CES: Apple's Siri prompts competitors to push their own voice controls - Page 2

Clearly we will all have robot assistants that look like Robin Williams to fetch the paper and pour our drinks. They will have those robot voices and dash around on wheels bashing into things.

This is all childs play, in 25 years we'll all be floating around like George Jetson with TV embedded in our electronic eye balls and commanding the world by thought with chips set into our frontal lobes while we fatten up in our floating chairs ready to be crushed by an invading alien force. I guess the president will just 'think' them to death with nukes...is thinking even possible with an American president? They all seem considerably remedial.

LOL!
You watch too much TV!

I am [mostly] successful using Siri on my iPhone under the conditions you describe (see prior posts).

Often, the kids are bouncing around, playing Pictionary (or somesuch)

For whatever reason (natural, comfortable), the iP4S is about 8* away 60 degrees down towards my lap -- I point my head down to speak and watch the iP4S display.

So, I suspect that a Siri implementation in a TV Remote (or iPod touch) would be used in a similar fashion:

An intelligent remote with noise cancellation WiFi communicating to an intelligent STB or TV with noise cancellation.

At some point, the limited subset of Siri capabilities necessary to control a TV will, likely, not need to go to the Apple servers on the Internet. Rather, these could be in the Remote, STB or a computer/home server within WiFi range.

BTW, we have several TV remotes in our family room.

Fine point here... Nuance developed the STT (Speech To Text) technology that Siri uses... that's only a small part of conversional/contextual voice recognition and processing system.

AIR, Apple has implemented voice recognition (the easy part) on Macs since the 1990s.

What I like is from Vlingo...they said a series of commands can be spoken that translates to what button pushing would do on a remote. Now a Siri remote would not have to push buttons but would simulate what was spoken to the same thing. It would browse to the channel or program you asked it to. Or maybe just open the channel guide so you could browse channel listings yourself and take commands to scroll up or down. PLUS>...it could intergrate into our existing Siri capable IOS devices (iphone, iTouch, iPad) to even enhance the capabilities. You could be in the kitchen and pick up your iPhone and tell it to change the channel on the TV in the next room to your favorite program and it could be done by the time you get your snack and walk in there.
My wife is going to be angry with me......I just bought a 65 inch HD TV and in the maybe near future will want to buy a Apple/Siri enable TV! I like the idea of a Siri controlled TV as long as it is completely functional and the voice part works as advertised! But if it is done by Apple....they won't put their name on it unless it delivers!

Agreed...they didn't do it all by themselves....

I think the world is plenty big enough to accommodate a lot of manufacturers, and it's usually a bad thing if one manufacturer gains monopolistic dominance because it drives out the competitive struggle, at which point the one remaining player loses all motivation to innovate AND to meet customer demand.

In this instance, the Samsung TV looks fantastic. Regardless of whether Samsung copied the iPhone and/or the iPad, Samsung DO develop some pretty good core products. The integration of voice recognition and gesture recognition is an attractive proposition. Whether the real-world performance matches it or not waits to be seen.

If Apple do not release their 'smart TV' soon and provided the product's performance matches their hype, Samsung stands a chance of getting in a lot of sales of this TV. It really does get close to bringing to life the fantasy of 'Minority Report' and people will buy that because it's 'sexy'. Furthermore, the lifestyle image of their demo video is very attractive. They're big enough and well enough known as a TV manufacturer that there'll be a high probability of a decent App ecosystem to encourage developers to aim their wares at.

The other advantage Samsung has is that its TVs are in every electronics retailer as standard. They have their distribution already sorted out. Apple's expected TV would have to be sold into very different distribution channels to what Apple is used to and to what the buying public are used to.

Now despite all this, I'm still committed to Apple. I'm not about to rush out and buy the Samsung voice/gesture controlled TV because I want to see how it stacks up with like-for-like or better competition. With products other than Apple, I'm not a first-adopter because experience has shown that Apple produce first-generation products that usually knock any existing competitors' ones into oblivion. But it still has to be said, Samsung are first among the major consumer manufacturers to the market with a TV that changes the user experience paradigm. The question is, how much different will that paradigm look when Apple finally (hopefully!) releases their own TV? I'm looking forward to finding out.

