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.
Siri learns the voice of the user during set up and beyond. My wife's devices do not even respond to me but work flawlessly with her voice. Mine works with me and apparently I sound a lot like the Cookie Monster. That ad triggered my devices, but not my wife's.
I think privacy as a way to improve Siri could be done with alternative methods, hence this is only smaller part of the reason. Also Google has an incentive, in that it can monetise its assistant directly, Apple not so much directly.
The main reason, I think, is the lack of resources Apple devotes to it. Apple thinks it can get away with it cheaply, but it can't. Voice recognition take a lot of ongoing work. Like Maps, its a project with no end in sight, otherwise you'll get left behind very quickly. Siri needs full time ongoing effort and resources on: enough full time employees (not just the bare minimum with >10hr work days) with certainly of employment and ongoing training and career path (buying employees is a short term fix), an increasing budget (not a reduction as usually the case), increasing R&D, having a roadmap and mindset of constant improvement.
Employees are a company's number 1 customer. This is overlooked. Having more than enough staff working on Siri, with staff having time to plan and experiment is important. Otherwise employees will just leave, which is happening. Having staff that stay over many years decades is must for continuity and vital for company's longetivity.
So, how do you know how many employees Apple has devoted to Siri, how many they plan to hire or how much money they devote to Siri research? Please, do share. I'm pretty sure Apple does a good job with project management too.
I wish they would either figure out a way to compromise or find a better way to anonymously gather data to allow these devices to be ,ore user friendly. The one thing that doesn't get spoken about enough in these types of articles is the speech recognition. Privacy is irrelevant when it comes to recognition and apple is failing at it right now.
Rarely have a problem with Siri not understanding my words.
Siri's largest issue is Bing. Every A.I. Assistant not named Google uses Bing. Search is the life blood of A.I. Especially A.I. that will become more conversational and informative. This is such a fast moving piece of technology that is changing the world, and will dramatically alter our lives over the next 30 to 40 years.
In 2017, the good news for Apple is that the most sophisticated assistant (Google Assistant) is still not very useful in most contexts. The best assistants are the ones that can set reminders, timers, order cat food, play music and convert measurements. Siri is good enough, Amazon Echo is pretty good at these things, and Google Home can do some of them as well. The extra cirraculars that Google Home can do is just not at a point where it's going to alter the state of the marketplace.
Apple's issue isn't 2017 it's 2025, it's 2030 and beyond. These are going to get exponentially smarter, and Google has such a massive amount of data to plug these assistants into. These companies need to create a back end search engine to compete with Google. It doesn't need to be public, but time to send out the little bots to harvest web data.
Really?! Don't know what you're searching for, but I've never had to use Google because a Bing search didn't deliver.
One of the main reasons I'm an Apple customer is the fact that Apple shows concern for privacy issues, so I will not fault Siri for issues that may be compounded by privacy concerns. With that said, I have a simple test for Siri and it failed the last time I tested it (and since this involves directions to an Apple Store, it shouldn't fail).
I live near an Apple Store (now closed for remodeling), but it's a smaller store and they don't always have a good selection of product. To test Siri, I ask for directions to another SPECIFIC Apple Store (using the official name as shown on their website) and instead Siri responds with "There is a closer Apple Store, would you like directions to that store" (that's not a direct quote, but something similar and, of course, I say No and that's the end of it). That's insane... When asking for directions to a specific store, Siri should NOT respond in that manner (If I asked for the nearest Apple Store, yes, but not when I'm asking for directions to a store that has the product that my nearest store doesn't have). [...snip...]
thats not good. Is there a way to offer feedback on things like this I wonder?
So much of the superiority of Google's assistant is just hype. I wish more folks, especially bloggers posting articles like this on sites like AI would research it more. Assistants need to be able to do much more than Internet searches. Indeed it's really how well can they perform a variety of tasks. Alexa is well behind Siri and Google, who are very close, with Siri able to do some things that Google can't and vice versa, but with Google, you have to give up all privacy.
Here's a recent thorough test of the big three against each other with a wide variety of tasks.
To whet your appetite, here's from the author's summary of the face offI know,
"I know — there are a lot of embarrassing moments for Google up there. If I were to simply count each "winner" above, Siri would be right there with it. Things are closer than the recent Google hype machine would suggest."
I see you are trying to dodge the facts. The article you cited is just one group of questions, when the whole point is how well the assistants do with a wide variety of tasks., i.e., how useful they are in the real world of "assisting you?" And in test after test on tasks, Siri does well . Oh, and Siri knows by far the most languages. Why the obfuscation?
So much of the superiority of Google's assistant is just hype. I wish more folks, especially bloggers posting articles like this on sites like AI would research it more. Assistants need to be able to do much more than Internet searches. Indeed it's really how well can they perform a variety of tasks. Alexa is well behind Siri and Google, who are very close, with Siri able to do some things that Google can't and vice versa, but with Google, you have to give up all privacy.
Here's a recent thorough test of the big three against each other with a wide variety of tasks.
To whet your appetite, here's from the author's summary of the face offI know,
"I know — there are a lot of embarrassing moments for Google up there. If I were to simply count each "winner" above, Siri would be right there with it. Things are closer than the recent Google hype machine would suggest."
I see you are trying to dodge the facts. The article you cited is just one group of questions, when the whole point is how well the assistants do with a wide variety of tasks., i.e., how useful they are in the real world of "assisting you?" Why the obfuscation?
Dodge the facts? I LINKED some facts for you to read for yourself. Yes BI asked a dozen questions or so and got various levels of correct response from the four "big-name" assistants. That hardly makes it thorough test does it, but I'm guessing you'd like to claim it does and carrying more weight than the 5000 question test I referenced? Well OK then.
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."
Project Titan. Also allows for "Hey Siri, bring me a beer"
Rarely have a problem with Siri not understanding my words.
Do you maybe not use it in the car? I constantly have trouble with Siri responding to my music requests with artists or titles that rhyme with the one I asked for. Siri responded to my request for a song by Don Henley by telling me it couldn't find anything by John Bentley in my library. I've tried repeating the request, changing pronunciation, talking louder -- nothing seems to work.
I've given up on Siri for anything more that dialling the phone and setting reminders, which is disappointing because I'd really like to use it more.
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.
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.
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So, how do you know how many employees Apple has devoted to Siri, how many they plan to hire or how much money they devote to Siri research? Please, do share. I'm pretty sure Apple does a good job with project management too.
Rarely have a problem with Siri not understanding my words.
Really?! Don't know what you're searching for, but I've never had to use Google because a Bing search didn't deliver.
I've given up on Siri for anything more that dialling the phone and setting reminders, which is disappointing because I'd really like to use it more.