I don't see any reason for this sort of voice control to require any hardware that the iphone4 doesn't already have, namely, a mic, and... well, just a mic, so if they make this stuff available only on the iphone5 HW running ios5, and not the iphone4 HW running ios5, that will be VERY irritating, as it would seem like just an artificial limitation to push iphone5 HW sales. I realize that the iphone5 will likely run an A5 chip instead of the current iphone's A4, but I'm kind of dubious that this functionality would NEED an A5 to make it work, and not work on an 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".
... for some new technologies that may be true, and for some new technologies it's truly a technical limitation the old hardware doesn't support or can't handle. However, in this case and many others, it's for the sole reason to sell more hardware and make more money.
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.
And if it's true, IMHO, not a real smart move on Apple's part to make Assistant an iPhone 5 feature exclusively. (that is, if there is an iPhone 5)
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.
I don't see any reason for this sort of voice control to require any hardware that the iphone4 doesn't already have, namely, a mic, and... well, just a mic, so if they make this stuff available only on the iphone5 HW running ios5, and not the iphone4 HW running ios5, that will be VERY irritating, as it would seem like just an artificial limitation to push iphone5 HW sales. I realize that the iphone5 will likely run an A5 chip instead of the current iphone's A4, but I'm kind of dubious that this functionality would NEED an A5 to make it work, and not work on an A4.
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.
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.
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?
Strange that you 'care' what Apple is doing if your Android device is so perfect.
J.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Couple of milliseconds on android is lag? You can't even perceive that as a human, lol.
.....
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)"
The cool thing about Siri was that it actually DID things. It used plug-ins to ACT on commands like, "Get me a reservation for 2 tonight at 7 PM at Sushi Raw". It could book a table, hail a cab, look up "what's going on" in a certain area, check for "the best Japanese restaurant by work", and other complicated things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If its done on device then heck yeah - it would require a MUCH faster CPU than the A4.
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.
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.
Strange that you 'care' what Apple is doing if your Android device is so perfect.
J.
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.
milliseconds? When I do it on my Nexus it takes 2-4 seconds to work over Wifi with a fast internet connection. And half the time it spits out the wrong text.
Yes Android is at least doing it and I commend them for that. But what the video above showed and what Android does is not even on the same playing field. Android looks like broken sticks again compared to the video showing what's purportedly on the iPhone 5.
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.
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.
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.
Comments
I don't see any reason for this sort of voice control to require any hardware that the iphone4 doesn't already have, namely, a mic, and... well, just a mic, so if they make this stuff available only on the iphone5 HW running ios5, and not the iphone4 HW running ios5, that will be VERY irritating, as it would seem like just an artificial limitation to push iphone5 HW sales. I realize that the iphone5 will likely run an A5 chip instead of the current iphone's A4, but I'm kind of dubious that this functionality would NEED an A5 to make it work, and not work on an 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".
... for some new technologies that may be true, and for some new technologies it's truly a technical limitation the old hardware doesn't support or can't handle. However, in this case and many others, it's for the sole reason to sell more hardware and make more money.
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.
And if it's true, IMHO, not a real smart move on Apple's part to make Assistant an iPhone 5 feature exclusively. (that is, if there is an iPhone 5)
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
I don't see any reason for this sort of voice control to require any hardware that the iphone4 doesn't already have, namely, a mic, and... well, just a mic, so if they make this stuff available only on the iphone5 HW running ios5, and not the iphone4 HW running ios5, that will be VERY irritating, as it would seem like just an artificial limitation to push iphone5 HW sales. I realize that the iphone5 will likely run an A5 chip instead of the current iphone's A4, but I'm kind of dubious that this functionality would NEED an A5 to make it work, and not work on an A4.
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
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.
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?
Strange that you 'care' what Apple is doing if your Android device is so perfect.
J.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Couple of milliseconds on android is lag? You can't even perceive that as a human, lol.
.....
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)"
The cool thing about Siri was that it actually DID things. It used plug-ins to ACT on commands like, "Get me a reservation for 2 tonight at 7 PM at Sushi Raw". It could book a table, hail a cab, look up "what's going on" in a certain area, check for "the best Japanese restaurant by work", and other complicated things.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yep. And if they hype the hell out of this iteration, my guess is that they will use a video. I will be astounded if they give a live demo.
Did you ever try Siri on the iPhone? It was pretty amazing.
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.
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.
If its done on device then heck yeah - it would require a MUCH faster CPU than the A4.
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.
You could? It doesn't sound like you could.
+1
This is one of those idiot mis-phrases that instantly marks out its user a a dork.
+1
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.
Strange that you 'care' what Apple is doing if your Android device is so perfect.
J.
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.
milliseconds? When I do it on my Nexus it takes 2-4 seconds to work over Wifi with a fast internet connection. And half the time it spits out the wrong text.
Yes Android is at least doing it and I commend them for that. But what the video above showed and what Android does is not even on the same playing field. Android looks like broken sticks again compared to the video showing what's purportedly on the iPhone 5.
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.
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.
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.