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Nuance Launches Siri Rival "Nina"
redletterdave writes "Siri can send texts and emails, set alarms and reminders, surf the Web, ask questions, place calls, play music, and get directions. But would you trust Siri, or any of her similar rivals out there for Android, to pay your bank bill? Or report a lost card? Or set up an auto-payments for your bills? Even if you wanted to do these things, how does Siri even know you are who you say you are? Nuance has clearly thought about what's missing from the voice recognition department, and unveiled its own solution on Monday, called 'Nina.' The Nuance Interactive Natural Assistant, or NINA, is a cloud-based AI that can be enabled in most business and enterprise applications thanks to a set of APIs and an open SDK for iOS and Android. Nuance calls Nina 'a watershed of firsts for virtual assistants,' mainly because she is the 'first [VA] to understand what is said and who said it' using voice-ID authentication software. Unlike Siri, Nina can help users manage their bank accounts, book flights and hotels, oversee and manage their investments, and more."
... when you have a cold, you cannot access your account to book a new return flight back home. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.
One more place for devious minds to find holes in. should be interesting.
Get up!
User: Nina, what is my credit card balance?
Nina: Your credit card balance is $744.12
User: Nina, pay my credit card bill
Nina: Transferring $74,412.00 from checking to credit card.
Nina: Error. Insufficient funds in account.
Nina: Searching for alternative funding methods
Nina: Initiating Nigerian scam.
Nina: Email sending complete. Awaiting results.
User: Uh, abort! abort! abort!
Nina: Abort what?
I don't know if I would want any Cloud based service handling that...
What a pitch! I feel safer already...
It looks like the idea is that services (like banks, hotels, etc.) opt-in to this, and then can use NINA's voice processing on their site or apps. This seems markedly different than the Siri model of using voice search as a service that integrates results from multiple predefined sources.
Of all the computers in SciFi, I think Jarvis is the best. A computer with sarcasm - priceless
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Right now, I'm only comfortable setting up autopayment of bills if I've got a nice webpage that makes it absolutely clear how much will be deducted, and when, and from which account, and who it's going to, and for how long, and how I can stop it. With a nice "Are you really sure you want to do this?" confirmation dialog at the end.
I'm sure that could be done verbally, but it seems like that would be a much larger PITA than via a user interface.
Some mistakes should be hard to make accidentally. Generally ones involving health and money.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I hope Nina has good council...
Hell, I don't trust my bank's phone service and there's ostensibly an intelligent human being listening to my request!
The Cloud! I wonder what terms of service will govern the treatment, security, and disclosure of the exciting new personal information this delightful system will allow me to automatically send over the intertubes to Nuance, presumably from any application using their API?
Being data mined is so exciting, I just can't wait!
Where is the demo app download? Tech demos are all very nice, but real life is much harder to deal with reliably.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"Nina, I'm behind on my 2007 taxes and don't know what to do. Can you go set up a payment plan?"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
has any non-us speaker actually used a nuance product (or any other voice recognition engine)?
none of them deal with even the slightest accent. hell they can't even get me the proper number when asking for a a contact on my phone, nuance can't even understand when i say "call" and often try to do a search on some garbled text
how they ever expect to be trusted for critical financial stuff is beyond me
Whats up with all the sexist names, only chicks can be personal assistants or what?
How bout a manly name, like Kit Carson, to make it all techie we'll call him "KITT"
How bout a manly name, like Hal Linden as seen on "Barney Miller" about 40 years ago and in reruns after the late news ever since... We could call him "HAL" for short.
Its kind of a 5hit or get off the pot thing, like if you're going to be all sexybabes and just rely on objectification of women for your app sales, then just give her a name like "barbie" (duh) or "natalie" (who got married recently, lucky guy) or "Brittany" (who looked a lot hotter before she aged so quickly). I can see the slogans already "instead of just staring at a rack, you can order it (and the attached women) around". Icky creepy for my tastes.
The idea of everyone else knowing I've got an imaginary ditzy babe who I talk to all the time and she never does anything right... Oh isn't this the plot of "I dream of Jeanie"? Or more like "Weird Science?". Imaginary hottie slave is not really a part of my wish fulfillment so I'm not in the target market.
