I haven't tested it myself but the AI link to Gruber's post that links to it being done came up with even worse responses than trying to speak the gazpacho reminder yourself.
There could be a reason for that. Siri might be assuming that the input is the full analog waveform that it then strips and compresses to send to their servers but we're talking about an already losslessly compressed audio file, right? Doesn't that add a complication to their system trying to process it correctly?
That is an interesting possibility. Lossy codecs do try to compress according to human perceptual models, and an electronic device using a different lossy compression scheme might be thrown off by that. A way to test if the extra steps are significant is to record yourself, compress it using AAC, play back the recording and see if the result is worse than using the same voice directly.
There's a Safari extension that changes the phrase "Justin Bieber" into something else entirely, but there's no extension for changing blatant lies and trolling remarks into other text.
Does that seem right to you?
He didn't live to see the full blown bugs of lion, after each point release, nor the ui mess of poor unpolished implementation that become apparent with time. And of course the last couple of months or so he was just struggling to hold on to his life and take care of his legacy as much as he could, lion was the least of his concerns... I am kinda glad he didn't live to see a .3 release crashing several macs of people installing it.
As far as Siri goes, it's all good and well to rationalise its premature release (as per usual there are plenty of ways intelligent people can rationalise in a plausible way) but the fact of the matter remains that apple needed a big marketable selling point for selling the exact same iPhone design for another year in a row (well one with a functional antenna that is) and Siri provided that. If the cycle had been around iPhone 5 where apple will indeed bring a redesign, Siri would have been less required to be used and would be given time to develop from its current poorly functioning and gimmicky stage.
He d have really lost his mind over os x lion, of course no one dare say this because they will be ex communicated from current apple forever... I can't fathom how Steve would have let such an embarassing release like lion slide without quite a few heads rolling. Sadly Steve is no longer with us, and the same people who messed up os x to begin with, in more ways than one, are responsible for mountain lion. Rip OS X.
What is wrong with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? I had very few issues. Are you also suggesting there are issues with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion?
What about you, Dick? You met the guy. Would Steve have greenlit Siri as-is? Granted, it was yet-to-be-humbled, pre-return Steve you met… :broken_wink_emoticon.gif: :broken_sad_emoticon_in_response_to_wink_emoticon_being_broken.gif:
Considering that Steve was around when the final decisions were made in the iPhone 4S, the question has been answered. Jobs clearly was OK with Siri.
He didn't live to see the full blown bugs of lion, after each point release, nor the ui mess of poor unpolished implementation that become apparent with time. And of course the last couple of months or so he was just struggling to hold on to his life and take care of his legacy as much as he could, lion was the least of his concerns... I am kinda glad he didn't live to see a .3 release crashing several macs of people installing it.
You seem to love the unending Apple-hating remarks, but you've never been able to document any of them.
1. What (specifically) is wrong with Lion? "it's a mess" isn't a rational argument.
2. Name an OS that is better, more consistent, and better designed.
3. And what are your credentials that makes you more of an OS expert than Apple?
As far as Siri goes, it's all good and well to rationalise its premature release (as per usual there are plenty of ways intelligent people can rationalise in a plausible way) but the fact of the matter remains that apple needed a big marketable selling point for selling the exact same iPhone design for another year in a row (well one with a functional antenna that is) and Siri provided that. If the cycle had been around iPhone 5 where apple will indeed bring a redesign, Siri would have been less required to be used and would be given time to develop from its current poorly functioning and gimmicky stage.
It's all well and good to whine and complain about everything Apple does, but where's your evidence?
1. What percentage of people find that Siri works for them, at least most of the time?
2. What speech recognition system on the market today works better?
What is wrong with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? I had very few issues. Are you also suggesting there are issues with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion?
Keep in mind that myapplelove has over 1400 posts and virtually every one is a mindless attack on Apple, but he never provides any evidence to back his claims.
Apparently, he thinks that if he simply screams "Apple sucks" enough times that people will stop buying Apple products and his short position in AAPL will pay off.
Some of you would like to have embedded SIRI, I mean that SIRI would not have to make online requests. Sure, that would be nice… But this is quite SCI-FI for now: think about the amount of data which should be stored on your device then. More, it would require power that an A5 chip would not be able to provide since SIRI is not just about audio deciphering. Furthermore, the service can be improved without any update on the device.
As many of you, I don't use SIRI on a regular basis since I don't find it accurate and quick enough for now. I also meet some issues dealing with languages mix. I have my iPhone in French and SIRI is unable to understand me whenever I want to play a music title which is in English. If ever I tell SIRI to play «Since I've been loving you» for instance, SIRI won't ever succeed in understanding I just want to hear Led Zep's famous title… It can be quite funny though, because it can be a game to try to speak an English title as if it was in French… But that's just funny a few minutes, and using fingers is much simpler and faster.
That is an interesting possibility. Lossy codecs do try to compress according to human perceptual models, and an electronic device using a different lossy compression scheme might be thrown off by that. A way to test if the extra steps are significant is to record yourself, compress it using AAC, play back the recording and see if the result is worse than using the same voice directly.
