Wow to the few here (you shall remain nameless, but you know who you are) who think Siri is only a novelty or the same as the Droid system, you are missing the point totally.
The point of Siri is that you can do more with out adhering to the regimented commands of other voice systems, that you can by voice change the nature of your search with out having to restate everything. I like that I can ask for some Thai food and get locations by review or location based on how I ask. I like how I can set an event and be warned if it overlaps with existing events. Things like the reminder alerts based on location are really the core of Siri.
The personality and the jokes are just the fluff. Some people will only see that and call it a shiny toy and miss out. Style with substance does not equal lack of substance. But hey some people like to be wrong I guess.
To the Droid Noid I say ha let's see what you have to say in six months when the clone is out.
It's always been a good sign for an Apple product when it's downplayed by the competition.
And btw the argument that people won't talk to Siri in public is so. Incredibly. Shortsighted.
What's the difference with talking to your phone like people have been doing for more than a decade now? And when that started out, the same stupid thing was said about cell phones in general.
I think it would have been more of a threat if Apple had waited until they got it out of beta. I've mainly head reviews and comments of it just not understanding people and the fact half the features don't work outside the US is a bit of a let down.
Meh - call me selfish, but I'll enjoy it in the US just fine, thank you. You can deny it to yourself instead of having Apple do it for you if your that worked up about it still being a little rough outside the US.
At least it's out there and useful for the instances is can be useful! It will catch up. Apple will improve it.
The glass is half full, not half empty! Sheesh, what is with people and the constant pessimism? This is the most amazing time in the history of the world to be alive but nothing is good enough?
Quote:
Once people have used it and found it not to be 100% working yet, they just give up and will probably never try again.
If that was true Windows would have died a long time ago
Quote:
It was a nice idea, ultimately best for sending messages while driving but I would agree it's not much of a threat. It will never become the standard way of using your phone
Really? Just like people prefer physical buttons and virtual keyboards will never take off? Fascinating.
Quote:
the same as people don't control there PC's via voice despite it also being perfectly possible. I also think the same for the next Xbox update, people will be able to control the whole Xbox dashbord via voice, but they will still use the controller.
Er, my PC and Xbox aren't in my car when I can't use my hands on my phone. You might try comparing like with like next time. You'll get better results.
I remember reading that it, along with Apple computers, were called just toys. Funny how many still call Apple products toys and for fun only.
Oh, if I only had a nickel for every time I've heard someone call the Mac a toy computer, then in their next breath deride it because it doesn't have any many available games as their Windows PC.
Siri is amazing, and it's only going to get better as Apple adds to its capabilities, and as it learns from everyone using it. It's going to just keep improving, right up to the day it becomes self aware and kills us all.
But seriously, within a day I had already outsourced my short-term memory to the Reminders app, because it was so easy to just hold a button for a few seconds and tell Siri to remember something for me-- way better than opening up an app and typing something in, because it takes almost no effort.
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.
It was a DARPA project at SRI and was spun off as a company. That does not imply failure at all. The uniqueness is that it's context aware, so you can have mini-conversations about a reminder, say, and Siri will know what you're talking about. That's not easy to do. All effective AI is based on machine learning and requires training. Hell, human beings require training, so I'm not sure why that implies it's not good AI.
I see a lot of folks trying to say Siri isn't ready or Siri isn't much use. I think you're wrong. This really happened in my garage just moments after getting her phone setup:
Wife (a professional musician running late to a gig--as always): Asks me, "Where is Blah House in Dallas?"
Me: "Just ask your phone"
Wife to Siri: "Where is Blah House in Dallas?"
Siri shows map with push pin.
Wife touches push pin
Phone displays address of Blah House in Dallas
Wife punches address into GPS and screeches out of the driveway.
Folks, give it up. My musician wife is in love with the thing.
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.
Why do people insist on spewing this garbage? Oh, you're so smart, no one else knew Siri was originally an app!
