Google, Samsung cancel phone launch event out of respect for Steve Jobs - Page 5

Originally Posted by Galbi

What hardware?

Besides the already included micrphone and speakerphone, there is nothing related to Siri that isnt on the iPhone 4 (regular).

Apple makes the Siri available only on the 4s to spur sales of it.

It essentially locks out the feature set of Siri used on other phones.

It's all software.

There is not a special switch to activate it (besides holding down the home button for 2 seconds, of which Apple already had the feature in iOS 4)

Dont get ahead of yourself here bud.

Siri (and its kind of software) showcases the power of cloud computing.

The actually software inside the iPhone 4s is nothing more than a recording device + transmitter that sends the voice data over to Apple's datacenter (where most of the heavy lifting and voice analysis is done).

We all know that Google's strength is quite heavy in this area.

Originally Posted by shadash

If they had respected Steve, they would have acted differently while he was alive.

Remember Google I/O with Vic Gundotra in 2010? "If Google did not act, our future would belong to one man, one company, one vision," with a 1984 scene on the slideshow behind him. And we're supposed to take this guy's little "Steve story" seriously, as if he and Steve were best buds? Give me a break.

https://plus.google.com/107117483540...ts/gcSStkKxXTw

It is absolutely NOT "hatred of anything not Apple." It is contempt for people like Gundotra who scorned Steve while he was alive, and now are jumping on the "We love Steve" bandwagon after he is gone.

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

I suspect what sets iPhone/Siri apart is the deep integration of the Siri analysis software and the iPhone 4S hardware.

Even if Google are able to approximate Siri within the Android OS and Google apps -- I doubt that they will have sufficient control over the hardware to match the iPhone/Siri implementation.

The quote by Alan Kay comes to mind:

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Originally Posted by EmperorsNewClothes

I'm inclined to think that this cancellation is more about Steve's death overshadowing this event, than it being out of respect. They want to grab all the headlines, rather than be largely ignored by the media at this time.

Originally Posted by MacInsider2

BULL shit.

Time to copy Siri

Originally Posted by 2stepbay

Agreed. If Google and Samdung wanted to show true respect for SJ's genius and innovative talent, they'd stop their hardware/software copying and pull their products from the market. Schmidt et. al. are nothing short of disingenuous with their feigned respect. IMO, they have solidified their position as fraud artists. Shameful...absolutely shameful.

Originally Posted by cloudsymph

i don't want to say you're an idiot, but sadly you are.

it is so likely that google is going build from ground up, with their thousands of developers to make a siri ripoff in two weeks /sarcasm

but hey while we're on who's copying who take a look at this..http://androidandme.com/2011/06/news...d-lock-screen/

i myself am an apple use, but seriously people like you are the worst.



refer to the above link. you people make it very hard to be an apple fan.

Originally Posted by Galbi

Lack of sportsmanship in the Apple fanboy camp is utterly preposterous.

You all should be ashamed of yourselves.

Originally Posted by Galbi

Show me the evidence that the Siri has a special hardware feature INSIDE the iPhone 4s that actually does the heavy lifting.

I'm willing to bet that most of the processing work and "AI" is done at the backend at Apple's computer farm.

Like I've mentioned already, the iPhone 4s's Siri feature on the phone is nothing more than a voice recorder + transmitter that send all of its information over to Apple's datacenter to do the voice analysis. Even the demonstrator mentioned it during his demo.

Sorry to rain on your parade but there isnt anything special INSIDE the iPhone 4s's Siri that sets its apart from the iPhone 4's hardware.

Originally Posted by jragosta

Other than, of course, twice the processor cores, 7 times the GPU performance (which with Apple software can be used for general purpose computing tasks) and probably more RAM.

Clearly, the 4S is far more powerful than the 4.

And your argument that it is being done at Apple's computer farm is absurd. It apparently works even when there's no internet connection.

Originally Posted by Apple ][

Does anybody think that Apple would ever cancel an event if the head of Google or Samsung happened to die?

I'm sure that Apple would release some polite sounding statement and offer condolences, but they wouldn't cancel any event, nor should they.

Originally Posted by Fairthrope

And you wonder why most of them got kicked out from MacRumour?

