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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.'"
http://siriouslyweird.tumblr.com/
http://sirisaysthedarndestthings.com/
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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?
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.
...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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I'm an iphone 4s owner and wish that instead of Siri, I had a phone that could actually just not drop calls every 5 minutes. Seriously, the 4s is way worse than my old iphone 3G in this respect.
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
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.
>It already does 99% of what Siri does
Siri is the 1%!
Occupy Siri!
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
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.
>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
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 ?
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.
Siri is based on an open sourced framework. I can't find the page in my search history, but the AI portions were based on a set of DARPA or DOD funded applications. Google already have good AI guys like Peter Norvig too. They will be able to come up with something similar within a few months if they want to.
I agree that it's likely the voice thing will be seen as more of a toy. It's definitely one that I'd like to play around with, but I don't know if I'd actually use it properly.
which is totally what she said
I'd much rather have in-phone implementation of basic voice commands like: "text contact message send text", "navigate to address/business", "add contact name name number number, etc.
Oh God yes. If you haven't tried Siri, it's considerably worse than existing voice commands for one simple reason: lag.
The most annoying one is for iPod voice commands. Like, for example, "Play" to start playing whatever's on the iPod app. In earlier iPhones, this was a short pause for it to understand it, and then the music started.
In Siri, this is now a one second pause for it to round trip to the server, then Siri saying "OK," and then, finally, the music starts playing.
"navigate to address/business"
Yeah, you ... can't navigate on iOS. At all. Sure, you can get a list of directions - but good luck following those without driving into something, especially since it won't automatically move through the next steps while you're moving. Annoying as the passenger, impossible as the driver.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
...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,
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();