I doubt you ever used Siri; instead you've just read about it on the Internet. I on the other hand, used Siri for a little over a year. Trust me, it's not the same as the new incarnation. It's like comparing a bottle rocket to a Saturn 5.
People act like a company buying something is a cop out. News flash, companies aren't people. They're entities made up of people. It's not like Apple put in an off-the-shelf solution into its OS; it identified the *potential* of Siri and essentially hired the people behind it to take it to the next level. What do you think any other company does?
I think the novelty of Siri is already starting to wear off (which is WAY sooner than I expected). I myself was all over the blogs looking at Siri's responses to random questions. My friend I believe put it best, "It was the most entertaining 10 hours of my life. I'm wondering if I'll ever use it again though."
If all you are using it for is the see what it says to random questions, then I agree that this would get old pretty quickly. I would say in less than 2 hrs.
But for me, it has already become the primary way of scheduling meetings, reminders, searches and timers. I already use my iPhone for such things and Siri is without a doubt faster for these things, at least for me.
For short bursts of text, it is faster. I had a list of song titles that I inputted into Notes via Siri. Faster than typing. And combined with iMessage, I've replaced Textfree as the primary way of texting my wife.
So, I would say,the usefulness would depend on how you are using it. If you are using it jokes, it'll get old quick. If you use it to get things done, it is a great tool.
I look forward to them expanding the use into app launching and controlling settings on the phone. "I want to play game X", "Any email?", "Turn off wifi" or "Dim the screen a little".
... ?This isn?t a new notion,? he said. ?In projecting the future, I think Apple did a good job of figuring out when the technology was ready to be consumer-grade.? ...
In fact he admits that Siri is useful for consumers. He also downplays Apples achievement by stating that Apple just had to wait to launch Siri.
But its more than likely that Apple did all it could to get Siri where it is now.
He's also forgetting(?) a 5 year DARPA project with 300 top scientists that started it all...
I think that Google and MS are scrambling to get this technology and trying to win time by downplaying it: "its the same, we have it already, its not a big deal, etc.".
How come their shares don't face a selling-spree after comments like these? They're basically saying "we don't value any technology that we can't deploy, AND we will RESIST it".
Just keep your mouth shut, so at least some share holders can maintain hope. Simply astonishing!
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").
Um, if I remember correctly, Siri uses the same voice recognition software: Nuance. In fact, Siri isn't voice recognition; it's a contextual AI that utilizes speech recognition software (it can be upgraded to a superior solution in the future).
Also, in my experience, even in noisy environments, Siri is about as accurate as the iPhone's keyboard.
Folks, give it up. My musician wife is in love with the thing.
See, the issue is your wife isn't a techie/geek and therefore she's irrelevant.
Sigh. I am starting to feel sorry for the anti-Apple techie/geeks. It's going to be such a tough, tough road for them in the coming decade as Apple continues to take over and democratize technology.
Maybe Stallmans head will explode as the irony of the company he loathes the most for perpetuating "closed" actually makes more technology accessible to more people than he could ever dream of!
If there ever was a more stark contrast between theoretical piety and practical reality I don't know what it could be.
Eat your heart out, haters - it's going to be a long, bitter winter of your discontent!
That is unless you stop loathing "clueless newbies" and actually start designing technology that is accessible to anyone without them having to worship at the alter of technology for the sake of the technology.
And by the way, that's the ultimate discipline. Apple is so good at it, they just make it look trivially easy. Don't think so? Show them up! Go on! If it's no big deal, you should be able to do it without copying their look and feel or patents - right?
/crickets
Yup - same old story.... Except Apple has the $$$ and in mobile devices the price advantage.
2014 won't be like 1984, 1994 or 2004 - that's for sure!
Siri does have a novelty factor, yes. I haven't asked it how much wood a woodchuck could chuck for several days now...
