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Apple To Open Up Siri To Developers, Release An Amazon Echo Competitor (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BGR: According to a new report from The Information, Apple is finally ready to let Siri grow up. Specifically, the publication relays that Apple will finally offer official Siri APIs to developers, thus paving the way for third-party integrations, the kind that Amazon Echo users can't seem to get enough of. Things like ordering an Uber or pizza are currently impossible, because Siri is locked down by Apple. What's more, Apple is also reportedly working on a standalone device meant to compete with the Amazon Echo and Google's recently unveiled Google Home. If that's true, it's huge news -- Apple has been lacking any kind of smart home hub until now, but a Siri-powered device would be a serious play to get Apple into our homes. Google is the latest tech giant to announce a virtual home assistant. It unveiled Google Home, a small round gadget with microphones and speakers that listen and respond to your questions and commands.
Can we put Siri and Cortana in a sound proof room and let them fight it out?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
If Apple maintains its privacy oriented stance I might actually consider one of these.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is the start of the "Hey we have that too" reaction to product RND
You mean like they did with that failed MP3 player of theirs? What was it called the iMP3 or something?
except that Siri sucks.
I was cooking dinner the other day and needed 598 divided by 5. my hands were a mess so hey, I haven't tried siri in a while let's try her.
it took 6 tries, for siri to reconigize my voice, and give me a result. the correct numbers and operators appeared on the screen of my iPhone 4 out of 6 of those times, but siri kept failing to find a result.
I don't have a tough accent, I don't stumble my words, yet when i speak voice recognition software falls (done on purpose) every time.
70% accuracy isn't good enough.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It'll probably cost double what the Echo does, and you'll have to buy a new one once a year.
Yes, because every single Apple machine turns into a pile of dust one year after it's bought.
You might choose to buy a new one every year because you get excited by the Apple event where the new one is introduced, but you don't have to do that. (I have to buy a new iPhone this year, but that's because next year it becomes an iPod touch with an extra useless radio. It still works, and is actually still mostly usable on the Intertubes.)
This is the start of the "Hey we have that too" reaction to product RND
You mean like they did with that failed MP3 player of theirs? What was it called the iMP3 or something?
I see you refrained from using either the word "Nomad" or the word "lame". :-)
That would be more of a problem except that Google can't even compete with Amazon.
I have to give them credit here. If anything, Google or Apple should have been the first one to release the first "Echo". But complacency is one hell of a drug. Looks like they've been dipping into Microsoft's stash.
Precisely. MP3 players were quite common, and Apple loved the UI of the Creative player, so they made their own and ripped off the UI. And then slickly marketed it!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Still using an iPhone4 and and Mac mini from 2006, macbook from 2007 and a 2 year old air. Typing from a Sony xperia z3 which I use daily.
The summary didn't once mention the tech giant Google and their recent unveiling of Google Home.
Yes, privacy is more expensive. Do you value privacy?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It is probably your accent because siri works great for me. Just tried it and got it first try, just to be sure.
Considering the original iPhone was released in 2007, I am having a bit of trouble with your claim.
Why do we need a device to set on the counter? Can't we just as easily set a smartphone on the counter and do the same thing? Maybe this is aimed at people who refuse to buy a smartphone.
It'll probably cost double what the Echo does
I have an Amazon Echo. I would gladly pay double for something twice as good. The Echo is nice, but it has a lot of limitations, and there is plenty of room for improvement. For instance, I can tell it to "turn off the kitchen light" and I can tell it to "set a timer for 5 minutes", but I can't tell it "in five minutes, turn off the kitchen light". Another nice feature would be to recognize individual voices of household members, so if my daughter says "play some music" it plays something she likes, and if I say "play some music" it knows I prefer Willie Nelson over Taylor Swift.
Wait wait wait...so your answer for a shit product is 'they were saying it wrong'. Yeah, that is a real selling point for a pile of dog shit. It doesn't really taste like dog shit, you are just eating it wrong.
Sad to say that at Apple Inc. Cuper-town Infinite Loop Basement Bunker, there is no one who understands Lisp, let alone C.
Want to bet?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Unless it can cook and clean, what good is it?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So they're finally opening it up to developers. Maybe they'll regain some of the features that they already had, but subsequently lost after they acquired Siri.
Meanwhile the original developers of siri have moved on to viv.
But the real issue is that Apple have hobbled the usefulness of Siri by not letting it gather all the information on you like Google Now (Google Assistant) so it will never be as personal or as useful.