I will do that this afternoon. I will use an iPhone 4S and iPad (3)* to speak a command. Each time I do that I'll have my MBP recording the audio. Only speech that is correctly interpreted by Siri will be used. I will record straight to record in ALAC and FLAC (if possible) as a lossless control.
* iPad (3) doesn't have Siri but it uses the Dragon Dictation backend that is the speech-to-text issue here so it's results could give us a hint about HW differences.
I am kinda glad he didn't live to see a .3 release crashing several macs of people installing it.
Pretty darn sure he'd be okay with 'several' crashing out of tens of millions.
Quote:
…apple needed a big marketable selling point for selling the exact same iPhone design for another year in a row (well one with a functional antenna that is)…
This conversation is over. You have lost. Try against next thread.
Quote:
…develop from its current poorly functioning and gimmicky stage.
Try using it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRicow
…think about the amount of data which should be stored on your device then.
What, a couple gigs? Can you shed any light on the amount of data we'd actually need?
As far as my limited understanding stretches, voice recognition and response is developed by building a large enough data set to anticipate and interpret speech. This was one of the motivations behind Google Talk, and why Googles competing product Majel may well be pretty good out of the blocks.
Siri when bought was not a finished product and it was clear that it would benefit substantially from a much bigger database of recorded speech to improve it.
This I suspect is what Apple are doing now by launching Siri as a Beta product, and why it is both important that Siri is recorded and processed server side. It may also be the reason why we are now seeing a number of different adverts to encourage us to use Siri more and in different ways.
My expectation is that Siri will improve enormously over time, whether it be 1 month or 10 years will partly be dependent on how much it is used in the meantime.
I use it in UK mode (in China) and it seems to me the performance has been improved substantially in both it's understanding of individual words and contextualising groups of words, I also have no life changing expectations of it yet but still find it surprisingly useful for certain circumstances.
As far as my limited understanding stretches, voice recognition and response is developed by building a large enough data set to anticipate and interpret speech. This was one of the motivations behind Google Talk, and why Googles competing product Majel may well be pretty good out of the blocks.
Actually Goog 411 was the original test application for their voice recognition algorhythms, however, you are correct about the motivation and when they EOLd the service that was the explanation given for the termination of the service. They had sufficiently built the voice database and no more voice samples were required.
Considering that Steve was around when the final decisions were made in the iPhone 4S, the question has been answered. Jobs clearly was OK with Siri.
You seem to love the unending Apple-hating remarks, but you've never been able to document any of them.
1. What (specifically) is wrong with Lion? "it's a mess" isn't a rational argument.
2. Name an OS that is better, more consistent, and better designed.
3. And what are your credentials that makes you more of an OS expert than Apple?
It's all well and good to whine and complain about everything Apple does, but where's your evidence?
1. What percentage of people find that Siri works for them, at least most of the time?
2. What speech recognition system on the market today works better?
3. Can you make something better?
Yeah, I can make something better, give me just a second to pull it out of my behind.... Sorry for the response but of that's the level we are talking here I am afraid it's the only rational response to it. Same goes for no. 3 of the first batch of questions. I don't have to be more of an os expert, and for tt matter I can't be more of an os expert than a computer (well...) company to know as a computer user with a computer science degree when an os release is rather shit. I am not a cloud computing expert but like others I had a fairly good idea that mm was shit too, thanks to SJ we have an official validation that it was. OS X lion has been a fiasco. There are 40+ arguments on why this was the case, but I won't do you the favour and lose an hour or so to go over them, it will be pointless anyway to do so, as you wil still not be conveinced, and I am not here to convince anyone anyway.
Keep in mind that myapplelove has over 1400 posts and virtually every one is a mindless attack on Apple, but he never provides any evidence to back his claims.
Apparently, he thinks that if he simply screams "Apple sucks" enough times that people will stop buying Apple products and his short position in AAPL will pay off.
You might want to read posts 300-1000 or so to see my praising apple, so that's as much a truth as my "mindless" attacks with no arguments. I am sorry you can't stomach criticism on apple, and I am more sorry for for your blind faith to anything apple creates, but when a company drops the ball I call them out for it, and apple dropped the ball on os x big time.
Yeah, I can make something better, give me just a second to pull it out of my behind.... Sorry for the response but of that's the level we are talking here I am afraid it's the only rational response to it. Same goes for no. 3 of the first batch of questions. I don't have to be more of an os expert, and for tt matter I can't be more of an os expert than a computer (well...) company to know as a computer user with a computer science degree when an os release is rather shit. I am not a cloud computing expert but like others I had a fairly good idea that mm was shit too, thanks to SJ we have an official validation that it was. OS X lion has been a fiasco. There are 40+ arguments on why this was the case, but I won't do you the favour and lose an hour or so to go over them, it will be pointless anyway to do so, as you wil still not be conveinced, and I am not here to convince anyone anyway.
You keep saying that Lion is shit, fiasco, etc. What specific.
