greg uvan

Oh Great, now he's working for Google. Crap. I hated to see him leave Apple, but moving to Tesla seemed harmless enough. Now he's working for the enemy.

I'm sure this was a very rational decision on Apple's part, given the numbers they have on sales that we're not privy to.

I'm not likely to own a HomePod any time soon. I just don't see all that much value in it, given that I have an iPhone, an iPad, and an Apple Watch, and I have a half-decent stereo with a lightning dock built in sitting in my kitchen.

But I'd sooner be dead than have an "assistant" from either Google, Amazon or Facebook setup permanently in my home. No thanks. I wouldn't install one if they were handing them out for free.

Apple acquired VocalIQ long ago for very cheap. Basically "discovered" them. VocalIQ created an AI system that recognizes human speech %90 of the time where Siri is closer to %30.

and no they didn't just ask robotic questions but tested with actual conversation.

Basically like 30%? Siri might have some issues, but its speech recognition is a lot better than 30%. 30% means that in every single sentence of 10 words, only 3 of those words will be correct. Or, every 10 times you ask it something, 7 of those times what it comes up with is completely unrelated to what you just said. That's nonsense. Even the original iPhone 4S Siri had very good voice recognition. Especially compared to the old-world train-against-your-voice variety. IMO the voice assistant phenomenon only became possible because the basic voice recognition far exceeds 90%.

People clearly weight those "trade-offs" differently. For me, personally, Apple would have to shit the bed and making a truly horrifying broken turd of a phone before I would even consider using an Android phone.