I can't believe that MacRumour is now where grownups go to, ever since Daniel Eran Dilger becomes a staf writer of AI, and all articles coming afterward are for clickbaits and page drives.

Originally Posted by asdasd

on the demo it took 2 seconds to answer Scott Forstall most times. That indicates a round trip to the servers. We know it does for wiki, and wolfram.

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

Yes, obviously, it has to go to the Internet to get anything that is not stored on the device!

It appears to work like this:

1) Siri, delegates speech-to-text translation to Nuance, on the iPhone 4S.

2) Then, Siri analyzes what needs to be done, on the iPhone 4S.

3) If the request can be resolved on the device, it is delegated to an app on the iPhone 4S.
-- make a note
-- set a timer, alarm
-- read a message, etc.

4) If the request requires web interaction, Siri delegates round-tripping to the web by making efficient, streamlined requests* of apps like Maps, Safari, etc. The request is assembled, and the results decoded/formatted* (if necessary) and displayed by Siri on the iPhone 4S.

5) For some requests, Siri passes the request to Wolfram, Yelp, etc.

At this point we don't know whether Siri passes the translated speech-to-text directly to the 3rd party service. However, I suspect that Siri passes the results of its analysis: "what is mitosis", "Find me a good Greek restaurant in Palo Alto", etc. in an efficient, streamlined request* to Apple's servers. Then, Apple's servers make a high-speed backend request to the desired 3rd-party service. Finally, Apple's servers assemble and encode* the information and returns it to Siri on the device. The request results are decoded/formatted* (if necessary) and displayed by Siri on the iPhone 4S.

6) On the iPhone 4S, Siri delegates text-to-speech translation to built-in iOS routines. Siri, does analysis, delegation and presentation.

* There are much more (10-100 x or more) efficient ways of communicating with the web than through HTML, XML and Web Services.

Originally Posted by asdasd

That analysis is probably correct ( except you would send ""what is mitosis"), however it does show that some of the processing is done online. I dont get that "There are much more (10-100 x or more) efficient ways of communicating with the web than through ... Web Services". XML, yes, - slow as molasses= but any communication with a web is tautologically a web service.

Originally Posted by asdasd

That analysis is probably correct ( except you would send ""what is mitosis"), however it does show that some of the processing is done online. I dont get that "There are much more (10-100 x or more) efficient ways of communicating with the web than through ... Web Services". XML, yes, - slow as molasses= but any communication with a web is tautologically a web service.

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

Google and Samsung have canceled an event...
[ google_samsung_postpone_phone_launch_event_out_of_respect_for_steve_jobs ][/c]

Originally Posted by screamingfist

'out of respect' my a$$.
they are just waiting so that steve's passing doesn't overshadow the release of ICS and the nexus/prime/whateveritscalled.

Originally Posted by muppetry

But I think the point is that the speech recognition and intent interpretation is local, and the online transactions are just the same ones that you might execute if you were doing it yourself (information lookup, email, text etc.), only maybe done more effectively (in terms of query construction etc.).

I am curious about those claimed efficiency gains though. If they are proprietary transactions with Apple servers, then you could imagine more efficient protocols than http, but if they are dealing with 3rd party web servers then they have no other choices.

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

I suspect it is similar to the Amazon Fire's Silk browser implementation:

1) A single, efficient, relatively low-speed connection from the device to the company's proprietary servers -- as opposed to multiple, inefficient low-speed connections to target servers.

2) The single request can minimize HTTP and XML overhead in the transmitted packet -- it does not need to be human-readable or conform to any, but the most basic TCP/IP protocols.

A single request to a target server usually involves multiple connections -- to download JavaScript scripts, CSS definitions, images, ad banners, animations, Flash, Flash Content, etc. Say, each image results in a single request-response connection that takes 1/2 second or more to turn around -- over and above the time to download the requested image. A web page with 10 images can easily waste several seconds in turning around request/response connections.

3) The company's servers communicate with the target servers via high-speed/bandwidth backbones.

4) The company's servers can cache frequently-requested data and avoid many requests of target servers.

5) The company's servers can aggregate the information from its caches and from requests to the target servers, then create and send an efficient data packet to the device. Again, there is no need for XML or HTML overhead.