However, I believe the real paradigm shift Siri offers is it's accessibility. We know Apple's MO by now: take existing functionality and make it something people actually want and can use. Apple originally took the computer and gave us the PC; they took clunky smartphones that required a manual to use, and gave us the iPhone. Now they've taken nerdy voice recognition and given us Siri.
Sure, with other solutions you can dictate texts, set calendar appointments, check the weather, etc. However, how many people really used this? It required training, and you had to say things in a predetermined way. My mom would never use it, for instance.
While Siri isn't perfect, it does make voice recognition so easy that my mom can't just do it, she wants to do it. You just talk to it like a person.
This is how you advance technology: you make it accessible and usable to the masses. It's like Prometheus giving us fire.
Whenever a new technology hits the market, those who are most threatened by it are the first to criticize and dismiss it. The fact that Microsoft and Google are finding it necessary to make such comments in public tells me they are so obviously on the defensive. These guys are nothing but tools. When you have no innovations of your own, your only strategy is to smear the innovators. This is not unlike the Republican economic strategy... I mean if they had one.
That's quite smart. I wondered about the use of a short pause to disambiguate the sentence.
Most people speak quite ambiguous, but don't realize that.
They also forget how often other people ask what they mean...
J
People saying Siri isn't perfectly accurate and therefore a failure need to remember this. Not all humans are perfectly accurate. I don't have the best hearing; you know how many times
I ask "What did you say?". Plus when talking on cellphones (AT&T), I repeat myself nearly as much as I repeat myself when using "Raise to Speak".
Typing this on an iPhone, I also retyped typos about as much as I have to fix errors in Siri, maybe more.
I tried, but I don't have contact info for your wife...
Actually, it works quite well...
Try: "Text my wife [short pause] I love you"
Siri: "here's your message to Lucy,
'To: Lucy:
I love you'
Want to send it?"
I believe his point is that Siri will text "I love her." if you say "Text my wife I love her." It doesn't (yet) pick up the change in subject, but it's coming...
I think the novelty of Siri is already starting to wear off (which is WAY sooner than I expected). I myself was all over the blogs looking at Siri's responses to random questions. My friend I believe put it best, "It was the most entertaining 10 hours of my life. I'm wondering if I'll ever use it again though."
Comments
The point of Siri is that you can do more with out adhering to the regimented commands of other voice systems, that you can by voice change the nature of your search with out having to restate everything. I like that I can ask for some Thai food and get locations by review or location based on how I ask. I like how I can set an event and be warned if it overlaps with existing events. Things like the reminder alerts based on location are really the core of Siri.
The personality and the jokes are just the fluff. Some people will only see that and call it a shiny toy and miss out. Style with substance does not equal lack of substance. But hey some people like to be wrong I guess.
To the Droid Noid I say ha let's see what you have to say in six months when the clone is out.
And btw the argument that people won't talk to Siri in public is so. Incredibly. Shortsighted.
What's the difference with talking to your phone like people have been doing for more than a decade now? And when that started out, the same stupid thing was said about cell phones in general.
I think it would have been more of a threat if Apple had waited until they got it out of beta. I've mainly head reviews and comments of it just not understanding people and the fact half the features don't work outside the US is a bit of a let down.
Meh - call me selfish, but I'll enjoy it in the US just fine, thank you. You can deny it to yourself instead of having Apple do it for you if your that worked up about it still being a little rough outside the US.
At least it's out there and useful for the instances is can be useful! It will catch up. Apple will improve it.
The glass is half full, not half empty! Sheesh, what is with people and the constant pessimism? This is the most amazing time in the history of the world to be alive but nothing is good enough?
Once people have used it and found it not to be 100% working yet, they just give up and will probably never try again.
If that was true Windows would have died a long time ago
It was a nice idea, ultimately best for sending messages while driving but I would agree it's not much of a threat. It will never become the standard way of using your phone
Really? Just like people prefer physical buttons and virtual keyboards will never take off? Fascinating.
the same as people don't control there PC's via voice despite it also being perfectly possible. I also think the same for the next Xbox update, people will be able to control the whole Xbox dashbord via voice, but they will still use the controller.
