Can't blame them really. Their companies are not innovative nor visionary. Several months from now they're going to start their photocopy machines anyway.
Just like how they dissed the iPad and ate their own words months later.
Lay off Windows and Android bosses, people! In case you've forgotten, Apple is no stranger to such tactics. Remember when Steve Jobs said that 7-inch tablet makers should ship their tablets with a nail file? How about when he he went on AllThingsD and trashed Adobe and Flash?
It's how the game is played. Executives are supposed to talk up their product and their strategy. They're supposed to poke holes in competitor's products/strategies. As far as I'm concerned, Andy Rubin did his job as the Android boss. Whether he's right or not is irrelevant. It's his job to to say good things about his company's products and show how they're better than competitors' products.
1) Apple still hasn't shipped Adobe Flash on iOS, Adobe has repeatedly struggled to get Flash to work on a handful of mobile devices, and Adobe is now focusing heavily on the core web code that made mobile Safari such a great browser on a mobile device.
2) When Apple releases a 7" iPad with the same version of iOS designed for the 10" iPad then you'll have a soapbox on which to stand.
Siri is cool, no doubt about it. It's flash, whizz-bang glory. $200M well spent. It's definitely selling iPhones to people who like shiny things.
The problem with Siri in its current state is really quite obvious. It's just not good enough. It's a version of the uncanny valley -- unless you can make something 99.9% reliable it's a frustrating experience. There's a reason we aren't speaking our posts to AppleInsider -- we are typing it. And make no mistake, Dragon Naturally Speaking is a far more advanced speech-to-text technology than what's in Siri (it does, of course, lack the "AI").
There's a novelty factor here that is selling phones. Will it be something everyone can't live without a year from now? Not a chance. For the vast majority of people anyway.
The most useful features of it (dictating texts, etc) have been standard features in most smartphones for a while. The other parts of it are pure showmanship. Apple put a ton of effort into things like the little jokes it has because they know it'll give them publicity. They knew it'd drive sales. It's the superficial sugarcoating on the phone to give it something stronger to differentiate from the prior iPhone 4 (which is why it's artificially limited from running on anything other than the 4S).
Many of you think the world of it right now, but once the novelty wears off (and make no mistake, it will), you'll probably want to forget about all of this hype you bought into. It's just not good enough -- it's not consistent enough, it's not reliable enough. Even if it fails 1 out of 10 times to correctly do what I ask of it, that's too much for me and most people.
I'm not going to bother googling it, but there's tons of UX research into this. "Good enough", when it comes to predictability interfaces, is 99.9% accuracy. In my experience with Siri thus far, it's nowhere near that.
It's the same reason I don't dictate my posts here.
I think Apple scored big with Siri. It's a natural way to interact with the device. If someone wants to take a powernap, they don't have to fiddle with the controls on the phone. Instead, they can just say, "Wake me up in a half-hour."
Also, Siri is more than just voice interaction. Google's version of voice interaction is probably better than Voice Control. But there's a big difference between that and Siri. Voice control recognizes a specific set of commands. In order to give a voice command, you have to give the phone a specific set of instruction. Siri is so much more than that. It understands words spoken in context. For example, you can ask Siri, "Do I need my jacket today?" Siri will understand that you're trying to ask for the weather.
Anyone know how to get Siri working again on the phones older than a week? I'm mad Apple janked it from the AppStore and then made it broken. And what happened to the cool support for OpenTable???
I think Apple scored big with Siri. It's a natural way to interact with the device. If someone wants to take a powernap, they don't have to fiddle with the controls on the phone. Instead, they can just say, "Wake me up in a half-hour."
Also, Siri is more than just voice interaction. Google's version of voice interaction is probably better than Voice Control. But there's a big difference between that and Siri. Voice control recognizes a specific set of commands. In order to give a voice command, you have to give the phone a specific set of instruction. Siri is so much more than that. It understands words spoken in context. For example, you can ask Siri, "Do I need my jacket today?" Siri will understand that you're trying to ask for the weather.
It's funny that I keep hearing the "do I need my jacket today" example.
Try asking Siri "Text my wife I love her". Awkward moments will ensue.
Siri isn't nearly as intelligent as many of you think it is. It's certainly very well trained, if you follow the rails. Hey, try asking it "Do I need my jacket today?". I heard that works great.