I'm predicting that they will make it, it will be good but not a best in class, it will integrate with apple tv and air play, and will only be bought by dyed in the wool apple fans. Other than that it will fall flat when compared to Google Home and Amazon Echo. Time will tell, and I don't have a horse in this race, I just feel like Apple could have, and should have been WAY out in front of this when they bought Siri, but they crippled its usefulness.
It was an early prototype iPhone 4. You know, made by that leather case company in China.
MP3 Players were also fairly inexpensive, and you didn't need to have a Mac with firewire, and install malware to load your music onto them.
You hang out in Timmy's basement bunker? What's your safeword?
oh, the high-tech irony... calculating 598 divided by 5 in your head would have taken as much time as it took asking and waiting for an answer once, and you'd also have the benefit of light mind-gymnastics...
For voice recognition, saying it wrong will absolutely ensure failure.
But an absolutely correct Apple response.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Yes, a shitty UI. That's why Apple paid Creative $100 million for the rights to use that UI. Shitty, indeed!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Even I know he/she means the Mac MINI was from 2006, not the iPhone 4
Considering the original iPhone was released in 2007, I am having a bit of trouble with your claim.
I think there might have been a missing comma after "iPhone4". Just replace the first "and" with a comma, then place the string " a " after that, and all will make sense.
Another nice feature would be to recognize individual voices of household members, so if my daughter says "play some music" it plays something she likes, and if I say "play some music" it knows I prefer Willie Nelson over Taylor Swift.
That's a move AWAY from "speaker independence", which has been one of the great breakthroughs in natural-language speech recognition. No thank you.
Not to defend Echo; but is it REALLY too hard to ask it to "Play some Willie Nelson"
Honestly, speech recognition is getting damned good; but CONTEXTUAL recognition is almost as hard, and an entirely different problem.
it took 6 tries, for siri to reconigize my voice, and give me a result.
One thing you didn't mention: What was the ambient environment like, audio-wise?
Speech recognition in the "real world" is QUITE a different problem than it is with a headset, or with your mouth a couple of inches away from the microphone in a relatively quiet room.
My feeling is that you had the iPhone/iPad sitting on the kitchen counter (itself being a pretty acoustically-reflective surface), and you weren't exactly close to, or "on axis" with, the microphone. Add to that that kitchens often have a relatively high ambient noise level, with "white noise masking" coming from exhaust fans, faucets with aerators, etc. Add to that the fact that most kitchens are HIGHLY echoic, with hard-surfaced walls, ceilings and floors, and you begin to see the problem. It all sounds like a big mish-mash by the time that Siri gets the audio.
Ever recorded a conference or meeting with a voice recorder? Notice how "reverberant" even what seems to be a fairly "dead" room is on the recording? Ever notice how much harder it is to pick-out what is being said on said recording, than it was when you were listening in person?
Well, THAT's what Siri is forced to "work with", ALL THE TIME.
Quite frankly, I'm often very amazed at how well it DOES do, given the audio soup it has to parse.
Next time, try bending down closer to the microphone and see if the recognition-factor doesn't go up dramatically.
By the way, these issues apply to ALL speech recognition, not just Siri.
Precisely. MP3 players were quite common, and Apple loved the UI of the Creative player, so they made their own and ripped off the UI. And then slickly marketed it!
Yeah, because organizing music by Artist, Album and Genre was SOOOO Unique and NON-OBVIOUS. I just can't IMAGINE how Creative thought of that, and I agree that PROVES that Apple ripped-off Creative. (Rolls eyes)
That was a bad court decision then, and simply parroting a bad decision doesn't make it better.
MP3 Players were also fairly inexpensive, and you didn't need to have a Mac with firewire, and install malware to load your music onto them.
WTF?
FireWire I'll give you, sort of. But once Apple opened-up iTunes to Windows, they dropped the FireWire-Only interface, and of course the Mac requirement. Before that, it was a moot point, since EVERY Mac came equipped with FIreWire. Next!
But "Malware"? I know a lot of people don't particularly like iTunes; but calling it "Malware" is a bit over-the-top, don'tcha think, even for you?
Yes, a shitty UI. That's why Apple paid Creative $100 million for the rights to use that UI. Shitty, indeed!
It wasn't the UI. It was the DATA ORGANIZATION. Ya know, Artist/Album/Genre? That COMPLETELY UNIQUE method of Organization that NOBODY ELSE thought of?
Fucking idiot.
Timmy (and his Gay Lover Jonathan Ive)
Jonny Ive isn't Tim Cook's lover. That would be Eddy Cue. He even hinted at same at a Keynote, when he said that "Eddy wouldn't let me buy" a new set of Beats headphones. If you're gonna hate, at least try to make it "informed".
