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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."
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?
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
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
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.
Or you could just do it the way you did it before Nina was born...
I'm just looking forward to the youtube video where you get Siri and Nina beside one another and talking. Hoping it ends in a fight with Nina calling Siri a slut.
The cloud offers scalable, redundant and PCI compliant servers
And in order to maintain PCI compliance, you have to restrict access to non-essential personnel, keep your anti-virus updated, encrypt customer data over the network, assign ID's to people with access, yada yada yada. So at least there's that.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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
For sarcastic computers, I always liked Orac from Blake's 7.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?