The only difference between Google's voice commands/voice control and Siri is the attempted AI, which was actually from an old DARPA project that had its funding cut because it wasn't close to being good enough for military use. And I say attempted. How the AI is implemented is just a much more complex version of voice commands. It does speech to text then tries to use a bunch of predefined rules to break down the sentence and associate it with pre-existing commands, weighting each outcome with a probability. The problem is this does require training. Lots of it. Which is why the Siri team is supposedly so large.
But the other implication of this is simple: Siri will only be able to do what it was programmed to do. This is why Siri is pretty much braindead in Canada and Europe. It's only been trained extensively for the US.
On Android you can already say "Text Joe, I am going to be late. Sorry bud. Send." and it'll send. With Siri, you can now say "Hello Siri. How are you? Please text Joe that I will be late. Sorry bud."
Yeah, it's cool in demos and when you get your shiny new toy. But what's the longevity on that? Unless you like the sound of your own voice, you're going to learn to optimize Siri to do what you want quickly. And do you know what that will sound like?
"Text Joe, I am going to be late. Sorry bud. Send."
Here we go again. Apple LEADS the pack and everyone else FOLLOWS with pointless comments. Steve would be proud.
Apple bought Siri. Siri was a spinoff of a government research project. Apple pulled Siri from the iOS store and aborted the almost-released Android version of it.
Let's not be victims of hyperbole. Apple bought a company with a product they knew would market very well, they killed it for other platforms, and they convinced everyone it was an "iPhone 4S feature" rather than just another app. Which is what it was for two years, and none of you apparently knew about.
I agree with most of it I suppose. Apple's purchase of Siri was a great decision. Especially the deep integration it has. I however would not use this in public, and would probably laugh / shake my head at anyone who does when I finally see it happen.
I would however use it to send a text to someone while driving.
A lot of these features have been available on Android for quite a while. As in, with a single button press, I can tell my phone to call anyone, to send a text message, or to start voice navigation.
Everything else that Siri has is usually just a glorified Google search.
What I like about google voice is that I speak three languages, two of them with heavy accents (well three actually - Australian is my mother language) but google voice / translate recognises them all. It took a bit of training to get it on all three but now it is used to my accent.
What it doesn't do is pick up commands in natural conversation. It picks up the words for search or a text message but does not pick up the command from them. That is a great bit of AI in Siri. Although I dont really have much use for it as I do not feel the need to use natural conversation to command a phone, but you have to admit it is something nice to play with for a while. Also interesting to see where it will be in 5 years from now.
There is a rumour that google voice will come to google TV this year. Amybe Siri will do the same.
I feel really sorry for these guys, especially at something like AsiaD.
They get up on stage and try to show the unique experiences they are trying to create but at the end of the day it doesn't matter what they have or what they do because the bounds of the conversation are always set to whatever Apple's latest thing is.
The Asus interview was actually worse than these two. Jonney Shih was demoing their new Transformer (and was obviously very excited about it ) and the looks Mossberg was giving him were not far shy of contempt.
How would you feel trying to show your product to this guy?
…the Siri team at Apple is one of the largest software teams at the company.
Unlike some other acquisitions, Apple has integrated the Siri software team into its own structure. This implies that Apple sees great potential and will put a lot of resources into advancing Siri development.
Don't forget, Scott Forestall has a background and strong interest in artificial intelligence.
I see Siri as another auditory interface and an extension of accessibility for a lot of people.
Most people are not geeks. To have a tool that can handle an initial ambiguity and move in the direction of preciseness (querying back to the user) should be a boon. I would think that the Siri team will be working hard at evaluating various feedbacks to extend and improve the tool.
Although Siri now requires full time internet access to servers to function, I am hopeful that techniques will be worked out to alleviate that problem so that Siri can be useful on an iPad and even OS X.
The current voice recognition available in OS X is old, limited, and incapable of handling accents and speech defects. I know because I can't use it at all.
The company that bought us Clippy dares to criticise Siri?
There is an interesting point I hadn't thought of until your post. Clippit/Clippy had a visual character, Hal 9000 had a giant red eye as its visual counterpart, and many other AI in sci-fi have had at least a semblance of human visual characteristics, but Siri has nothing but a microphone symbol. This strikes me as unusual for SW being marketed as AI and a personal assistance. It certainly has personality but I'd think that it would be natural to want to add a visage to make it feel more human like.
This sounds a little like Whistling past the graveyard...
...and a little provincial to limit it to their respective smart phone OSes.
Siri will go way beyond just phone devices.
