Mockups demonstrate Apple's anticipated iPhone 5 'Assistant' feature - Page 2

If its done on device then heck yeah - it would require a MUCH faster CPU than the A4.

I'm willing to be that the rumor mill grinds a lot of mix-ups between iOS5 and iPhone5. E.g., Assistant may only be on phones running iOS5, which via the post office game quickly turns into "They're only going to have Assistant on iPhone 5".

How do you "know" that the iPhone can do what the iPhone 5 does and that there isn't a good technical reason for limiting voice to iPhone 5? You're making an assumption that this would run great on iPhone 4 and that assumption may not be accurate.

I don't figure that Apple makes decisions like that arbitrarily. And I don't believe they just want to deprive old device owners in order to force more sales.

Maybe the algorithms employed by these features require heftier processors and/or more RAM.

This isn't just speech-to-text voice recognition, like some folks here are assuming. And it's not just speech-to-text-to-matched-command-word either. Apparently, they have tried to build in some natural language understanding, which I find great, but I'm skeptical of those algorithms. In general, they have a high rate of confusion.

Thompson

Do you realize how hard it is to develop a good algorithm for machines to understand natural language? This is orders of magnitude more challenging than just recognizing the words that were spoken and copying them into either a text field or using them to match to a small set of keywords that invoke commands.


Thompson

1) But isn't that why Nuance uses server-side processing to parse syntax.

2) If it is localize, I think it's a valid question to wonder how any ARM processor can do this quickly and without a severe hit to the battery if used often. Could they have a special Voice Recognition chip?

Because people can't read news about handsets that they don't own? I read Android news when I had an iPhone and now I read iPhone news when I have an Android...get this, I actually read both types of stories regardless of which device I owned.

Just blew your mind, right?

I have a work-provided Droid 2, and I have always found the voice commands to be one of the most lacking features therein. From the almost 10 seconds delay from "please wait" to "say a command", I then get some pretty limited options... Basically "call contact name" "call number" "message someone" and "go to an application". On average, the recognition quality of all of these is poor to piss poor. I don't get the impression the phone is going to and cloud service to interpret my voice. It's plenty quick in returning a very quick "did you say..." question with humorous results. Even when it does "work" it is terribly limited.

For example, something as simple as "Message Jim" will at best open the messaging app where you then get to type your message. There is no "Text my wife and tell her I will be ten minutes late."

Yes, voice simple recognition has long been a feature of phones everywhere, and some do it better than others, but what we see emerging here is an almost Star Trek-esque natural dialog recognition, where you can can ask your phone a natural question or give it a complex multi-part command and have it act on it. No phone, Droid, iPhone, windows, or otherwise can do that today. Perhaps next Tuesday that will change.

It would be wrong of Apple to try to coerce users of iP4s who are still on contract to do an early termination to buy the iP5 if the iP4 was in fact able to do the job. Typically they enable all of the features that they can on the previous generation phone with the upgrade.

In some cases like with the iPad 2 where there was a new camera which its predecessor did not have it prevented them from making some features backwardly compatible. Unless the voice feature needs some specific new hardware other than cpu power, they should make it available on at least iP4.

When iOS 4 was released they made it available to 3Gs users even though it didn't run that great. I hope they do the same thing with iOS 5 and iP4 even if it is a little slow.

Typical cellular lag is often 150- 300 ms, which is noticable, and I've seen 1300 ms on a couple of tests. BTW, 1300 ms is expressed as "Hey, where the f@@@ did it go? (reload)"

Keep in mind Siri could do all those things TWO YEARS AGO. God knows what it can do today, especially when paired with custom made hardware.

I predict it becomes self-aware weeks before December 21, 2012.

You, sir, have won teh internetz

You can say, for instance, "Text Brian..I will be ten minutes late" then it'll enter the message to the sender and you have to press send though.

Did you ever try Siri on the iPhone? It was pretty amazing.

I call BS it does it instantly on my Optimus T, If you really used it then you would know their is no delay like that. Have you tried saying "Send to text to (what ever your wife's name is saved as in your phonebook" I will be home ten minutes late...It works I bet.

