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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.

5 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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.

  2. 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.