Er, my PC and Xbox aren't in my car when I can't use my hands on my phone. You might try comparing like with like next time. You'll get better results.
I remember reading that it, along with Apple computers, were called just toys. Funny how many still call Apple products toys and for fun only.
Oh, if I only had a nickel for every time I've heard someone call the Mac a toy computer, then in their next breath deride it because it doesn't have any many available games as their Windows PC.
Siri is amazing, and it's only going to get better as Apple adds to its capabilities, and as it learns from everyone using it. It's going to just keep improving, right up to the day it becomes self aware and kills us all.
But seriously, within a day I had already outsourced my short-term memory to the Reminders app, because it was so easy to just hold a button for a few seconds and tell Siri to remember something for me-- way better than opening up an app and typing something in, because it takes almost no effort.
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.
It was a DARPA project at SRI and was spun off as a company. That does not imply failure at all. The uniqueness is that it's context aware, so you can have mini-conversations about a reminder, say, and Siri will know what you're talking about. That's not easy to do. All effective AI is based on machine learning and requires training. Hell, human beings require training, so I'm not sure why that implies it's not good AI.
Wife (a professional musician running late to a gig--as always): Asks me, "Where is Blah House in Dallas?"
Me: "Just ask your phone"
Wife to Siri: "Where is Blah House in Dallas?"
Siri shows map with push pin.
Wife touches push pin
Phone displays address of Blah House in Dallas
Wife punches address into GPS and screeches out of the driveway.
Folks, give it up. My musician wife is in love with the thing.
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.
Why do people insist on spewing this garbage? Oh, you're so smart, no one else knew Siri was originally an app!
I doubt you ever used Siri; instead you've just read about it on the Internet. I on the other hand, used Siri for a little over a year. Trust me, it's not the same as the new incarnation. It's like comparing a bottle rocket to a Saturn 5.
People act like a company buying something is a cop out. News flash, companies aren't people. They're entities made up of people. It's not like Apple put in an off-the-shelf solution into its OS; it identified the *potential* of Siri and essentially hired the people behind it to take it to the next level. What do you think any other company does?
I think the novelty of Siri is already starting to wear off (which is WAY sooner than I expected). I myself was all over the blogs looking at Siri's responses to random questions. My friend I believe put it best, "It was the most entertaining 10 hours of my life. I'm wondering if I'll ever use it again though."
If all you are using it for is the see what it says to random questions, then I agree that this would get old pretty quickly. I would say in less than 2 hrs.
But for me, it has already become the primary way of scheduling meetings, reminders, searches and timers. I already use my iPhone for such things and Siri is without a doubt faster for these things, at least for me.
For short bursts of text, it is faster. I had a list of song titles that I inputted into Notes via Siri. Faster than typing. And combined with iMessage, I've replaced Textfree as the primary way of texting my wife.
So, I would say,the usefulness would depend on how you are using it. If you are using it jokes, it'll get old quick. If you use it to get things done, it is a great tool.
I look forward to them expanding the use into app launching and controlling settings on the phone. "I want to play game X", "Any email?", "Turn off wifi" or "Dim the screen a little".
... ?This isn?t a new notion,? he said. ?In projecting the future, I think Apple did a good job of figuring out when the technology was ready to be consumer-grade.? ...
In fact he admits that Siri is useful for consumers. He also downplays Apples achievement by stating that Apple just had to wait to launch Siri.
But its more than likely that Apple did all it could to get Siri where it is now.
He's also forgetting(?) a 5 year DARPA project with 300 top scientists that started it all...
I think that Google and MS are scrambling to get this technology and trying to win time by downplaying it: "its the same, we have it already, its not a big deal, etc.".
J.
It's always been a good sign for an Apple product when it's downplayed by the competition.