We have been using Lion on 3 of the 4 Macs that support Lion (The iMac 24 runs Snow Leopard because I don't want to buy an update to Photoshop).
One of the Macs running Lion is a headless Mini that holds our Media Library on external 2TB HDDs.
My daughter and her 3 kids share an iMac 20 running Lion.
I have a loaded Dual Display iMac 27 that runs FCP X & other power apps and has 2 Promise Pegasus 12 TB Raids attached.
I consider myself a power user and the other Lion users are above average users.
I also have Mountain Lion on an external HDD -- and periodically boot to see how ML works for this or that.
I honestly don't understand your complaints about Lion -- if they are valid, I think you could enumerate 2-3 key issues off the top of your head and itemize them in a few sentences.
Otherwise, discussing it is just tilting at windmills.
I will do that this afternoon. I will use an iPhone 4S and iPad (3)* to speak a command. Each time I do that I'll have my MBP recording the audio. Only speech that is correctly interpreted by Siri will be used. I will record straight to record in ALAC and FLAC (if possible) as a lossless control.
* iPad (3) doesn't have Siri but it uses the Dragon Dictation backend that is the speech-to-text issue here so it's results could give us a hint about HW differences.
The goal of this test was to see if various words could be accurately interpreted by Siri's speech-to-test (Dragon Dictation) engine. I used 5 different words, not completely phrases, one of them being gazpacho, to see if the change in codec affects the engine's ability to convert the waveform to text.
Since I couldn't find a built-in app in OS X that would allow for various codecs — the way you can have screenshots rendered as various image formats — I DLed and installed Audio Hijack Pro. I recorded everything in ALAC then imported to iTunes where I converted the ALAC to both 256kbps AAC and 128kbps AAC, and 256kbps MP3 and 128kbps MP3.
In all cases the system was able to interpret the recording correctly. Note there were times when it didn't work that was the case with all recordings and when I spoke directly to Siri's speech-to-text engine, and there was no noticeable difference between spoken or recorded, or between the various codecs and bitrates.
Conclusion: For the codecs and bit rates used the Siri engine is not adversely affected in generating speech-to-text. A clearly expressed term in both loudness and pronunciation seem to the most important aspects.
The goal of this test was to see if various words could be accurately interpreted by Siri's speech-to-test (Dragon Dictation) engine. I used 5 different words, not completely phrases, one of them being gazpacho, to see if the change in codec affects the engine's ability to convert the waveform to text.
Since I couldn't find a built-in app in OS X that would allow for various codecs — the way you can have screenshots rendered as various image formats — I DLed and installed Audio Hijack Pro. I recorded everything in ALAC then imported to iTunes where I converted the ALAC to both 256kbps AAC and 128kbps AAC, and 256kbps MP3 and 128kbps MP3.
In all cases the system was able to interpret the recording correctly. Note there were times when it didn't work that was the case with all recordings and when I spoke directly to Siri's speech-to-text engine, and there was no noticeable difference between spoken or recorded, or between the various codecs and bitrates.
Conclusion: For the codecs and bit rates used the Siri engine is not adversely affected in generating speech-to-text. A clearly expressed term in both loudness and pronunciation seem to the most important aspects.
Sol, thanks for taking the time and effort and posting your results.
I think that in a global economy, Siri will have to handle slang, dialects, and mixed languages like Spanglish.
I was playing around with things like:
Play una paloma Blanca... Never did get it -- then tried: Play Slim Whitman, then skip until it came up.
Oddly, Play Gaite (pronounced gay) Parisenne, brought up the Can-Can about half the time.
Well, enumeration or not, if your machines run great, I m fine by that, anyway:
Buggy and problematic smb shares, slow, unreliable, no searching, problems with printers via smb.
safari memory leaks
Autoshutdown acing like program crash
Still no dpi or ri settings with ever shrinking font in higher and higher resolutions
annoying and/or buggy save states (close all safari windows, log out and in and they pop up again)
defualt versioning a problem
Frqeuent crashes in preview
mail going to 1-2gb memory
briken memory management with too many page outs, much larger kernel task memory allocation
poor performance in order macs where windows installations right now run much better and expand their life cycle
various ui problems in monochromatic user interface elements, iPad looking elements not well suited to macs, duplicate instead of save as etc., and in general it shows a tendency to pander to ios design but without good judgment on implementation , much like the new apple tv interface, the people overseeing ui choices are no Steve Jobs. It ales a lot of talent to go from decent o good to great and from convoluted to simple. Durrent os x ui design is very seldom well done. It's the difference between huddler and a good forum software.
poorly implemented mission control ui (about to be fixed in ml)
a generally slow system even on new macs, certainly not showcasing the state of the art hardware used
mcuh less responsive browsers both chrome and safari compared to windows (tried and tested in many devices) and flash now has be disabled by default in os x (yeah I don't like flash either, but it's a large part of the web still)
Poor legacy support, when g4 computers could run leopard, it's inexcusable that macs circa 2009 won't run mountain lion.