I don't dispute that it might take more computing juice than the A4 can give to do this voice nav stuff, but just how much faster is the A5 than the A4? In the case of the ipad1 vs ipad2, specs says that the cpu is clocked at a limited speed of 1GHz on both, with 1 core on the A4, and 2 cores on the A5. However, the benchmarks I've seen show the ipad 2 at around 1.6x-2.1x faster than the ipad1. (Main ref here is Primate Labs Geekbench 2 score: ipad1 @ 456, ipad2 @ 739, but there are others) The finer details of these benchmarks are unknown to me, but assuming that's in the ballpark, we're talking around 2x the computing "power", not 10x or 100x or something in the stratosphere. I assume that the A5 that will likely be used in the iphone5 will be similar in speed to what's currently in the ipad2. If that's a bad assumption, feel free to correct me. So, my point here is that it'd seem weird if the functionality we're talking about works well enough to be acceptable to Apple in ios5 on the A5/iphone5 (and we know Apple doesn't want to put it out there if the HW limitations make the experience suck), and yet is crap enough on the A4 that Apple would remove it from ios5 running on the A5/iphone5.

+1

This is one of those idiot mis-phrases that instantly marks out its user a a dork.

Welcome. We don't call each other idiots here.

We often point out that they're absolutely definitely trolling for some other company (or Apple itself), but we don't do personal attacks. Please change your post into something meaningful. Thanks.

Why's it so strange? If you like smartphones and gadgets in general your going to want to know whats happening on all of them so that when you change you get the best for yourself.

Buying one brand of technology and then never looking at what other people offer is stange, how do you know your device is actually any good if you never try any others?

Tried using this on WP7 and it works perfectly well, in the end I just didn't bother using it. Talking to a device is overrated, pressing buttons is simple enough and you are still holding it after all.

1) that video is a made up concept vid. of COURSE it would be perfect. If you want to see something really cool, watch Microsoft's visions of the future videos sometime. Amazing concept work there.

2) Native Google Voice translation takes maybe 2 seconds. Unless Apple made some serious progress on compressing data and/or massive boost to internal storage their implementation will need a data connection as well to have some heavy lifting done by the cloud. Even FlexT9 (Which uses the Dragon diction engine) still connects to the internet to translate.

Speaking of, Nuance, Vlingo, and "start talking" all offer voice command driven options on android, with a varying level of success. For example, start talking is the best at composing status updates/text messages (accurate and fast) while Vlingo is amazing for things like the second option shown in the video (a google search).

The really BIG issue about most of these programs is that they are battery drains. 10:1 that's where Apple will have the biggest innovations. Voice tech is VERY good already.

There's a fair amount of difference from being interested in technology in general, keeping informed about developments across manufacturers, investigating your options, etc., and registering on an Apple enthusiast site to relentlessly drone on about the superiority of anything but Apple.

Computing has bottlenecks other than the CPU. The GPU in the A5 is supposedly 9x faster than the A4, the RAM is rumored to be 1 GB and who knows how fast it is. Even the speed of the storage could make a difference. It could be something as simple as RAM requirements.

And yeah, "2x" the CPU (it really depends on the MHz as Apple could ship a 1.0 to 1.5 GHz version, in which case, it could have 2.5 to 3x the throughput), 9x CPU, and 2x RAM relative the A4 in the iPhone 4 could be the difference between running a smart agent and not.

We'll see how it goes, assuming the feature is real of course.

Not at all, I understand that you like all kinds of technology. I was just curious about your motivation.

J.

If you like technology, brand specific blogs and forums are not the best place to get information. At least not if your interested in unbiased (or less biased) information.
It's also very easy to know if a device, in this case an iPhone or iPad, is any good: just try it out and use yourself as a reference. That works remarkably well, you should try it.

J.

If you like technology enough to read a site that's going to give you the latest info on one of the biggest companies out there, chances are you don't just read one site like this and you also read a few others covering different companies.

Going to the extent of registering on this site but not liking technology by any other manufacturer is just weird. Its like saying if Apple made the walkman and Sony made the iPod you would only be interested in the walkman. Or that 12 months a year you read a site that for a phone will only ever mention 1 new product a year. It doesn't make any sense to be that interested in 1 tech companies products but not any others.