So very true.
Just keep your mouth shut, so at least some share holders can maintain hope. Simply astonishing!
Where's Ballmer btw?
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").
Um, if I remember correctly, Siri uses the same voice recognition software: Nuance. In fact, Siri isn't voice recognition; it's a contextual AI that utilizes speech recognition software (it can be upgraded to a superior solution in the future).
Also, in my experience, even in noisy environments, Siri is about as accurate as the iPhone's keyboard.
Folks, give it up. My musician wife is in love with the thing.
See, the issue is your wife isn't a techie/geek and therefore she's irrelevant.
Sigh. I am starting to feel sorry for the anti-Apple techie/geeks. It's going to be such a tough, tough road for them in the coming decade as Apple continues to take over and democratize technology.
Maybe Stallmans head will explode as the irony of the company he loathes the most for perpetuating "closed" actually makes more technology accessible to more people than he could ever dream of!
If there ever was a more stark contrast between theoretical piety and practical reality I don't know what it could be.
Eat your heart out, haters - it's going to be a long, bitter winter of your discontent!
That is unless you stop loathing "clueless newbies" and actually start designing technology that is accessible to anyone without them having to worship at the alter of technology for the sake of the technology.
And by the way, that's the ultimate discipline. Apple is so good at it, they just make it look trivially easy. Don't think so? Show them up! Go on! If it's no big deal, you should be able to do it without copying their look and feel or patents - right?
/crickets
Yup - same old story.... Except Apple has the $$$ and in mobile devices the price advantage.
2014 won't be like 1984, 1994 or 2004 - that's for sure!
I tried, but I don't have contact info for your wife...
Actually, it works quite well...
Try: "Text my wife [short pause] I love you"
Siri: "here's your message to Lucy,
'To: Lucy:
I love you'
Want to send it?"
That's quite smart. I wondered about the use of a short pause to disambiguate the sentence.
Most people speak quite ambiguous, but don't realize that.
They also forget how often other people ask what they mean...
J
However, I believe the real paradigm shift Siri offers is it's accessibility. We know Apple's MO by now: take existing functionality and make it something people actually want and can use. Apple originally took the computer and gave us the PC; they took clunky smartphones that required a manual to use, and gave us the iPhone. Now they've taken nerdy voice recognition and given us Siri.
Sure, with other solutions you can dictate texts, set calendar appointments, check the weather, etc. However, how many people really used this? It required training, and you had to say things in a predetermined way. My mom would never use it, for instance.
While Siri isn't perfect, it does make voice recognition so easy that my mom can't just do it, she wants to do it. You just talk to it like a person.
This is how you advance technology: you make it accessible and usable to the masses. It's like Prometheus giving us fire.
That's quite smart. I wondered about the use of a short pause to disambiguate the sentence.
Most people speak quite ambiguous, but don't realize that.
They also forget how often other people ask what they mean...
J
People saying Siri isn't perfectly accurate and therefore a failure need to remember this. Not all humans are perfectly accurate. I don't have the best hearing; you know how many times
I ask "What did you say?". Plus when talking on cellphones (AT&T), I repeat myself nearly as much as I repeat myself when using "Raise to Speak".
Typing this on an iPhone, I also retyped typos about as much as I have to fix errors in Siri, maybe more.
I tried, but I don't have contact info for your wife...
Actually, it works quite well...
Try: "Text my wife [short pause] I love you"
Siri: "here's your message to Lucy,
'To: Lucy:
I love you'
Want to send it?"
I believe his point is that Siri will text "I love her." if you say "Text my wife I love her." It doesn't (yet) pick up the change in subject, but it's coming...
I think the novelty of Siri is already starting to wear off (which is WAY sooner than I expected). I myself was all over the blogs looking at Siri's responses to random questions. My friend I believe put it best, "It was the most entertaining 10 hours of my life. I'm wondering if I'll ever use it again though."
True....But my 6 year old loves it!