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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."
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.
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 :) )
Clippy had attitude too, and was endearing and friendly...
She was also the first officer of the Enterprise in the first pilot episode.
Pssssst, Google. Use Morgan Freeman's voice. I promise you'll make trillions.
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.
"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. "
And of course in Siri stories many Android users just aid to get Vlingo.
Shouting your Slashdot posts into Siri is getting better, but still not all that good.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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.
Wrong Troi; Lwaxana is her flirty mother...
You: Where is the nearest pizza place?
Lwaxana Troi phone: Pizza? Dreadful! I know a lovely little bistro just ahead- the cook has the most FILTHY thoughts about me but he makes the most delicious chocolate cake. Chocolate is an aphrodisiac, you know...
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.
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.
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 were jealous of back then.
Fixed.