Its a poor release anyway you cut it, it brought many very unpolished and questionable "features", many bugs in major os software, and has had very ltle focus on core software development unlike sl. Apple isn't putting appropriate care to it, and they are too focused on its, their dev teams are enoguh, and the b team very obviously gets to work on os x.
Well, enumeration or not, if your machines run great, I m fine by that, anyway:
Buggy and problematic smb shares, slow, unreliable, no searching, problems with printers via smb.
safari memory leaks
Autoshutdown acing like program crash
Still no dpi or ri settings with ever shrinking font in higher and higher resolutions
annoying and/or buggy save states (close all safari windows, log out and in and they pop up again)
defualt versioning a problem
Frqeuent crashes in preview
mail going to 1-2gb memory
briken memory management with too many page outs, much larger kernel task memory allocation
poor performance in order macs where windows installations right now run much better and expand their life cycle
various ui problems in monochromatic user interface elements, iPad looking elements not well suited to macs, duplicate instead of save as etc., and in general it shows a tendency to pander to ios design but without good judgment on implementation , much like the new apple tv interface, the people overseeing ui choices are no Steve Jobs. It ales a lot of talent to go from decent o good to great and from convoluted to simple. Durrent os x ui design is very seldom well done. It's the difference between huddler and a good forum software.
poorly implemented mission control ui (about to be fixed in ml)
a generally slow system even on new macs, certainly not showcasing the state of the art hardware used
mcuh less responsive browsers both chrome and safari compared to windows (tried and tested in many devices) and flash now has be disabled by default in os x (yeah I don't like flash either, but it's a large part of the web still)
Poor legacy support, when g4 computers could run leopard, it's inexcusable that macs circa 2009 won't run mountain lion.
Its a poor release anyway you cut it, it brought many very unpolished and questionable "features", many bugs in major os software, and has had very ltle focus on core software development unlike sl. Apple isn't putting appropriate care to it, and they are too focused on its, their dev teams are enoguh, and the b team very obviously gets to work on os x.
Thanks for the detailed response -- I see some valid points there... And a few I will challenge.
Right now, I am watching the NBA playoffs -- so it will be later tonight.
Well, enumeration or not, if your machines run great, I m fine by that, anyway:
Buggy and problematic smb shares, slow, unreliable, no searching, problems with printers via smb.
safari memory leaks
Autoshutdown acing like program crash
Still no dpi or ri settings with ever shrinking font in higher and higher resolutions
annoying and/or buggy save states (close all safari windows, log out and in and they pop up again)
defualt versioning a problem
Frqeuent crashes in preview
mail going to 1-2gb memory
briken memory management with too many page outs, much larger kernel task memory allocation
poor performance in order macs where windows installations right now run much better and expand their life cycle
various ui problems in monochromatic user interface elements, iPad looking elements not well suited to macs, duplicate instead of save as etc., and in general it shows a tendency to pander to ios design but without good judgment on implementation , much like the new apple tv interface, the people overseeing ui choices are no Steve Jobs. It ales a lot of talent to go from decent o good to great and from convoluted to simple. Durrent os x ui design is very seldom well done. It's the difference between huddler and a good forum software.
poorly implemented mission control ui (about to be fixed in ml)
a generally slow system even on new macs, certainly not showcasing the state of the art hardware used
mcuh less responsive browsers both chrome and safari compared to windows (tried and tested in many devices) and flash now has be disabled by default in os x (yeah I don't like flash either, but it's a large part of the web still)
Poor legacy support, when g4 computers could run leopard, it's inexcusable that macs circa 2009 won't run mountain lion.
Its a poor release anyway you cut it, it brought many very unpolished and questionable "features", many bugs in major os software, and has had very ltle focus on core software development unlike sl. Apple isn't putting appropriate care to it, and they are too focused on its, their dev teams are enoguh, and the b team very obviously gets to work on os x.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum
Thanks for the detailed response -- I see some valid points there... And a few I will challenge.
Right now, I am watching the NBA playoffs -- so it will be later tonight.
OK!
First, are you Using Lion exclusively on Macs -- no Hackintoshes. I once believed that software is buggy and hardware is a rock-solid known entity -- hardware can be buggier than software.
Second, I believe with each release of OS X, Apple tries to establish a new threshold of minimum system requirements/capabilities while, at the same time, discarding whatever it can to minimize legacy bloat, This philosophy has served Apple and its users pretty well. Though, any particular OS X release may not suit specific users' needs -- my need for Rosetta requires me to run SNL on a single Mac. At any point in time, some of the OS features are not, yet, implemented in the OS -- they are being piloted in a few, select apps.
Third, I believe the iOsification of OS X is a good thing if done properly. Many legacy OS X constructs were reimplemented "the right way" for iOS, then ported back to the OS X mothership. Apple appears to be giving the Mac user the option to run the iOS UI along with the traditional OS X UI -- rather than cramming it down the users' throat, ala Metro.