Sad to say that at Apple Inc. Cuper-town Infinite Loop Basement Bunker, there is no one who understands Lisp, let alone C.
You're not actually serious, are you?
So, the place that writes nearly EVERYTHING in a variant of C (Objective-C) doesn't have ANYONE who understands C? Is that REALLY your position? As for Lisp, I would bet there are some old-timers that have Lisp experience, and if not, Apple can have a team of Lisp-experts there with resumes in-hand in an hour.
Sometimes you Haters just crack me up...
What's worse, so many things that it SHOULD be able to do, it can't because you have to unlock it first, defeating much of the purpose of using the digital "assistant," and there doesn't seem to be a way to change that in the options or settings.
Believe that most of your concerns have been addressed with iOS 9 and the iPhone 6s and SE.
Time marches on. Things (usually) improve. Do try to keep up.
It installs several background services without consent and even if you uninstall iTns, it leaves it there. It reports back to a central server the files on your computer and in some cases deletes your music. It occupies 100+MB for a glorified content downloader and often makes Windows more unstable.
I can see where he's coming from, even if it's filled with hyperbole.
If you count all the software that installs Services (which are "background" pretty much by definition; so your characterization is unnecessary and redundant), you would likely be surprised. I believe that in the case of iTunes, it is two Services: One that checks to see if you have plugged-in an iPod, and the other to check for Software Updates for iTunes, QuickTime and (when it was relevant) Safari.
That's not "several" it is "two". The Apple Software Update remains because QuickTime (and maybe Safari) remains. If iTunes Helper remains, then I will concede that is an Uninstaller-Script error, or perhaps a Windows Permissions Error.
It only reports your music files if you have turned on the "Genius" function, or if you have "iTunes Match" on. And it is very clear about that in iTunes Preferences. Plus you can disable "Genius" and not participate in "Match", and avoid the intrusion/data-leak.
It deletes your files: Well, the jury is still out on that.
Last I heard, Apple actually sent two iTunes Dev. people out into the field to study the computer and user-habits of the person who allegedly lost 122 GB of music files to iTunes (which by the way, they actually had a backup-of, so nothing was actually lost). One of the things they did was bring along a version of iTunes that had some extra debugging/logging built-in, so they can see what happens, if/when it happens again. So, if it is indeed happening, it CERTAINLY isn't Apple's intent, and they are treating the complaint as serious.
Oh, and iTunes is much more than simply a "Glorified Content Downloader". And I can't say that it has ever made any WIndows system I have had it on, some all the way back to XP SP1, "unstable" in any way. I have NEVER seen iTunes cause a "lockup" and certainly never a BSOD. I'm not saying it CAN'T happen; just that I haven't personally seen that with my iTunes-on-Windows, or with my Windows-saddled iTunes-using friends.
That's pretty funny, but he's not off the mark. Voice recognition software loves my voice. I've had great results even on crummy old software from the mid-90's. I've had success getting the things to recognize all sorts of unusual words, words that sound similar to common words, etc. That's great for me, but no one else I know has had the luck with voice recognition software that I've had. I have very little doubt that there are people on the opposite end of the spectrum as well, who can't get the software to recognize their voice well at all.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "they're saying it wrong" but it's pretty clear that their voice is why they have so much trouble with the software. Ultimately, it's the software's fault, as the technology is obviously not as advanced as we like to pretend.
Required reading for internet skeptics
And if it can actually help you find things in the AppStore, I am sure that all Apple users will get one out of necessity...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Wow, You're confusing things. The ability to recognize speech without training by each speaker is, yes, a great advancement. Having speaker identification, used for preference, is totally different. Stop trolling. If you're not trolling, then unfortunately, your just a an idiot.
I'm not trolling; nor am I an idiot. I'm an embedded developer with nearly 4 decades of paid experience; so I think I understand the issues involved.
Maybe (probably) we have gotten to the point where we can separate pitch, cadence and other "identifying factors" from the actual "words" themselves. In that regard, perhaps it would be possible to distinguish speakers reliably (however I kind of doubt it). Things like siblings of the same gender/age and mood of the speaker might be enough to make that an unreliable mess at this point.
...says the poster with the fanboi name...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
...says the poster with the fanboi name...
Funny. Because, if we go back and look at what the Slashdotters said at the time, the "mood" of most posters seems to be that Creative was only suing Apple because they were looking for some deep pockets to mine, and that Apple had "put it all together" with the iPod.
So, I guess those were all "fanbois" too, eh?