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Apple Goes on Hiring Spree To Improve Siri's Smarts (engadget.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

Thinknum has noticed that Apple has been on a Siri-related hiring spree in recent months, with 161 positions listed as of the end of March. There's been an uptick ever since summer 2016, but there was a distinct surge in February of this year. From a report: Nearly all of the new positions are for engineers, and it's notable that some of those spots are meant to tackle Siri's relative weakness in general questions. There are entries for Siri software engineers tackling "General Knowledge" and the "Knowledge Graph," for instance. Other notable recruiting efforts include a machine learning scientist as well as multiple engineers to address areas like Proactive Intelligence (Siri's ability to anticipate info you might need), the SiriKit developer framework and speech generation.

30 comments

  1. Where's my pony? by Shemmie · · Score: 0

    Topic.

    1. Re:Where's my pony? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      https://mylittlepony.hasbro.co...

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    2. Re:Where's my pony? by antdude · · Score: 1

      In a factory to make glues. :P

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    3. Re:Where's my pony? by Shemmie · · Score: 1

      Well that was a naff April Fools Day.

  2. Amazingly by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Throwing people at the problem won't work. Siri can't even understand follow up questions like: "Who is the President of the US?" followed by "How old is he?". So much for "AI". It isn't even a very good Eliza.

    1. Re:Amazingly by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I just tried that with Alexa, and it recognized the follow-up question. So, good for Amazon on that one. But Alexa still falls woefully short in other areas, though. For the shopping list functionality, you can't even say something simple like: "Alexa, add milk, eggs, and cheese to my shopping list."

      Alexa: "I added "milk eggs cheese to your shopping list."

      Me: "Alexa, remove "milk eggs cheese" from shopping list.

      Alexa "You can remove items from the shopping list in the Alexa app."

      *facepalm* This is why I have a good chuckle whenever someone calls these digital helpers "AI". Well, it's still early days, so these things will improve over time, presumably.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    2. Re:Amazingly by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 3, Funny

      Alexa "You can remove items from the shopping list in the Alexa app."

      It could have been worse. Alexa might have answered:

      Too late! The articles on your shopping are already shipping from Amazon!"

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    3. Re: Amazingly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A follow-up question involves stateful design.

      There is probably the usual ideology at play within Apple saying that states cannot be preserved between API calls. The WhateverKit framework decrees that a complicated data structure will be required.

    4. Re: Amazingly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Alexa is only useful for buying creamed corn by the ton

    5. Re:Amazingly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't interact with 110010001000, that only encourages the fat fuck to post more inane comments.

    6. Re:Amazingly by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Throwing people at the problem does work. Only if the company listens to the ideas of those who bring up suggestions and those who brought up suggestions are willing to change their mind if a better one is given.
      This is a tough haul for any organization.

      But also it may be that Siri development is under staffed. A lot of good ideas and designs but just not enough man hours to implement.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    7. Re:Amazingly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't interact with 110010001000, that only encourages the fat fuck to post more inane comments.

      How do you know he is fat?

    8. Re: Amazingly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Siri is supposed to be stateful.

      Go back and watch the keynote where it was introduced. The demo was something like:

      "What's the weather?"
      (gets answer)
      "How about in Chicago?"
      (gets answer for Chicago)

      The implication has always been the Siri is stateful and will understand followup questions. Except that, as anyone who's tried it is aware, Siri is not in the least stateful and doesn't understand followup questions. Although there are also exceptions to that, as certain interactions always have followups. For example, if you ask for directions to a location, Siri will then ask you if you want to call the number for that location or get directions. (Needless to say, this is somewhat infuriating, especially while driving, which is when you'd use Siri rather than just search directly.)

    9. Re:Amazingly by swb · · Score: 1

      You laugh, but people will probably figure out how to do "voice ai squatting" on Amazon, selling bogus "combination" products that match this (ie, some product that is called "milk eggs cheese" but isn't any of them).

