Google Working On Siri Competitor Majel

judgecorp writes "Google is working on a competitor to Apple's Siri voice input system. It's an extension to its existing Voice Actions offering with a name that should ring bells. Majel is named after Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who was the voice of most of the Star Trek on-board computers, as well as playing Nurse Christine Chapel in the first series and being Gene Roddenberry's wife."

Comments

Google versus Apple

[bonch]

This signifies so many of the core differences between Google and Apple. Apple intentionally implemented "attitude" in the character of Siri to make it more endearing and friendly, while Google dismisses that idea and tries to make theirs into an emotion-less Star Trek computer, even naming it after the actress who voiced it. Many of the insider remarks on this project are talking about how it's intended to be like the Star Trek computer, even addressing it as "computer." Often times, I think Google is way too engineering-driven and quite simply doesn't get humans.

Voice recognition is driven by feedback, and Apple has a huge headstart with Siri because it's already out now in beta form, and so Apple has access to real-world usage data. By the time Majel comes out, Siri will be even more advanced and will have been shaped by its users. It will be interesting to see how Google competes.

Re:Google versus Apple

[WPIDalamar]

Google has less real world usage?

Matching a search with useful information is kind of what google does best. For voice recognition, they've been doing voice-search on Android for a long time, plus their now defunct goog-411 and that's a lot of voice recognition experience.

Siri/Majel is really just a UI layer on top of those two things.

Google may be behind in the integration, but they're probably way ahead in those two things.

Re:Google versus Apple

[TehDuffman]

I like this approach personally. I think it is weird to treat the phone as a person. I would rather talk to my phone like it is a phone than a woman. (especially if i have to repeat myself :) )

Re:Google versus Apple

[Jeng]

Many of the insider remarks on this project are talking about how it's intended to be like the Star Trek computer, even addressing it as "computer." Often times, I think Google is way too engineering-driven and quite simply doesn't get humans.

I don't need a hammer that gets me. I need one I can accurately use. Natural language is very imprecise, a set list of commands makes things more precise.

Re:Google versus Apple

[mark_elf]

Indeed, FTFA -

"Google, it is widely held, is Siri’s best challenger. The company has offered Google Voice Search on the iPhone and its Android devices since 2008, and that application has been expanded to cover 29 languages, supporting accents in 37 countries, including the Middle East."

Ouch.

Re:Google versus Apple

[TheRaven64]

Have you actually done a survey on this, or is it just an assumption? In my experience, computer voice falls into the uncanny valley very quickly - people find computers that try to sound like humans to be creepy.

Re:Google versus Apple

[hedwards]

Google has tons of data from which to trawl for edge cases. What precisely did you think that the Google Voice transcription service was all about? People let Google transcribe their voicemails by algorithm and Google gets more data. I doubt very much they even bother looking at messages which aren't reported to them as inaccurate.

So, I'd venture to guess that they're actually a lot more used than Siri is. I have a hard time believing that Siri is so used that it's been used more in 4 months than Google Voice in a couple years.

As for sophistication, Google's implementation might be significantly less sophisticated, but it does work reliably, Siri from what I've heard, not so much.

Re:Google versus Apple

[hedwards]

Google's voice recognition works, if it doesn't get it right it tends to recognize it and pop down a list of possibilities.

From what I've heard about Siri, it trades accuracy for sophistication of ability and it isn't a good trade off. We'll see how things progress as it's only a 4 month old release, but still. There's some wisdom in limiting the features to what you can actually do than to overreach and come up with crap.

At the end of the day, voice recognition isn't really that useful except for people driving and possibly the blind. Most people view it as a gimmick. Personally, I'm not about to spend much time using it as when I'm out in public I'd rather not have people know what I'm searching for or whom I'm calling.

Re:Google versus Apple

[hedwards]

That's probably a much more mainstream feeling than you realize. People tend to get freaked out by the uncanny valley. Not to mention that if it sounds like a person then it is a person complete with all the downsides that entails. Most people just want the device to figure out what to do and get it done, adding emotions and jokes just muddies it up and increases the likelihood that the interaction will go wrong.

As a side note, what Google's doing is working, so I'm not really sure on what basis you're suggesting that they don't know what people want, they're wiping the floor with both MS and Apple as of late in that market.

Re:Google versus Apple

[JustinOpinion]

Agreed.

To amplify this 'uncanny-valley' notion. The problem with the anthropomorphizing ('attitude') approach is that it lulls the user into thinking they are dealing with a very sophisticated (sentient) system. This fiction quickly disappears once the user runs requests that the AI quite obviously doesn't understand. At that point, the quirky personality becomes annoying (think Clippy), and the fact that it pretends to be as smart as a human, without actually being as smart as a human, makes the interface seem broken and comically insufficient.

