Sorry, I don't believe or trust a word from "ex-employees", especially when they're unnamed. Also, even if any of this was true, if they had a shred of class they wouldn't shit talk their former employer or divulge info. This kind of thing is usually motivated by resentment.
This story feels like a 3 year old piece to get clicks immediately after HomePod was announced. The sources are either unnamed or departed Apple over 3 years ago. The privacy issue is mostly in the past and was already addressed by Apple last year using differential privacy algorithms. That doesn't mean Siri does not have a lot of work ahead to get better but so do all voice assistants. They're all fairly bad right now.
For those who are in doubt about Siri future due to lack of data due privacy concern, I have 1 word for you: darkdata.
How many % of data Google or Microsoft or Amazon gather from you are usable? They are not more than 25%. The rest are all gibberish. Darkdata changes that, it actually intelligent enough to convert those unusable data into usable data with the rate of closer to a staggering 80%.
Apple's privacy policy is making hard to evolve and personalize Siri, the ex-Apple sources told the Wall Street Journal.
Good because privacy is the number 1 important issue of our times. Or at the very least one of the top five issues going. I wouldn't necessarily want to, but I could get by without a digital assistant. I could even get by, if I had to, without a phone, period. But I couldn't relax and feel myself without privacy. Once you have no privacy, you have no identity IMO. It is also certainly a key reason I choose Apple products over competitors. In terms of voice assistants in technology, early days doesn't even begin to get to the heart of where we are at this point. And tbh, even though Path Inc's social network didn't take off, long term I see the potential for a competitor to Facebook coming along and succeeding with privacy being its key differentiator. It may not happen next year, but it wouldn't surprise me if it happens at some point. If Duck Duck had a search engine anywhere near as good as Google's I'd so never use Google again.
I'm glad you feel yourself in private, but if you really think you are private you are fooling yourself. Apple has a lot of our information stored in the cloud too, just take a look at the level of cooperation they are giving the UK and other law enforcement.
They are required by law to aid these agencies in any way they can, and so they should. What they won't do is build back doors into their products so these same agencies can lose the keys, which they will.
Apple stores a lot of encrypted information in the cloud, such as your iMessages.
Sorry, I don't believe or trust a word from "ex-employees", especially when they're unnamed. Also, even if any of this was true, if they had a shred of class they wouldn't shit talk their former employer or divulge info. This kind of thing is usually motivated by resentment.
The article does say that the staff left in frustration, so there definitely is some resentment.
I think these wiz-kids need to understand that Apple isn't going to function like a company with 1 product and 35 people. You either have the balls to keep the technology to yourself and try to develop it, or you have the patience to see it implemented properly, or, if you quit, stop whining about it.
Eh, voice-activated assistants are of no interest to me, until I can get a satisfactory result from the following query:
"Hey (Siri/Google/Alexa), bring me my slippers."
Lovely and yesterday, Google sold off their Robotics division so I guess you will be waiting for some time for a machine to bring you your slippers. May I humbly suggest getting a Dog and training it?
Disgruntled former employees that don't understand the prime importance of privacy. Glad they're not still at Apple!
All these assistants need to improve. Siri almost always understands my voice (British accent) but often doesn't understand my wife (california Bay Area accent). If think she runs into trouble because rather than speaking naturally she slows her speech with long pauses between the words in the hope the Siri will understand her better. So people's experiences are inconsistent. Siri seems great at answering questions to do with sports that Apple executives are big fans of. But if you ask it something outside of their world, Siri might struggle.
When asked a question like "what diameter hole do I need to drill to tap a 6-32 thread?" - Siri reads 6-32 as "632" and gives web results from which you can navigate to a chart via the second result in the list, by which time you might as well have either opened Safari and Googled for a chart or walked over to see the chart you have posted on the wall.
Siri should be able to come back with a clarifying question "what material are you going to drill?" User "Brass" Siri "then you need a point, one, zero, six, five diameter drill bit, that's drill size number thirty-six"
It'll get there eventually.