No need. You already said it

yea this is very much like Google voice search...except of course the UI is light years better...

On android for the same thing I'd have to say

"Text Scott Forstall Mobile (short pause) I like the new assistant"

and for the ISS I'd simply have to say "International Space Station" or "ISS"

but if what I hear about the expanded features of nuance is true...then wow.

I am told Target app has Nuance voice search built in and it's local, not server-side, which would make it world's better than the Google voice search if true. I've tried both the Target app and Google app to test their voice apps after I heard about it; Google's voice search is lot slower.

Is that allowed in The States? It's forbidden in most European countries.

Could be as you say, not everyone is the same though. It makes no difference for the point I made about 'unbiased' information.
The point is that not every technology company is the same as you seem to suggest. There is an underlying reason for Apples enormous success, it's not that they make some nice products now and then, like any other company out there. And that makes it not so strange to be mainly interested in Apple and not so much in other companies. If you don't understand that, your kind of reasoning comes to play.

J.

I get that some people are a bit obsessed by apple, but still think its strange to only like a feature when apple include it in a product and not when other people do.

Anyways my origional comment was about someone being called strange for reading apple news when they have an android phone. I'm just pointing out that a lot of people just like technology and don't care who's logos on it, just that the tech is good. After all why let brand loyalty get in the way of buying a decent product.

I see you don't agree with me that Apple is a very special brand but you don't seem to understand that that's not a matter of opinion anymore.

On the original point: I already acknowledged your view on the matter, but someone who says his non Apple phone is perfect and still comment on an Apple phone seems a bit suspect or strange to me. Why care about another device if you already have the perfect one?

You don't seem to understand brand loyalty at all. Your loyal only when the products you buy are extremely good. If you think otherwise you make the mistake of underestimate the buying public; you declare them insane so to say.

J.

Voice recognition has been around since the DOS days. This is not some new advent in the last few years. It's been around and in use for almost 2 decades. It has changed quite a bit since it's inception. The old pre-2000 days you had to pause - for - every - word - so - the - software - could - recognize - word - breaks. In short, you sounded like William Shatner in an odd twist of fate.

Somewhere around 2005 when Nuance was born from the old Dragon Dictate, processors were around the 1GHz range, so it's not crazy to think they could do this locally but I tend to doubt it will be local if they are doing queries shown in the mock up with such a high degree of accuracy.

As to those questioning if Android uses the cloud, simply turn off your internet connection and try it and see what results. I suspect that simple things like "Call X" are local as they don't require much processing power, while more completed commands leverage server farms.

The Google app is actually quite good at recognizing basic sentences for web searches. I use it quite often on my iPhone when I'm in the car and don't feel like typing a complex query. As long as it's a common query, the app usually gets it right (or I should say Google's server farms do).

Having bought a very old copy of Dragon way back in the day, I can tell you that word recognition has come a long way and only with the advent of those server farms has it become usable. I'm not opposed to Apple leveraging a similar system if the end result is a more usable result. It would be nice if the feature is local but time will tell.

Why would something that makes driving safer be banned in

Oh, it's Europe. Right.

Yeah, in some states, it's illegal to NOT use a hands-free system if you're on a cell phone in your car.

I would imagine he's referring to Texting itself being unsafe while driving. Any distraction from driving is less safe than none at all. Even hands-free has been shown to be just as risky with no reduction in accidents related to cell use in states where hands free devices are allowed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012900053.html

Ah, that makes sense.

But so how does that help me? A 'no hands-free' law is completely unenforceable. I'll still be hit by morons doing this, and I'll still be hit by morons still PHYSICALLY texting while driving.

It doesn't' help you. You just seemed to miss the previous posters point that texting while driving is not allowed in most European countries.

I would think even voice activated texting would be an unwanted distraction as you would still have to verify visually that the text was correct before sending.

Useful in a pinch though. I've used the voice dial to that effect which saved time glancing through an address book while driving.

Voice recognition + non American accent = FAIL

I tried the Nuance power Target app search with Spanish. Didn't work. Not sure about a non-American English accent.

Believing this: "fail".