It is worth remembering this:
Quote:
There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
Steve Ballmer
I suspect that both Ballmer and Page are concerned that Amazon Silk and Siri could deeply reduce the advertising appeal of web searches (Bing and Google). These new approaches could aggregate and cache results on their own servers -- reducing hits to (limiting ads and hiding user information from) Bing, Google, Yahoo...
Comments
Just like how they dissed the iPad and ate their own words months later.
Lay off Windows and Android bosses, people! In case you've forgotten, Apple is no stranger to such tactics. Remember when Steve Jobs said that 7-inch tablet makers should ship their tablets with a nail file? How about when he he went on AllThingsD and trashed Adobe and Flash?
It's how the game is played. Executives are supposed to talk up their product and their strategy. They're supposed to poke holes in competitor's products/strategies. As far as I'm concerned, Andy Rubin did his job as the Android boss. Whether he's right or not is irrelevant. It's his job to to say good things about his company's products and show how they're better than competitors' products.
1) Apple still hasn't shipped Adobe Flash on iOS, Adobe has repeatedly struggled to get Flash to work on a handful of mobile devices, and Adobe is now focusing heavily on the core web code that made mobile Safari such a great browser on a mobile device.
2) When Apple releases a 7" iPad with the same version of iOS designed for the 10" iPad then you'll have a soapbox on which to stand.
Can't blame them really. Their companies are not innovative nor visionary.
Says the guy defending the company that stole its new notification system.
The problem with Siri in its current state is really quite obvious. It's just not good enough. It's a version of the uncanny valley -- unless you can make something 99.9% reliable it's a frustrating experience. There's a reason we aren't speaking our posts to AppleInsider -- we are typing it. And make no mistake, Dragon Naturally Speaking is a far more advanced speech-to-text technology than what's in Siri (it does, of course, lack the "AI").
There's a novelty factor here that is selling phones. Will it be something everyone can't live without a year from now? Not a chance. For the vast majority of people anyway.
The most useful features of it (dictating texts, etc) have been standard features in most smartphones for a while. The other parts of it are pure showmanship. Apple put a ton of effort into things like the little jokes it has because they know it'll give them publicity. They knew it'd drive sales. It's the superficial sugarcoating on the phone to give it something stronger to differentiate from the prior iPhone 4 (which is why it's artificially limited from running on anything other than the 4S).
Many of you think the world of it right now, but once the novelty wears off (and make no mistake, it will), you'll probably want to forget about all of this hype you bought into. It's just not good enough -- it's not consistent enough, it's not reliable enough. Even if it fails 1 out of 10 times to correctly do what I ask of it, that's too much for me and most people.
I'm not going to bother googling it, but there's tons of UX research into this. "Good enough", when it comes to predictability interfaces, is 99.9% accuracy. In my experience with Siri thus far, it's nowhere near that.
It's the same reason I don't dictate my posts here.
Also, Siri is more than just voice interaction. Google's version of voice interaction is probably better than Voice Control. But there's a big difference between that and Siri. Voice control recognizes a specific set of commands. In order to give a voice command, you have to give the phone a specific set of instruction. Siri is so much more than that. It understands words spoken in context. For example, you can ask Siri, "Do I need my jacket today?" Siri will understand that you're trying to ask for the weather.
I think Apple scored big with Siri. It's a natural way to interact with the device. If someone wants to take a powernap, they don't have to fiddle with the controls on the phone. Instead, they can just say, "Wake me up in a half-hour."
Also, Siri is more than just voice interaction. Google's version of voice interaction is probably better than Voice Control. But there's a big difference between that and Siri. Voice control recognizes a specific set of commands. In order to give a voice command, you have to give the phone a specific set of instruction. Siri is so much more than that. It understands words spoken in context. For example, you can ask Siri, "Do I need my jacket today?" Siri will understand that you're trying to ask for the weather.
It's funny that I keep hearing the "do I need my jacket today" example.
Try asking Siri "Text my wife I love her". Awkward moments will ensue.
Siri isn't nearly as intelligent as many of you think it is. It's certainly very well trained, if you follow the rails. Hey, try asking it "Do I need my jacket today?". I heard that works great.
The only difference between Google's voice commands/voice control and Siri is the attempted AI, which was actually from an old DARPA project that had its funding cut because it wasn't close to being good enough for military use. And I say attempted. How the AI is implemented is just a much more complex version of voice commands. It does speech to text then tries to use a bunch of predefined rules to break down the sentence and associate it with pre-existing commands, weighting each outcome with a probability. The problem is this does require training. Lots of it. Which is why the Siri team is supposedly so large.