I think voice command can have some application, but I got majors issue with Voice command, It took a lot more time to verbalize a command, being correctly interpreted and execute than pressing on a single bouton on your remote, a direct bouton input will be forever more efficient than voice Input.

Until Siri came in, every other voice control as ever failed, The power of Siri is not about voice control, is about understanding context and fetching info inside and outside of the device, Siri is a personal assistant which have very little need on a TV set, and a voice commanded TV sound more like a gimmick than real game changer on how we use TV.

Until someone come out with a good voice commanded product to prove me wrong, I'm more than happy to use my iPhone with a Griffin Beacon to directly control my TV and bypassing the horrible and unresponsive Scientific Atlanta Cablebox menus.

This is the fundamental problem, it requires you to remember the commands and command sequences. unlike SIRI which uses natural language, and I can tell you I seen these voice system when other talk around you the get confused or can not understand what you are saying. Remember voice prompts is nothing new to Apple, they had the feature in OS9 and well as OSX, it requires you to remember the commands and say things in a particular way.

I also have used these systems in car which voice controls and can not tell you how many time I had to ask for help since I could not remember the command sequence for feature I do not use all the time. I am very skilled with computers and systems like this and I am running into issue the every day user will as well.

I believe you can make these voice systems work, but the conditions they work under are limited that is for sure. They have a long way to go before they work easily and beat the good old remote.

I do not disagree with most of what you said, ideally it can be done, in the real world it is not that easy. This is no difference than when Video Conferencing was invented and was used back in the later 70's, it worked in principle but failed on everyday applications only now 30 years later has it gotten better and people using it do not care about the social aspect of looking bad on video.

Part of the reason personal Video phone and systems failed many times over was the engineers failed to understand the underlying social issues. One of which people are vain and do not want to worry about answering a video call right as the just woke up or step out of the shower, women more so than men that is. This was a well documented underlining concerns that many attempts were made to address with no luck. Only today does the younger generation not worry about this.

The same will be true for voice command systems. Just like Dragon Speak why don't people use this verse typing all the time, people do not want to sit there and speak to a computer, it look kind of weird, people worry about what others think seeing them speaking to themselves. They are probably other social and human nature things that will not allow this to be main stream for some time.

This is my point, yes technically it can be done to work okay, but it is the human element that most engineers fail to understand. So maybe Steve Job figure it out, since these are the kinds of things he was good at. Simple example, home computer became popular when the mouse and GUI came about since users no longer had to remember commands and command sequences. Changing how people interact with a TV will be the same thing. There has to be method that is simple and base on rote memory and builds on what you already know.

There is no reason for Apple to buy Nuance because it's not really that important. Nuance provides speech-to-text capability. Siri is where it's at. Even before Apple bought Siri, the company that developed the Siri feature, Siri licensed speech-to-text technology from Nuance. Other license Nuance's speech-to-text technology.

Others can't just use Nuance to compete with Siri. Many have dismissed Siri as a gimmick, as something that others can easily compete with. Siri may not gain wide adoption, but if competitors think coming out with their own version of it is going to be easy, they better think again.

Siri is the culmination of a DARPA project known as CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). That's right, DARPA, as in Department of Defense. A contract research institute known as SRI International coordinated the work on the project. The work on CALO ran for five years and had some of the best researchers in the world working on it, as you might imagine is the case for a DARPA project.

They are not part of the "same" innovation, they part of the "same" product that already existed long before apple got into the game, Kinect. My point is simply that this website gives Apple credit for everything, when it doesn't deserve it. Kinect was successful at doing the exact thing that these TVs are starting to do as standard (voice and gesture control) before Siri was released. Siri has nothing to do with TVs (yet) but this site being this site it still gives it all the credit. Whenever I read stuff on here about Microsoft, Samsung etc I often wonder "why the hell is this on here, I'm here to read about apple" and then I realise that they are just spinning it to make apple look better. I find tribal geekism funny, it's like I'm 13 again and arguing in the playground that my snes is better than your mega drive (I was right, obviously). Apple make great products, but believe it or not, so do other people and before apple sometimes.