If it can't understand 6-32 what hope do I have when asking about the drill size for a 4BA thread.... The mind boggles.
It's easy to see consumers don't care about privacy and that's why Google continues to outperform Apple and have more potential growth. The thing that makes consumers most happy is the "free" services Google is giving them. Free services prove to be far more important to individuals than privacy. That's why Google is so smart and Wall Street knows this. That's just Google understanding basic human nature. In so many ways, humans are social people and that's why Facebook is as valuable as it is. All those people on Facebook are always happily giving away information about their lives in order to brag about how wonderful and successful they are. Facebook is just one big "look at me" narcissistic show. Apple is going to keep losing out to Amazon, Google, and Facebook as those companies continue to harvest consumer data like vacuum cleaners.
Apple is the only company going against the flow of data harvesting and Apple continues getting criticized for their consumer privacy stance. Only Apple is concerned about consumer privacy because it's not getting paid from harvesting consumer data. Most consumers don't even care about and certainly doesn't support Apple's privacy policy. All they want is lots of seemingly free stuff. That's the main why Siri is being roundly criticized for being a "weak" virtual assistant. Apparently, those critics would prefer to throw their privacy away just so Siri can perform better. They consider losing privacy a harmless trade-off. More consumers will continue to flock to other computing platforms and to hell with their privacy.
I reasonably happy with Siri actually. It seems to excel in one area, Integration with the OS. In that case it seems equal, or even a bit better than Google. Google certainly has the edge searching for facts, but sometimes the results come out to be just plain wrong, even with their expertise. Certainly some work to do there. One place Google does seem to have an advantage is having it understand things like street names, or maybe stores. It seems smarter about that when asking directions in maps then Siri. The integration with data on the Phone is more important to me than looking up random facts though, and it's the part that actually requires some smarts.
SIri is a lot more than just a voice assistant though. It does quite well learning my schedule and giving me directions. It's app suggests are right on. It does a good job pulling events out of email and apps, and unlike Google is asks before adding them to my calendar which I appreciate. The privacy issue is huge though. There is so much private information available about it, and it knows my movements, when I'm likely to not be at home etc. Stuff I'd rather keep as private as possible.
I'm quite interested in the work Apple is going with understanding natural language. They seem to be putting a lot more effort in this area than the other assistants, but apparently weren't ready to release a big update this year at WWDC. They keep it pretty tight until they have everything ready. Also, living over seas makes it apparent how far behind Google and Amazon are. At least Apple tends to roll stuff out to a lot more countries a lot faster. I can't even get Google Assistant or Amazon's service over here. (Sonos too. I'm not sure where all Sonos isn't available, but the HomePod is finally a multi room solution I'll be able to buy here, which actually makes it the only assistant and multi room audio solution I can get here, in one device)
"People at Apple's anxiety level went up a notch," one ex-Siri team member said.
No wonder Siri is failing; the Siri team can't even make grammatical sense themselves!
Oh! So you're the person that speaks correctly each and every time when speaking to others. You never, ever make a mistake in the grammatical sense. Awesome! Nice to finally meet someone that does.
Sorry, I don't believe or trust a word from "ex-employees", especially when they're unnamed. Also, even if any of this was true, if they had a shred of class they wouldn't shit talk their former employer or divulge info. This kind of thing is usually motivated by resentment.
The article does say that the staff left in frustration, so there definitely is some resentment.
I think these wiz-kids need to understand that Apple isn't going to function like a company with 1 product and 35 people. You either have the balls to keep the technology to yourself and try to develop it, or you have the patience to see it implemented properly, or, if you quit, stop whining about it.