Fourth, I believe that Apple knows where it wants to go with OS X, and basically this means that the OS becomes invisible (or at least gets out of the way) for most users -- while still satisfying the needs of the power user. Some day, in the not-too-distant future, Apple will celebrate the "arrival" by CTFF -- Can The Fine Finder.
Response to your specific points:
We don't use smb shares -- no comment
Safari memory leaks a periodic problem -- pretty responive fixes from Apple
Do not use autoshutdown -- Experience has shone better to keep things running (sleep)
I think DPI and RI will come in ML -- maybe with retina and GPU requirements
no problems here with saved states
versioning works fine for us
use Preview all the time -- can't remember any crashes
mail is 1.52 gb -- not a big deal here
mem management & kernel -- no information
poor performance on older Macs -- stay on older OS X version
monochromatic UI -- Apple trying things, SJ certainly approved Lion UI -- I think its a step in a series
mission control -- OK
slow -- see below
browsers and Flash -- seems as fast or faster than SNL
legacy support -- a plus and a minus -- you still can run an old OS X version
Finally let me demonstrate the future, as I see it:
I have used Final Cut for years... It is a powerful, but intricate, confusing and bloated piece of legacy [Carbon] software -- crash and error prone. It was updated every 12-18 months with mostly feature adds and bug fixes. Many users stay a release (or 2) behind.
FCP X was released less than a year ago -- completely rethought and reimplemented. It is wicked fast and fun to use. You never save anything (like iOS) it autosaves. You have fantastic metadata and search capability with an SQL DB (though you don't know it) file management system. You can do in minutes what it takes the older FCP hours to do, on the same hardware.
When first released, FCP X lacked some capabilities of the prior versions -- but it has been updated 4 times (fixes and features) in less than 12 months (obviously, some feature additions were already in development).
It cost 1/3 of the prior version.
FCP X is not for everybody... but it shows the future.
I believe that Apple does the same thing staging its OS releases:
-- establish a threshold
-- show some sizzle that exploits the threshold
-- discard legacy baggage
-- set the stage for the next release
So, any version of the OS is just a step along the road -- some better, some worse. In the case of OS X, you can stay on the current release or, for $30, download the latest version from the app store.
That's a pretty good accomplishment, IMO.
Paraphrasing: OS X is a journey, not a destination.
Edit: Just to follow up. The mail app on my system takes 1.75 MB RAM idle up to 1.52 GB when very busy. Compare that to the Flash plugin whick takes 1.75 GB RAM and 115% CPU when idle...
Comments
That is an interesting possibility. Lossy codecs do try to compress according to human perceptual models, and an electronic device using a different lossy compression scheme might be thrown off by that. A way to test if the extra steps are significant is to record yourself, compress it using AAC, play back the recording and see if the result is worse than using the same voice directly.
He didn't live to see the full blown bugs of lion, after each point release, nor the ui mess of poor unpolished implementation that become apparent with time. And of course the last couple of months or so he was just struggling to hold on to his life and take care of his legacy as much as he could, lion was the least of his concerns... I am kinda glad he didn't live to see a .3 release crashing several macs of people installing it.
As far as Siri goes, it's all good and well to rationalise its premature release (as per usual there are plenty of ways intelligent people can rationalise in a plausible way) but the fact of the matter remains that apple needed a big marketable selling point for selling the exact same iPhone design for another year in a row (well one with a functional antenna that is) and Siri provided that. If the cycle had been around iPhone 5 where apple will indeed bring a redesign, Siri would have been less required to be used and would be given time to develop from its current poorly functioning and gimmicky stage.
Quote:
Originally Posted by myapplelove
He d have really lost his mind over os x lion, of course no one dare say this because they will be ex communicated from current apple forever... I can't fathom how Steve would have let such an embarassing release like lion slide without quite a few heads rolling. Sadly Steve is no longer with us, and the same people who messed up os x to begin with, in more ways than one, are responsible for mountain lion. Rip OS X.
What is wrong with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? I had very few issues. Are you also suggesting there are issues with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion?
Considering that Steve was around when the final decisions were made in the iPhone 4S, the question has been answered. Jobs clearly was OK with Siri.
You seem to love the unending Apple-hating remarks, but you've never been able to document any of them.
1. What (specifically) is wrong with Lion? "it's a mess" isn't a rational argument.
2. Name an OS that is better, more consistent, and better designed.
3. And what are your credentials that makes you more of an OS expert than Apple?
It's all well and good to whine and complain about everything Apple does, but where's your evidence?
1. What percentage of people find that Siri works for them, at least most of the time?
2. What speech recognition system on the market today works better?
3. Can you make something better?
Keep in mind that myapplelove has over 1400 posts and virtually every one is a mindless attack on Apple, but he never provides any evidence to back his claims.
Apparently, he thinks that if he simply screams "Apple sucks" enough times that people will stop buying Apple products and his short position in AAPL will pay off.
Some of you would like to have embedded SIRI, I mean that SIRI would not have to make online requests. Sure, that would be nice… But this is quite SCI-FI for now: think about the amount of data which should be stored on your device then. More, it would require power that an A5 chip would not be able to provide since SIRI is not just about audio deciphering. Furthermore, the service can be improved without any update on the device.
