, Android is light years ahead of iOS in terms of Google app integration. Which is where the platform is absolutely most useful in my life.
I *DEFY* you to send a pdf from safari via e-mail.
If you want to attach the PDF, then all you need to do is:
Or you could just click the action button in Safari and pick "Mail Link to this Page".
Apple's portable devices (laptops excluded) are designed to make the stuff you do 90% of the time extremely easy (take notes, check weather, etc), but everything else (e-mail a pdf, copy a simply link from a google-search, etc) either requires 20 minutes of stupid crap or is simply impossible.
Both of your complaints are pretty trivial to do...I've already explained how to attach the PDF, and you can copy links from any website by pressing and holding on the link until Safari offers you "Open" / "Open in New Page" / "Copy" / "Cancel". (I'll give you a hint, you want to use "Copy"...) Or you could just go to the page you want to link, and use the action button in Safari and pick "Mail Link to this Page".
"I don't know how to do it" != "It's impossible."
This is a board full of nerds. As such, we're all used to people looking funny at us. People looked funny at me in kindergarten when I joined the computer club (PC Jr baby!). They looked funny at me in middle school when I was programming HGR graphics screen saver analogues on Apple IIs. They looked at me funny in high school when I was typing notes on a Sharp Wizard OZ9600 II.
And I'm sure most of you had similar experiences because like me you've been early adopters for basically your whole life, and early adopters of computer technology who were born in the 70's almost always got funny looks if not beatdowns from their gradeschool classmates.
As such, I'm not sure why people looking funny at you for giving voice commands to a phone is of particular concern to this group.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
Talking to a device is just awkward. You try popping out your iPhone 4s in public transport and start giving voice commands to the thing. People will look funny at you.
Way to miss the point of owning an iPhone dude. People are suppose to look at you, thats the appeal!
How do you know that reopening the same file in a different app is the right way to do it? Not having seen the actual interface I'm inclined to call that step very, very non-obvious.
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
When I'm driving, talking to my device is the *only* meaningful way to communicate with it.
so you would rather kill a few innocents than stop your car and answer your call??
seriously, talking to anything but a person who is in the car with you is fucking dangerous. it distracts your mind and slows down your reactions to the level of a drunk person.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Wait a minute, I think we're missing the point. Is siri useful in the real world, or just hype for kids who grew up with star trek? Are people going to talk to their phone everywhere in 2 years?
Curiously yours, crip.
I once told siri to open the door because my hands were full with groceries. my roommates were suitably amused.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I don't know about anything in this field but has Google integrated this into Android? I think that is the advantage that is mentioned. Yes there are Android apps and Google is working on voice but the two efforts are not well connected as Apple has done. From my viewpoint, speech recognition is done mostly by Siri on the phone while Apple's cloud handles the AI. Android apps seem to do both and they do it fairly well for simple things. Moving the AI to the cloud lends more processing power. Does Google plan to incorporate this voice interaction more in Android?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I love the desperate comments from the Android-faithful and general anti-smartphone or anti-Mac crowd.... "It'll make you look like an IDIOT if you talk to your phone!" "Nobody will want to use THAT!"
Yep.... and it was crazy to think it was possible to build some kind of rocket ship that could go all the way to the moon. Nobody would want to sit around for hours at a time on their couch and watch things happen on a little glass screen (TV). Or take Howard Aiken's quote back in 1952; "Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country." More directly relevant? Look how many people claimed nobody would ever walk around in public with those goofy bluetooth headsets on with blinking blue lights. Makes you look like you're going to a Star Trek convention!
People ARE going to use Siri, a *lot*. They're ALREADY doing so. One of the problems with the iPhone 4S right now is that often, Siri's servers are too busy with requests to handle all the load so you have to ask Siri a question a couple of times before it goes through!