The opposite approach, also seen in robotics and many other areas of AI (e.g. search), is to not pretend that the system is like a person. Instead, make it obvious that it is a machine, with a set input/output behavior. Users can then quickly learn how to best use this machine to accomplish tasks. If the shortcomings of the system are evident, users will not be surprised by them and will instead build these into their mental model of how the system works.

As a case study, consider the similar criticisms that have been made about Wolfram-Alpha (e.g. here): essentially, W|A is a highly sophisticated set of computation and relation engines. However it's all wrapped up inside an overly simplistic UI (a single text-entry box, without any obvious way to refine what you mean). This leads to people getting all kinds of unintended results, despite the fact that the system actually can perform the computation/analysis/lookup the user wants. It's just that there is no obvious way to tell it what lookup you meant. The overly-simplified UI implies to the user that the system will just 'figure out what you mean', but the fact is it fails to do that very frequently; the user becomes frustrated because they then have to mentally reverse-engineer W|A's parsing logic, trying to build a query that returns the kind of results they want.

In short, it's better to design a UI that is an honest reflection of the sophistication/power of the underlying technology. To do otherwise creates a bad user experience, because user expectations are not meant by available functionality.

Re:Google versus Apple

[jeffmeden]

There's a big difference between standard search engine queries and the things people ask voice recognition software. Simply owning a search engine doesn't mean you're going to be awesome at understanding human language and delivering results accordingly. That comes through trial-and-error, which is why Apple has a headstart here.

If you don't realize that a significant number of Google searches are entered in plain English (in the form of a question) then boy are you behind... Fire up any Google portal that supports suggested searching and start a question, like "how do i" and watch as it recants popular natural language searches. I like "how do i update my iphone", how apropos. You will see similar things for "how will" "how should" "how does" etc. People have been using Google like they would use a "human" for many years. They also know that for any given natural question, what results are the most popular (based on a number of choices only possible to present on a full computer screen). Don't worry one bit about how well Google understands language, accurate results, etc.

Re:Google versus Apple

[dan828]

Actually, I've been seeing Apple as the new MS. That is, blatantly using their big bucks and near monopolistic positioning to crush competition and force major players in various industries to do things their way at the expense of the consumer (eg, the whole e-books thing). I can't even look at the old 1984 commercial without thinking that Apple has become what they despised back then.

Re:Google versus Apple

[coldfarnorth]

Have you been paying attention to what google has been doing with voice data? First, they've been collecting voice data for years. Before Google Voice actions, they were using Google Voice, before that, it was Google 411. They have a tremendous amount of natural language data back in the warehouse, and It's going to be quite a while before Apple has any hope of catching up (Remember - Google is still gathering data at an amazing rate via Voice actions and Google Voice, plus Android market share is now larger than iPhone market share - that's one more handicap for Apple).

As to the magic that Apple can supposedly work with incoming data: Would you be shocked if Google engineers can do the exact same thing with their voice data that Apple can? That's not valuable feedback, it's necessary, otherwise your algorithms will not improve.

And the "Siri isn't released yet" argument: I call shenanigans. If I can get it on my phone without signing an NDA, It's been released. I'm sure it WILL get better in future versions, but that's not an advantage - it's a requirement if Apple wants to stay in the field.

Apple HAS done good work in natural language processing, but I am unconvinced that this is a permanent advantage. They are playing catch-up in too many respects for anyone to say that they own the field.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I use Google's voice actions all the time. Care to convince me that they aren't much used?

Re:Google versus Apple

[somersault]

Try typing things like "why", "where", "what", etc into Google and you will see from the autocompletions that normal people's "standard search engine queries" are exactly what people would ask voice recognition software.. what do you think they're asking? Geeks like us may understand search engines and google more frugally, but your average person puts in lots of redundant info and doesn't really realise what's going on. For example I typed in "piza places near" and one of the top results was "pizza places near my location", as if Google understands that..

Even if Apple do better presentation (remains to be seen..), do you think their AI and search guys are anywhere near Google's in terms of knowledge and experience?

Re:Google versus Apple

[Darth Snowshoe]

Yes, but Google didn't think to try to do this until Apple made it the primary feature of a new product. Apple continues to innovate the UI in big ways. I give Google a lot of credit for working towards a driverless car, but in several other instances recently, it seems they've either been following other companys' products, or killing their own development efforts right out from under fairly large groups of appreciative users.

Re:Google versus Apple

[BasilBrush]

So, I'd venture to guess that they're actually a lot more used than Siri is. I have a hard time believing that Siri is so used that it's been used more in 4 months than Google Voice in a couple years.