As many of you, I don't use SIRI on a regular basis since I don't find it accurate and quick enough for now. I also meet some issues dealing with languages mix. I have my iPhone in French and SIRI is unable to understand me whenever I want to play a music title which is in English. If ever I tell SIRI to play «Since I've been loving you» for instance, SIRI won't ever succeed in understanding I just want to hear Led Zep's famous title… It can be quite funny though, because it can be a game to try to speak an English title as if it was in French… But that's just funny a few minutes, and using fingers is much simpler and faster.
I will do that this afternoon. I will use an iPhone 4S and iPad (3)* to speak a command. Each time I do that I'll have my MBP recording the audio. Only speech that is correctly interpreted by Siri will be used. I will record straight to record in ALAC and FLAC (if possible) as a lossless control.
* iPad (3) doesn't have Siri but it uses the Dragon Dictation backend that is the speech-to-text issue here so it's results could give us a hint about HW differences.
Quote:
Originally Posted by myapplelove
I am kinda glad he didn't live to see a .3 release crashing several macs of people installing it.
Pretty darn sure he'd be okay with 'several' crashing out of tens of millions.
Quote:
…apple needed a big marketable selling point for selling the exact same iPhone design for another year in a row (well one with a functional antenna that is)…
This conversation is over. You have lost. Try against next thread.
Quote:
…develop from its current poorly functioning and gimmicky stage.
Try using it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRicow
…think about the amount of data which should be stored on your device then.
What, a couple gigs? Can you shed any light on the amount of data we'd actually need?
As far as my limited understanding stretches, voice recognition and response is developed by building a large enough data set to anticipate and interpret speech. This was one of the motivations behind Google Talk, and why Googles competing product Majel may well be pretty good out of the blocks.
Siri when bought was not a finished product and it was clear that it would benefit substantially from a much bigger database of recorded speech to improve it.
This I suspect is what Apple are doing now by launching Siri as a Beta product, and why it is both important that Siri is recorded and processed server side. It may also be the reason why we are now seeing a number of different adverts to encourage us to use Siri more and in different ways.
My expectation is that Siri will improve enormously over time, whether it be 1 month or 10 years will partly be dependent on how much it is used in the meantime.
I use it in UK mode (in China) and it seems to me the performance has been improved substantially in both it's understanding of individual words and contextualising groups of words, I also have no life changing expectations of it yet but still find it surprisingly useful for certain circumstances.
Yeah, that's what she said...
Quote:
Originally Posted by festerfeet
As far as my limited understanding stretches, voice recognition and response is developed by building a large enough data set to anticipate and interpret speech. This was one of the motivations behind Google Talk, and why Googles competing product Majel may well be pretty good out of the blocks.
Actually Goog 411 was the original test application for their voice recognition algorhythms, however, you are correct about the motivation and when they EOLd the service that was the explanation given for the termination of the service. They had sufficiently built the voice database and no more voice samples were required.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
Considering that Steve was around when the final decisions were made in the iPhone 4S, the question has been answered. Jobs clearly was OK with Siri.
You seem to love the unending Apple-hating remarks, but you've never been able to document any of them.
1. What (specifically) is wrong with Lion? "it's a mess" isn't a rational argument.
2. Name an OS that is better, more consistent, and better designed.
3. And what are your credentials that makes you more of an OS expert than Apple?
It's all well and good to whine and complain about everything Apple does, but where's your evidence?
1. What percentage of people find that Siri works for them, at least most of the time?
2. What speech recognition system on the market today works better?
3. Can you make something better?
Yeah, I can make something better, give me just a second to pull it out of my behind.... Sorry for the response but of that's the level we are talking here I am afraid it's the only rational response to it. Same goes for no. 3 of the first batch of questions. I don't have to be more of an os expert, and for tt matter I can't be more of an os expert than a computer (well...) company to know as a computer user with a computer science degree when an os release is rather shit. I am not a cloud computing expert but like others I had a fairly good idea that mm was shit too, thanks to SJ we have an official validation that it was. OS X lion has been a fiasco. There are 40+ arguments on why this was the case, but I won't do you the favour and lose an hour or so to go over them, it will be pointless anyway to do so, as you wil still not be conveinced, and I am not here to convince anyone anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
Keep in mind that myapplelove has over 1400 posts and virtually every one is a mindless attack on Apple, but he never provides any evidence to back his claims.
Apparently, he thinks that if he simply screams "Apple sucks" enough times that people will stop buying Apple products and his short position in AAPL will pay off.