Before you write me off as another rabid iPhone fanboi, you probably should know I'm using an HTC EVO 4g right now myself. I can tell you why Android users didn't use the speech capabilities that were "there for years". The implementation stinks! The "Google Voice" app is one of the few that actually understands me when I speak to it with really good accuracy, but it can't even respond with speech! That alone makes it nothing like the Siri experience. If I'm trying to give my phone voice commands, it's very likely because I'm not in a situation where staring at the screen is convenient. Maybe the phone is buried deep in a coat pocket and I'm using a headset, or maybe I'm driving, or ?? Some of the other apps I tried have serious integration flaws that makes them worthless. For example, one of them I used was able to figure out how to open the "Messages" app on my phone to send out an SMS if I told it to "send sms", but wasn't able to pass the "Messages" app any actual data, so it I said "Send SMS to 3142212121", it'd just open the app and it'd sit there, empty, waiting for me to key in a new text!
On the contrary. The fact that you resort to insulting your opponent speaks about you. You have some good points, but so does delinear. Rather than attacking him, why not actually respond to his point?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
You're talking wrong. :)
It already does 99% of what Siri does
Yeah, if by 99% you mean about 70% and with structured, formal commands. Apple had that too.
and all they have to do is make a different app with the same code as google voice and just add a series of lookup tables that convert common phrase fragments into Android commands. Easy Peasy
Yeah, simple. Why haven't those guys simply done it yet, it's so simple! I could do it in my spare time and make a fortune, but I'll just sit back smugly and let Apple have their day. Those jerks.
Using a second account to come to the aid of your first doesn't make you any less stupid.
I don't even quite know how to respond to this. It's pretty obvious, if you look at our respective comment histories, that delinear and I are not the same person (or if we are, we're one person who is unusually committed to being active on a sockpuppet account... Occam's razor suggests that this probably isn't true). Not to mention that you're truly committed to your insults. I guess I can't criticize you for not being willing to stick to your methods, poor though they are.
When someone actually responds to what I write, I tend to respond in kind. When someone says something completely unrelated, belligerent and fantastically stupid, I call them out on it.
It's ironic, because you're the one who said something unrelated and belligerent (hint: using an exaggerated example to make a point doesn't make a person childish, whatever your opinions of lolcats are). You had an actual response to what you wrote. delinear is claiming that there's nothing truly useful one can do with Siri, while driving, that one couldn't do with competing products. Either provide reasons why that's not true, or shut the fuck up. Insulting someone, rather than addressing their arguments, is the lowest form of debate and should never be sunk to.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
The power isn't in knowing HOW to do it. It's WHY and WHAT. Yes, if I told you I'd like it to understand "remember the milk when I leave home", you might be smart enough to build some tables that understands starting a phrase with remember means a "to do". You probably would have missed "when I leave home" to mean "around 9am, since tomorrow is Tuesday and that's when I leave", and you almost certainly wouldn't have though to build the geofencing feature, so that the reminder would actually fire as your car pulled back from the driveway.
But we'll know in a month, when Google adds it (I'm giving them a bit of extra time since it only takes "days".)
Google already has TONS of natural voice data.....the key is mining it properly. I've been using Google Voice as my voice mail service since I got it (and I'm sure others have too). I get text versions of those voice messages and have even answered the "was this helpful" frequently. And I'm not the only one. Siri is really just starting to collect the data, so in reality, Apple is behind Google in terms of data volume......how long before Google engineers figure out the best way to mine the data and leap ahead of what Siri does now? I give them until the end of the year.
In addition to the usual Voice Search and Voice Control tools I have on my android phone 4 (!) tools that do pretty much what Siri does:
- Iris
- Speaktoit Assistant
- EVA Intern
- Pocket Blonde
AFAIK all but one were around before Siri.
So where exactly is the "2 year advantage"?
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();
And in the 16th century, most people in this world didn't want to be "book literate", they just wanted to work their feudal lord's land. Face it, computer literacy is becoming a basic social requirement as much as being able to read, write and operate a motor vehicle. If someone proudly claimed "I don't do reading, that shit's for geeks", we'd be justified in looking down upon them. That is equally the case for people who display their complete ignorance of "computer literacy". And Apple is partly to blame for making it socially acceptable to be an uneducated moron and proud of it.
But hey, who gives a shit about security, privacy, DRM, free software et all when IT JUST WERKS! HURR IT'S MAGICAL!!!1