Oh, easily. By an order of magnitude or two. Siri is the number one feature on the latest version of the worlds most popular smartphone. There are TV adverts about Siri around the world. Google Voice, personally I hadn't even heard of it till you mentioned it. Looking it up, it seems like one of the many web services Google try out for a couple of years, then drop because few people are interested.

Re:Google versus Apple

[ozgood]

Can we at least see a demo of Google's version before we compare the two?

Re:Google versus Apple

[Archibald Buttle]

The very best voice recognition systems are only about 95% accurate. That recognition system is the grey matter that sits between your ears. We tend to think of our recognition as perfect, but it's really not. We use context to help our recognition. We generally know what subject is being spoken about, we know what words are likely to come next, and we use that information to compensate when we fail to properly recognise words. All this happens so quickly that we don't notice that we have failed to recognise a word properly.

If human beings worked like computers and demanded 100% accuracy of recognition, we'd be continually stopping each other to repeat things. Conversation would be next to impossible. Even when we're not sure we've heard what somebody has said, we rarely ask people to repeat themselves, and usually just rely on having gotten the gist of what was said to us.

As Siri is a conversational interface it does not pop down a list of possibilities, since that would interrupt the flow of the conversation, but it instead makes use of context to help improve it's recognition. This isn't as simple as a trade-off of (per-word) accuracy vs sophistication of ability - it's a sophistication of ability that's attempting to improve the accuracy of the interface. It is not a voice recognition system per-se, it's a conversational interface, and they're not the same thing.

Re:Google versus Apple

[wickerprints]

I find it amusing that Google fans are quick to point out how they've been harvesting natural language data from your voicemails (never mind the privacy implications for now!), but fail to realize that Siri's voice recognition algorithms are built on technology from Nuance, which is the company that developed Dragon Naturally Speaking. And Dragon has been around for a LOT longer than Google Voice. Apple didn't try to invent Siri's voice recognition from scratch, and that's something that fans of Apple also must realize. Apple purchased Siri, and with the backing of money and resources, grew it into what it is today.

Furthermore, Google may collect a lot of data, but it's the algorithms that drive the accuracy and flexibility of any voice recognition system.

As a final point, Siri is much, much more than just a voice recognition system. All that voice recognition does is transcribe audio input into text. A lot of what Siri does that is novel has to do with the use of natural language processing to achieve semantic understanding of the input, which is what Wolfram|Alpha does. The novelty and the innovation lies in the relatively successful synthesis of these two technologies to achieve something akin to that idealized "Star Trek" interface.

Re:Google versus Apple

[shellbeach]

I don't mean to say that Google couldn't create human-like voice recognition, but the insider remarks that have been posted on various Android sites have so far stated that Google is not implementing Siri's "funny" remarks, for example. That alone is so Apple-like.

If you're seeking humour and witty conversation from your phone, then I'm not sure you're speaking for the majority of people; most of us have human friends for that. My ideal voice recognition software would do the task required and only that task -- I don't want software to quip back at me, and I especially don't want it to make jokes about referring to me as "an ambulance" if I'm injured and dying. Humour and computers don't generally mix well.

Based on past statements by Google (Marissa Meyer once criticized interfaces that looked like they were made by humans, instead favoring interfaces made by machines...), they just don't seem to get people. They definitely come off like an engineering company without the balance of human interface design. This was also the perception of Microsoft for many years, incidentally.

That's a good analogy. It was amazing how MS failed to get UI design, and how Apple gained a virtual monopoly in the PC market because everyone cared so much about the usability difference. Why, last I checked, Apple had 93% of the PC market share, with MS sitting on a lowly 7% ...

I'm getting the impression that Apple fans think that design is everything, and that functionality should be sacrificed for cute animations and humorous backchat. I don't think it works like that for most people.

Re:It's a cute jab at apple

[Anonymous Coward]

The three basic opinions on this:

The tech world: "Well, fair is fair. Though this was done on phones and such before, Google really had one of the first major working voice-to-text implementations for limited commands AND search, then Apple improved the interface with Siri, and now Google is improving that to make it more engineering-based. No real problem."

The plebs outside the tech world: "WTF?!?!??!? Apple invented voice controls! They had all their advertisements about Siri on the iPhone and everything!!!!1! GOOGLE IS TEH EVULZ AND TEH COPAYCATZ ZOMG KILL"

Apple themselves: "Yes, we invented the concept of voice. Itself. Now, give us royalties."

Re:copycat company

[ColdWetDog]

Seriously, google - do your own thing, don't just copy Apple over and over. It makes you look bad.

They have. Google is developing the first browser to have a three digit version number (to be rapidly followed by Mozilla).

The release candidate should be available next week or so.