Here, I'll prove it to you that this whole tech sector is way too creepy for breakout success with the "normals". Try to sell alternate voice packs who sound like "Hal" "my grandma" and "grouchy old man" and watch the weirdos line up to exclusively purchase the "I objectify women" hottie app instead.
If Steve Jobs sold an "iNflatable Babe Secretary" as a phone holder/charger/dock/milk dispenser (sorry for clockwork orange reference) it wouldn't be any creepier.
Now don't get me wrong... I love pr0n with the best of them and a little objectification is not all that bad. I just think its cheesy to pretend its all a "productivity enhancer". Don't sell me schmaltz and tell me its classical, don't sell me pr0n and tell me its art, miscategorization is all I'm saying. If you filed all this "PDA chicks" with the "dating sims" I wouldn't blink, thats where they belong.
Hope you enjoyed my rant, if so please mod me the F up?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you knew the corporate history of Nuance, then I think you'd trust 'Nina' even less than 'Siri'.
Cloud-based anything is adding another potential source of security compromise that has to be mitigated. Who thinks that voice-recognition upstart would have expertise to design something that could be trusted with banking? it isn't their money on the line if you get hacked that way.
you really know someone named Nina. God help you if your wife is named Nina.
Siri on the other hand is safe because no real person is named Siri.
As long as it's secure and long as the response is more dependable and quicker than Siri. Half the time Siri doesn't work at all for me (good coverage area). The rest of the time the response is so slow I would rather just type it in. If it's not near instant, it's just not going to work.
I was amazed at just how bad Siri really is. It's at about the level of voice recognition software from many years ago before training.
I thought Apple would take this existing technology and perfect it, bring it to the masses as they have before, but no. It's just standard voice recognition technology that isn't ready for primetime, yet Apple shipped anyway.
Desperate for a new feature, or Job's health getting in the way?
Either way, the numerous parodies of Siri and funny videos of the frequent mistakes it makes probably isn't good marketing....
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Can anyone recommend something like this that is suitable for a home automation system but NOT cloud based?
Nina can help users manage their bank accounts, book flights and hotels, oversee and manage their investments, and more.
I'll manage my personal finances and travel arrangements myself, thank you very much.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Is it of any significance that the icon for this story appears to be SAL 9000, HAL 9000's earth-based, female-voiced twin?
And should we be worried if this "Nina" sounds like her?
To be fair, as far as I'm aware SAL never murdered anyone unlike her more famous sibling, but maybe that was only down to circumstances. Do we want to risk our smartphones murdering us while we sleep?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
If a little scary because of the horrifying mistakes it could make. I wonder if this will be a future direction for Siri... nuance technology is what is behind the scenes to power Siri.
Do you happen to know that both Apple and Nuance are in fact THIEFS? That they stole the original software and patent from the poor family who worked on this engine their all life, and when they decided to "trust" GoldenSach, they were tricked to give up their software and patent for freee!!!!!
If i was you, i would never never ever consider using or buying anything from these criminal elements. Of course, if you are stupid idiots, go ahead, no one is stopping you.
It should be Max Headroom handling my accounts!
I thought Nuance is where good software goes to die ( a long painful death)
ifriend 0.9
I'm confused. DAvid Pogue says all the time that Siri IS the speech recognition of Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Can someone explain? I know the travails of the poor owners and developers of the original Dragon. I am a faithful and happy Dragon Naturally Speaking medical since 1999. I just want to understand whether Siri is or isn't Nuance's Dragon. And if so, why would Nuance put out a "rival", to quote the title of the OP here. -- Josh
I see an explosion in demand for voice imitation art. Heck, there are even tons of software for it
People get more lazy every fuckin day. "Oh, its so hard to press some buttons! Blah blah blah I worked 8 hours a day and I don't have time to do it! Siri, what's my name? Am I a waste of flesh?".
I'm surprised no-one has said that already. Maybe with AI in the cloud 'authorised' to do 'stuff', it's a lot less like a geeky joke too. Tinfoil hat please.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
This hasn't been launched. It's not being sold anywhere.
Verify me.
Did we not learn anything from Sneakers?
Nevermore.