You might want to read posts 300-1000 or so to see my praising apple, so that's as much a truth as my "mindless" attacks with no arguments. I am sorry you can't stomach criticism on apple, and I am more sorry for for your blind faith to anything apple creates, but when a company drops the ball I call them out for it, and apple dropped the ball on os x big time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by myapplelove
Yeah, I can make something better, give me just a second to pull it out of my behind.... Sorry for the response but of that's the level we are talking here I am afraid it's the only rational response to it. Same goes for no. 3 of the first batch of questions. I don't have to be more of an os expert, and for tt matter I can't be more of an os expert than a computer (well...) company to know as a computer user with a computer science degree when an os release is rather shit. I am not a cloud computing expert but like others I had a fairly good idea that mm was shit too, thanks to SJ we have an official validation that it was. OS X lion has been a fiasco. There are 40+ arguments on why this was the case, but I won't do you the favour and lose an hour or so to go over them, it will be pointless anyway to do so, as you wil still not be conveinced, and I am not here to convince anyone anyway.
You keep saying that Lion is shit, fiasco, etc. What specific.
We have been using Lion on 3 of the 4 Macs that support Lion (The iMac 24 runs Snow Leopard because I don't want to buy an update to Photoshop).
One of the Macs running Lion is a headless Mini that holds our Media Library on external 2TB HDDs.
My daughter and her 3 kids share an iMac 20 running Lion.
I have a loaded Dual Display iMac 27 that runs FCP X & other power apps and has 2 Promise Pegasus 12 TB Raids attached.
I consider myself a power user and the other Lion users are above average users.
I also have Mountain Lion on an external HDD -- and periodically boot to see how ML works for this or that.
I honestly don't understand your complaints about Lion -- if they are valid, I think you could enumerate 2-3 key issues off the top of your head and itemize them in a few sentences.
Otherwise, discussing it is just tilting at windmills.
The goal of this test was to see if various words could be accurately interpreted by Siri's speech-to-test (Dragon Dictation) engine. I used 5 different words, not completely phrases, one of them being gazpacho, to see if the change in codec affects the engine's ability to convert the waveform to text.
Since I couldn't find a built-in app in OS X that would allow for various codecs — the way you can have screenshots rendered as various image formats — I DLed and installed Audio Hijack Pro. I recorded everything in ALAC then imported to iTunes where I converted the ALAC to both 256kbps AAC and 128kbps AAC, and 256kbps MP3 and 128kbps MP3.
In all cases the system was able to interpret the recording correctly. Note there were times when it didn't work that was the case with all recordings and when I spoke directly to Siri's speech-to-text engine, and there was no noticeable difference between spoken or recorded, or between the various codecs and bitrates.
Conclusion: For the codecs and bit rates used the Siri engine is not adversely affected in generating speech-to-text. A clearly expressed term in both loudness and pronunciation seem to the most important aspects.
Sol, thanks for taking the time and effort and posting your results.
I think that in a global economy, Siri will have to handle slang, dialects, and mixed languages like Spanglish.
I was playing around with things like:
Play una paloma Blanca... Never did get it -- then tried: Play Slim Whitman, then skip until it came up.
Oddly, Play Gaite (pronounced gay) Parisenne, brought up the Can-Can about half the time.
Well, enumeration or not, if your machines run great, I m fine by that, anyway:
Buggy and problematic smb shares, slow, unreliable, no searching, problems with printers via smb.
safari memory leaks
Autoshutdown acing like program crash
Still no dpi or ri settings with ever shrinking font in higher and higher resolutions
annoying and/or buggy save states (close all safari windows, log out and in and they pop up again)
defualt versioning a problem
Frqeuent crashes in preview
mail going to 1-2gb memory
briken memory management with too many page outs, much larger kernel task memory allocation
poor performance in order macs where windows installations right now run much better and expand their life cycle
various ui problems in monochromatic user interface elements, iPad looking elements not well suited to macs, duplicate instead of save as etc., and in general it shows a tendency to pander to ios design but without good judgment on implementation , much like the new apple tv interface, the people overseeing ui choices are no Steve Jobs. It ales a lot of talent to go from decent o good to great and from convoluted to simple. Durrent os x ui design is very seldom well done. It's the difference between huddler and a good forum software.
poorly implemented mission control ui (about to be fixed in ml)
a generally slow system even on new macs, certainly not showcasing the state of the art hardware used
mcuh less responsive browsers both chrome and safari compared to windows (tried and tested in many devices) and flash now has be disabled by default in os x (yeah I don't like flash either, but it's a large part of the web still)
Poor legacy support, when g4 computers could run leopard, it's inexcusable that macs circa 2009 won't run mountain lion.
Its a poor release anyway you cut it, it brought many very unpolished and questionable "features", many bugs in major os software, and has had very ltle focus on core software development unlike sl. Apple isn't putting appropriate care to it, and they are too focused on its, their dev teams are enoguh, and the b team very obviously gets to work on os x.
Thanks for the detailed response -- I see some valid points there... And a few I will challenge.
Right now, I am watching the NBA playoffs -- so it will be later tonight.
Same for me here. Worked in first try.