I've been watching "Silicon Valley" lately, and in it, you see lots of young geniuses doing startups, hoping to be discovered by some VCs or a big company so that they can sell themselves (i.e. their technology) and become overnight millionaires (well, after years of development, of course). In this article, one of the founders says (quoted from the article) "he realized during his tenure at Apple that money and profit is not what drives the California consumer electronics giant: 'It is the desire to create a fantastic product.'" My guess is that he wasn't happy with the package he received at Apple, or that he tried to use Samsung's bid as leverage against Apple. Apple offered/offers a culture to their employees, whereas Samsung offered money. A core value of Apple's culture is privacy and security. And they won't sacrifice that to rush something to market at the expense of that core value. These guys apparently didn't have the patience to make Siri more robust while at the same time keeping users' privacy and security intact. I can't help but think that leaving Apple to develop Bixby is a major step down for them. Maybe Samsung offered them a higher salary, but Bixby? Really?
Eh, voice-activated assistants are of no interest to me, until I can get a satisfactory result from the following query:
"Hey (Siri/Google/Alexa), bring me my slippers."
Lovely and yesterday, Google sold off their Robotics division so I guess you will be waiting for some time for a machine to bring you your slippers. May I humbly suggest getting a Dog and training it?
They sold of Boston Dynamics but I think there's still some robotics people left - doing robo arms and SCHAFT humanoids. They wanted to get rid of the creepy military bots but slipper deliverers might still be on the cards
Eh, voice-activated assistants are of no interest to me, until I can get a satisfactory result from the following query:
"Hey (Siri/Google/Alexa), bring me my slippers."
Lovely and yesterday, Google sold off their Robotics division so I guess you will be waiting for some time for a machine to bring you your slippers. May I humbly suggest getting a Dog and training it?
No, they still have their Robotics division, cutely named Replicant. They sold only two of the 7 companies in the group. Well technically 6 since Boston Dynamics was never worked as part of Google's robotics group and operated separately. Rumor was they didn't play well with others. So now with the sale of two companies to Japan's Softbank (they do love robots in Japan) there's 5 in Alphabet's Replicant bet, and operated under GoogleX. So it would appear with these two gone Google is less interested in humanoid robots and more interested in manufacturing/ industry/ medical/ service.
The problem with that "test" is that it only relates to internet search, which is Google's primary business. When you change the test to be centered around Apple's primary business, local interaction with apps and the OS, then Siri looks quite a bit better than Google.
For those who are in doubt about Siri future due to lack of data due privacy concern, I have 1 word for you: darkdata.
How many % of data Google or Microsoft or Amazon gather from you are usable? They are not more than 25%. The rest are all gibberish. Darkdata changes that, it actually intelligent enough to convert those unusable data into usable data with the rate of closer to a staggering 80%.
That was probably a good company for Apple to acquire. Google, Facebook, insurers and others are already making use of "dark data" themselves. In fact Apple's acquisition is using the DeepDive algorithms developed at Stanford (2014 and still actively in development) funded by Google among others.
Eh, voice-activated assistants are of no interest to me, until I can get a satisfactory result from the following query:
"Hey (Siri/Google/Alexa), bring me my slippers."
Lovely and yesterday, Google sold off their Robotics division so I guess you will be waiting for some time for a machine to bring you your slippers. May I humbly suggest getting a Dog and training it?
Apple's privacy policy is making it hard to evolve and personalize Siri, the ex-Apple sources told the Wall Street Journal. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant both take advantage of user data stored in the cloud, improving their adaptiveness.
Did he quit or was he sacked? What sort of engineer are they if this constraint isn't an inspiring challange. It would be like a structural engineer quitting because gravity was getting in the way. Find a way to make it work if it takes multi-key encyprtion, more modern file system, better data tagging by apps and/or a thousand other things.
thats just protecting the user from his data been taken by someone other than Apple, the problem for these engineers is that Apple is respecting user's privacy by not gathering information for Apple that would be useful for siri.
Apple's privacy policy is making hard to evolve and personalize Siri, the ex-Apple sources told the Wall Street Journal.