But the other implication of this is simple: Siri will only be able to do what it was programmed to do. This is why Siri is pretty much braindead in Canada and Europe. It's only been trained extensively for the US.
On Android you can already say "Text Joe, I am going to be late. Sorry bud. Send." and it'll send. With Siri, you can now say "Hello Siri. How are you? Please text Joe that I will be late. Sorry bud."
Yeah, it's cool in demos and when you get your shiny new toy. But what's the longevity on that? Unless you like the sound of your own voice, you're going to learn to optimize Siri to do what you want quickly. And do you know what that will sound like?
"Text Joe, I am going to be late. Sorry bud. Send."
Here we go again. Apple LEADS the pack and everyone else FOLLOWS with pointless comments. Steve would be proud.
Apple bought Siri. Siri was a spinoff of a government research project. Apple pulled Siri from the iOS store and aborted the almost-released Android version of it.
Let's not be victims of hyperbole. Apple bought a company with a product they knew would market very well, they killed it for other platforms, and they convinced everyone it was an "iPhone 4S feature" rather than just another app. Which is what it was for two years, and none of you apparently knew about.
I agree with most of it I suppose. Apple's purchase of Siri was a great decision. Especially the deep integration it has. I however would not use this in public, and would probably laugh / shake my head at anyone who does when I finally see it happen.
I would however use it to send a text to someone while driving.
A lot of these features have been available on Android for quite a while. As in, with a single button press, I can tell my phone to call anyone, to send a text message, or to start voice navigation.
Everything else that Siri has is usually just a glorified Google search.
What I like about google voice is that I speak three languages, two of them with heavy accents (well three actually - Australian is my mother language) but google voice / translate recognises them all. It took a bit of training to get it on all three but now it is used to my accent.
What it doesn't do is pick up commands in natural conversation. It picks up the words for search or a text message but does not pick up the command from them. That is a great bit of AI in Siri. Although I dont really have much use for it as I do not feel the need to use natural conversation to command a phone, but you have to admit it is something nice to play with for a while. Also interesting to see where it will be in 5 years from now.
There is a rumour that google voice will come to google TV this year. Amybe Siri will do the same.
Most asinine statement of 2011.
I wish that could be added as an actual response...
They get up on stage and try to show the unique experiences they are trying to create but at the end of the day it doesn't matter what they have or what they do because the bounds of the conversation are always set to whatever Apple's latest thing is.
The Asus interview was actually worse than these two. Jonney Shih was demoing their new Transformer (and was obviously very excited about it
How would you feel trying to show your product to this guy?
…the Siri team at Apple is one of the largest software teams at the company.
Unlike some other acquisitions, Apple has integrated the Siri software team into its own structure. This implies that Apple sees great potential and will put a lot of resources into advancing Siri development.
Don't forget, Scott Forestall has a background and strong interest in artificial intelligence.
I see Siri as another auditory interface and an extension of accessibility for a lot of people.
Most people are not geeks. To have a tool that can handle an initial ambiguity and move in the direction of preciseness (querying back to the user) should be a boon. I would think that the Siri team will be working hard at evaluating various feedbacks to extend and improve the tool.
Although Siri now requires full time internet access to servers to function, I am hopeful that techniques will be worked out to alleviate that problem so that Siri can be useful on an iPad and even OS X.
The current voice recognition available in OS X is old, limited, and incapable of handling accents and speech defects. I know because I can't use it at all.
The company that bought us Clippy dares to criticise Siri?
There is an interesting point I hadn't thought of until your post. Clippit/Clippy had a visual character, Hal 9000 had a giant red eye as its visual counterpart, and many other AI in sci-fi have had at least a semblance of human visual characteristics, but Siri has nothing but a microphone symbol. This strikes me as unusual for SW being marketed as AI and a personal assistance. It certainly has personality but I'd think that it would be natural to want to add a visage to make it feel more human like.
Apple bought Siri.
Google bought Android. And had a sneak peek of the iPhone pre-release.
...and a little provincial to limit it to their respective smart phone OSes.
Siri will go way beyond just phone devices.
It is worth remembering this:
There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
Steve Ballmer
I suspect that both Ballmer and Page are concerned that Amazon Silk and Siri could deeply reduce the advertising appeal of web searches (Bing and Google). These new approaches could aggregate and cache results on their own servers -- reducing hits to (limiting ads and hiding user information from) Bing, Google, Yahoo...