Ok, so you were having a go because of a point completely different to the one I was actually making? Er yeah that's good. Analogy I thought of earlier: saying samsung are making smart TVs in response to a rumour that apple was making them is like saying apple made the iPad because of a rumour Samsung was making the galaxy tab. Utterly stupid statements all round.

Oh and thanks for the support bouncerman!

Sent from my iPad.

What in the world does Siri have to do with Kinect?! You're saying Siri was once a part of Kinect? You're saying that Kinect development led to Siri development?


That's hardly the truth.


Successful is debatable.


No, past history of all other companies gives Apple all the credit. Whenever the rumor mill says Apple is releasing something, everyone else scrambles to get their own something out first, before anyone in the world outside of Steve Jobs and his Senior Vice Presidents knew about it. It has happened time and again. That is to what the title is referring.


Indeed, I've been confused at the point of the recent Samsung stories, particularly when they have nothing to do with the lawsuits or their general failure. I'm sure it's just a spike in nonsense that will taper out.

This suggests you don't know what the Kinect does because it does both physical AND voice control and has since day one although the initial voice control was limited (but very useful).

Similarly Microsoft Sync on Fords have had voice control for a couple years now. Several car manufacturers in fact have had voice control. the increase in interest has more to do with processor power and less to do with Siri. Siri just happens to be one of the best implementations but its not even Apple's doing really.

Hahaha how the hell did you get that point out of it? God no they are nothing to do with each other. This article said that companies were putting voice commands into TVs because of Siri. I would argue that companies are putting voice control (and gesture) into TVs because of Kinect. Siri is nothing to do with it IMO, other that the fact its a new way of doing voice control. I doubt very much Siri was the motivation for samsung etc.



The guinness world record for the fastest selling consumer electronics product ever is not a success? Wtf?

Good night.

There's a good video that deals with this called, "Everything is a Remix." http://vimeo.com/25380454

Was there a live demonstration of anything approaching Siri at CES? I saw video of a video of someone commanding a TV by voice. Was this followed up by a live demonstration?

In respect of Kinect, I've used the Xbox, Kinect system. It's great fun in games where imprecise responses to movement of the player are grudgingly acceptable but is laboured when commanding the system under circumstances where precision is required, such as in selecting a menu item.

"but the expectation is companies will continue to invest in the technology and result in great improvements in the years to come.

The OTHER expectation, as always, is that Apple will NOT continue to invest, improve and innovate. Thus, it is somehow useful to compare Apples 2011 product to 2015 products from anyone else...

Commercial success of Kinect has little or nothing to do with how successful it's speech recognition is. You are combining two unrelated points.

Speaking of voice recognition, that is only part of what Siri is. Siri understands natural language, which is derived from voice recognition. There are more than enough Youtube videos which demonstrate how good Microsofts voice recognition, let alone natural language understanding, is compared to Siri, I'll leave you to search for them yourself.

The rumored codename for Microsoft's voice control OS "Parrot".

There's a couple of new stories up at 9to5 that concern Siri. The first one deals with the possibility that Siri infringes on IP not owned by Apple. Apparently some older Excite patents to be specific.
http://9to5mac.com/2012/01/16/does-s...xcite-patents/

In the second, Woz is back at it. This time he opines that Android Voice Actions are a better option than Siri in some instances, and his personal preference:

"I have a lower success rate with Siri than I do with the voice built into the Android, and that bothers me. Ill be saying, over and over again in my car, Call the Lark Creek Steak House, and I cant get it done. Then I pick up my Android, say the same thing, and its done."
http://9to5mac.com/2012/01/16/the-wo...oice-commands/