So the device and the company's servers have a single, very efficient request/response connection.

The company's servers do all the heavy lifting (as efficiently as possible) gathering, caching and aggregating data from multiple target servers.


The net result to the user is that sometimes Siri takes a moment, or so, longer to do what you ask. But it is not significant enough to degrade the UX.

In fact, Siri usually warns/notifies you of the extra effort: "Let me think about that", "I think I have an answer for you", etc.


You could say that Siri, Silk and the like give the user the "Best of the web" (speed and content) and eliminates the "Worst of the Web" (slowness, ads, distractions, click-bait, etc.).

It will be interesting to see how monitization of the web changes as a result of this change.


And, I suspect that people, who wanted to, could ask Siri: "Show me the New York Times web page" (in all its current glory).

Originally Posted by solipsism

I rewatched the Siri demo of the special event. Everytime a request is made, even if it's something that is currently done locally with Voice Control or something one might think is completely local the spinning lines (not sure what to call it) appears next in the Menu Bar next to the network.

That clearly indicates that it's using the data network which I find surprising for many of the mundane requests that Voice Control in iOS 4.x seems to handle well so it is looking like Silk, a low-overhead server-side service.

That would also mean that Apple will be data mining real world requests that I think could be more valuable than the data mining Amazon and Google do with their search engines. I don't think Apple will sell this information, but they will certainly use it to their advantage. I wonder if this will become a big scandal like the anonymous location tracking.

Originally Posted by solipsism

I rewatched the Siri demo of the special event. Everytime a request is made, even if it's something that is currently done locally with Voice Control or something one might think is completely local the spinning lines (not sure what to call it) appears next in the Menu Bar next to the network.

That clearly indicates that it's using the data network which I find surprising for many of the mundane requests that Voice Control in iOS 4.x seems to handle well so it is looking like Silk, a low-overhead server-side service.

That would also mean that Apple will be data mining real world requests that I think could be more valuable than the data mining Amazon and Google do with their search engines. I don't think Apple will sell this information, but they will certainly use it to their advantage. I wonder if this will become a big scandal like the anonymous location tracking.

Originally Posted by asdasd

The spinner in the toolbar is always and only a network activity indicator.

Originally Posted by stelligent

For those who smell fish (or smell like it), consider this:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page have been unabashed admirers of Steve Jobs, well before Jobs was sick. The respect they have for the man may be equal to that of most Apple fans. Despite Steve Jobs' reported anger toward Google and particularly Eric Schmidt, Schmidt has said nothing but kind words even well before Jobs' death. In some ways, the GooglePlex has lost a hero too, a source of inspiration.

Of course, we will never know anyone's true motive. But, in the absence of certainty, why not choose the more positive scenario and be happy? Being a cynic whenever possible does not make one more intelligent. It just makes you more cynical.

Originally Posted by AbsoluteDesignz

Are you suggesting the people in charge at Google and Samsung (who have worked closely with Mr. Jobs for years and have in some cases been mentored by him) weren't affected by his passing?

Originally Posted by stelligent

For those who smell fish (or smell like it), consider this:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page have been unabashed admirers of Steve Jobs, well before Jobs was sick. The respect they have for the man may be equal to that of most Apple fans. Despite Steve Jobs' reported anger toward Google and particularly Eric Schmidt, Schmidt has said nothing but kind words even well before Jobs' death. In some ways, the GooglePlex has lost a hero too, a source of inspiration.

Of course, we will never know anyone's true motive. But, in the absence of certainty, why not choose the more positive scenario and be happy? Being a cynic whenever possible does not make one more intelligent. It just makes you more cynical.

Originally Posted by jragosta

Other than, of course, twice the processor cores, 7 times the GPU performance (which with Apple software can be used for general purpose computing tasks) and probably more RAM.

Clearly, the 4S is far more powerful than the 4.

And your argument that it is being done at Apple's computer farm is absurd. It apparently works even when there's no internet connection.

Originally Posted by screamingfist

are you kidding me? this type thinking is why usa gov is so messed up. silly voters believing all the sugery dumb s*** and voting quacks into office.

Originally Posted by stelligent

Sorry, but Apple states clearly on their site but Siri only works with internet connectivity. So apparently you are mistaken.