    10. Re:Amazingly by arth1 · · Score: 2

      But also it may be that Siri development is under staffed. A lot of good ideas and designs but just not enough man hours to implement.

      I doubt that adding man hours to implement ideas and designs will make Siri any better. It will make it bigger and some functionality will change, but it will not necessarily become noticeably better.

      I think systems like Siri need to be able to learn on their own, without any well-meant tweaking or shortcuts that hinder context learning. Hire thousands of people to grade the answers it gives without well-meaning engineers attempting to add right answers or well-meaning management censoring some answers.

      One day, it may be smart enough to understand that when you ask "Where does Jane work?" followed by "What's her phone number?", you likely want her work phone number if it's daytime, but if followed by "What's her address?", you're less likely to want her work address. But simply tossing more manpower at programming won't get us there - it will likely get a more bloated expert system with more hardcoded shortcuts that prevents actual learning.

    11. Re:Amazingly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Found the apple apologist! Your work is needed; siri is too stupid to apologise for herself.

    12. Re:Amazingly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL apple has only had 7 years. Maybe they have not got enough money?

    13. Re:Amazingly by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      If they ship me an omelette, I'll be genuinely impressed.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    14. Re: Amazingly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I donâ(TM)t thunk you can classify Siri as AI? Itâ(TM)s a quite good speech interpreter, but nothing more then that.

      I use Siri for two things, controlling my Hue lights and setting timers when cooking. Timers work flawless, but there seems no intelligence in recognizing my best English. One out of 10 times she fucks up and tries to find music with âlightsâ(TM) or one of my scÃne names. True intelligence would recognize my behaviour and know that I mainly use that dumb slavebitch for my lights. Regardless of how crappy my English pronunciation can be.

  3. Doomed to failure. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Lots of guys have tried to make their bitches smart.
    They all failed.

  4. i wonder who by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    apple will poach their people from this time. And more importantly who would want to work for them?

  5. Spotted it by Hognoxious · · Score: 0

    "Nearly all of the new positions are for engineers" that's the April Fool joke, right? They'll actually be cultural appropriation auditors and pronoun compliance facilitators.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  6. Apple is clueless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Apple has always been more about hyping their products then actually doing them well. Siri was clearly dumbed down and Apple never bothered to build on it. Its the same with Apple maps that Apple forced on its IOS platform by default and never lived up to what Google has done with maps. Why would you downgrade people's experience just to push your own product no matter how inferior it was. I agree throwing engineers at it is sort of late in the game to build on Siri when its been ignored for so long.

  7. lol april fools by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I love April fools. Apple improving their products? HAAHAH!

  8. They need to fix their speech-to-text first by JoeyRox · · Score: 2

    You can't improve your response to queries when you can't even get the query itself right. Siri still has trouble with basic dictation. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

  9. 15 Years Behind by bobbutts · · Score: 1

    About 15 years ago Google was aggressively recruiting expects in natural language processing.

  10. Context dependents era and the new turing test by goombah99 · · Score: 1

    The new turing test is something we get to play every day-- ask your phone a quetion then refer to the previous question or an obvious inference from it. Can the phone follow you like a human would?

    Were still in the context dependent era of AI. We have not yet produced an AI that can handle the non-sequitur. Indeed siri does less than even that, it doesn't follow a train of thought. You can't refer to something you just said in a new instruction.

    The problem Siri has is that it's trying to do too much with too little context. Google and the self driving cars do their jobs seemingly more proficiently because they are context aware. Google by spying on you so it can guess what you are doing when you ask it something. Cars because, cars are found on roads and roads have rules.

    I think Siri would improve fastest if apple could bridge the gap between restraint in collecting information and selling information. Google has no such qualms.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  11. Ob by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Siri, fuck off!

    There is no fuck here..

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  12. Buy up Cycorp by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    They should buy up Cyc (Cycorp). If somebody finds a way to combine neural nets with knowledge-bases like Cyc, they could have something much closer to everyday common-sense. And, more trace-able.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.