Good because privacy is the number 1 important issue of our times. Or at the very least one of the top five issues going. I wouldn't necessarily want to, but I could get by without a digital assistant. I could even get by, if I had to, without a phone, period. But I couldn't relax and feel myself without privacy. Once you have no privacy, you have no identity IMO. It is also certainly a key reason I choose Apple products over competitors. In terms of voice assistants in technology, early days doesn't even begin to get to the heart of where we are at this point. And tbh, even though Path Inc's social network didn't take off, long term I see the potential for a competitor to Facebook coming along and succeeding with privacy being its key differentiator. It may not happen next year, but it wouldn't surprise me if it happens at some point. If Duck Duck had a search engine anywhere near as good as Google's I'd so never use Google again.
I do use Duck Duck. Don't find the need for Google at all.
The problem with that "test" is that it only relates to internet search, which is Google's primary business. When you change the test to be centered around Apple's primary business, local interaction with apps and the OS, then Siri looks quite a bit better than Google.
Where did you find evidence for "Siri looks quite a bit better".? Just curious.
It still amazes me how Apple and its customers are vehemently opposed to sharing any metadata with 3rd parties in the spirit of privacy, but then willingly those same customers will put a Google/Amazon listening device in their home....No surprise that Google is stretching its lead with personal assistants; as long as Apple clings to its privacy shtick they are only going to be left further behind.
I don't have an Echo and actively avoid Google products and services wherever I can. So, no. Not all customers put Amazon or Google devices in their home.
Comments
How many % of data Google or Microsoft or Amazon gather from you are usable? They are not more than 25%. The rest are all gibberish. Darkdata changes that, it actually intelligent enough to convert those unusable data into usable data with the rate of closer to a staggering 80%.
Here is the reading: https://futurism.com/apple-is-using-ai-to-unlock-previously-unusable-dark-data/
Apple stores a lot of encrypted information in the cloud, such as your iMessages.
The article does say that the staff left in frustration, so there definitely is some resentment.
I think these wiz-kids need to understand that Apple isn't going to function like a company with 1 product and 35 people. You either have the balls to keep the technology to yourself and try to develop it, or you have the patience to see it implemented properly, or, if you quit, stop whining about it.
May I humbly suggest getting a Dog and training it?
Apple is the only company going against the flow of data harvesting and Apple continues getting criticized for their consumer privacy stance. Only Apple is concerned about consumer privacy because it's not getting paid from harvesting consumer data. Most consumers don't even care about and certainly doesn't support Apple's privacy policy. All they want is lots of seemingly free stuff. That's the main why Siri is being roundly criticized for being a "weak" virtual assistant. Apparently, those critics would prefer to throw their privacy away just so Siri can perform better. They consider losing privacy a harmless trade-off. More consumers will continue to flock to other computing platforms and to hell with their privacy.
SIri is a lot more than just a voice assistant though. It does quite well learning my schedule and giving me directions. It's app suggests are right on. It does a good job pulling events out of email and apps, and unlike Google is asks before adding them to my calendar which I appreciate. The privacy issue is huge though. There is so much private information available about it, and it knows my movements, when I'm likely to not be at home etc. Stuff I'd rather keep as private as possible.
I'm quite interested in the work Apple is going with understanding natural language. They seem to be putting a lot more effort in this area than the other assistants, but apparently weren't ready to release a big update this year at WWDC. They keep it pretty tight until they have everything ready. Also, living over seas makes it apparent how far behind Google and Amazon are. At least Apple tends to roll stuff out to a lot more countries a lot faster. I can't even get Google Assistant or Amazon's service over here. (Sonos too. I'm not sure where all Sonos isn't available, but the HomePod is finally a multi room solution I'll be able to buy here, which actually makes it the only assistant and multi room audio solution I can get here, in one device)
I can't help but think that leaving Apple to develop Bixby is a major step down for them. Maybe Samsung offered them a higher salary, but Bixby? Really?
The problem with that "test" is that it only relates to internet search, which is Google's primary business. When you change the test to be centered around Apple's primary business, local interaction with apps and the OS, then Siri looks quite a bit better than Google.