Quote:
Originally Posted by myapplelove
Well, enumeration or not, if your machines run great, I m fine by that, anyway:
Buggy and problematic smb shares, slow, unreliable, no searching, problems with printers via smb.
safari memory leaks
Autoshutdown acing like program crash
Still no dpi or ri settings with ever shrinking font in higher and higher resolutions
annoying and/or buggy save states (close all safari windows, log out and in and they pop up again)
defualt versioning a problem
Frqeuent crashes in preview
mail going to 1-2gb memory
briken memory management with too many page outs, much larger kernel task memory allocation
poor performance in order macs where windows installations right now run much better and expand their life cycle
various ui problems in monochromatic user interface elements, iPad looking elements not well suited to macs, duplicate instead of save as etc., and in general it shows a tendency to pander to ios design but without good judgment on implementation , much like the new apple tv interface, the people overseeing ui choices are no Steve Jobs. It ales a lot of talent to go from decent o good to great and from convoluted to simple. Durrent os x ui design is very seldom well done. It's the difference between huddler and a good forum software.
poorly implemented mission control ui (about to be fixed in ml)
a generally slow system even on new macs, certainly not showcasing the state of the art hardware used
mcuh less responsive browsers both chrome and safari compared to windows (tried and tested in many devices) and flash now has be disabled by default in os x (yeah I don't like flash either, but it's a large part of the web still)
Poor legacy support, when g4 computers could run leopard, it's inexcusable that macs circa 2009 won't run mountain lion.
Its a poor release anyway you cut it, it brought many very unpolished and questionable "features", many bugs in major os software, and has had very ltle focus on core software development unlike sl. Apple isn't putting appropriate care to it, and they are too focused on its, their dev teams are enoguh, and the b team very obviously gets to work on os x.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum
Thanks for the detailed response -- I see some valid points there... And a few I will challenge.
Right now, I am watching the NBA playoffs -- so it will be later tonight.
OK!
First, are you Using Lion exclusively on Macs -- no Hackintoshes. I once believed that software is buggy and hardware is a rock-solid known entity -- hardware can be buggier than software.
Second, I believe with each release of OS X, Apple tries to establish a new threshold of minimum system requirements/capabilities while, at the same time, discarding whatever it can to minimize legacy bloat, This philosophy has served Apple and its users pretty well. Though, any particular OS X release may not suit specific users' needs -- my need for Rosetta requires me to run SNL on a single Mac. At any point in time, some of the OS features are not, yet, implemented in the OS -- they are being piloted in a few, select apps.
Third, I believe the iOsification of OS X is a good thing if done properly. Many legacy OS X constructs were reimplemented "the right way" for iOS, then ported back to the OS X mothership. Apple appears to be giving the Mac user the option to run the iOS UI along with the traditional OS X UI -- rather than cramming it down the users' throat, ala Metro.
Fourth, I believe that Apple knows where it wants to go with OS X, and basically this means that the OS becomes invisible (or at least gets out of the way) for most users -- while still satisfying the needs of the power user. Some day, in the not-too-distant future, Apple will celebrate the "arrival" by CTFF -- Can The Fine Finder.
Response to your specific points:
We don't use smb shares -- no comment
Safari memory leaks a periodic problem -- pretty responive fixes from Apple
Do not use autoshutdown -- Experience has shone better to keep things running (sleep)
I think DPI and RI will come in ML -- maybe with retina and GPU requirements
no problems here with saved states
versioning works fine for us
use Preview all the time -- can't remember any crashes
mail is 1.52 gb -- not a big deal here
mem management & kernel -- no information
poor performance on older Macs -- stay on older OS X version
monochromatic UI -- Apple trying things, SJ certainly approved Lion UI -- I think its a step in a series
mission control -- OK
slow -- see below
browsers and Flash -- seems as fast or faster than SNL
legacy support -- a plus and a minus -- you still can run an old OS X version
Finally let me demonstrate the future, as I see it:
I have used Final Cut for years... It is a powerful, but intricate, confusing and bloated piece of legacy [Carbon] software -- crash and error prone. It was updated every 12-18 months with mostly feature adds and bug fixes. Many users stay a release (or 2) behind.
FCP X was released less than a year ago -- completely rethought and reimplemented. It is wicked fast and fun to use. You never save anything (like iOS) it autosaves. You have fantastic metadata and search capability with an SQL DB (though you don't know it) file management system. You can do in minutes what it takes the older FCP hours to do, on the same hardware.
When first released, FCP X lacked some capabilities of the prior versions -- but it has been updated 4 times (fixes and features) in less than 12 months (obviously, some feature additions were already in development).
It cost 1/3 of the prior version.
FCP X is not for everybody... but it shows the future.
I believe that Apple does the same thing staging its OS releases:
-- establish a threshold
-- show some sizzle that exploits the threshold
-- discard legacy baggage
-- set the stage for the next release
So, any version of the OS is just a step along the road -- some better, some worse. In the case of OS X, you can stay on the current release or, for $30, download the latest version from the app store.
That's a pretty good accomplishment, IMO.
Paraphrasing: OS X is a journey, not a destination.
Edit: Just to follow up. The mail app on my system takes 1.75 MB RAM idle up to 1.52 GB when very busy. Compare that to the Flash plugin whick takes 1.75 GB RAM and 115% CPU when idle...