
John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team - Nuance
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/12/john-giannandrea-named-to-apples-executive-team/
======
skizm
Lots of comments about improving Siri here. This is interesting to me for
several reasons I won't address, but I will ask this: Do people really use
voice commands for, well, anything?

From a purely functional standpoint, they seem super awkward to me. I like
buttons that click and reassure me of every input. I like to feel confident my
actions won't be misinterpreted. I like that no one else near me will get
weirded out or annoyed when I'm having trouble interfacing with whatever app
I'm currently using. The only reason I can envision using voice controls for
anything is in the car while driving, and you would only begrudgingly use them
because it is overwhelmingly safer to have both hands on the wheel and your
eyes on the road.

Apart from not enjoying voice controls from a functional point of view, is no
one else creeped out at always on mics and video cameras in their house? In
this era of super crappy security, especially with consumer grade stuff,
there's a not insignificant chance your stuff is currently being hacked by one
or more non-government bad actors (I already assume the US government, and
probably a few other governments, already have 24/7 access to every mic and
camera that is connected to the web in any way).

I've been assuming voice commands will die out and that this Alexa / Siri hype
(hype might not be the right word. buzz? rumblings?) was a result of Amazon
and Apple pushing them from a marketing perspective. The amount of comments
about Siri in a thread about a random exec being added to Apple is making me
re-consider that PoV.

~~~
matwood
> Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?

Siri plus shortcuts have made many mundane tasks easier. When I get in my car
to come home from work I say "Hey Siri, heading home." That causes my phone to
text my wife my arrival time _and_ starts the last podcast I had playing.

It's a simple thing, but is so much easier than texting and then thumbing
through the podcast player to start where I left off. I have others like
logging my water intake or weight, but it was really adding shortcuts to Siri
that made these possible.

Playing music or TV shows is also much easier/nicer. "Hey Google, play The
Office on Netflix".

Timers. Another simple thing that is so much easier when you can use your
voice when cooking.

~~~
pmart123
I am skeptical when technologists say voice assisted systems will become the
dominant interface at least in countries with a high rate of literacy.

I just look at TV vs radio, texting versus calling, or audio books versus
written content. I believe most studies indicate that people are better at
visual comprehension versus auditory:

[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-audi...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-auditory-
memory-visual-learning-brain-research-science/)

I know scientists love working on voice and speech recognition, since it is a
hard problem to solve, but it sometimes feels like its a bit of a solution in
search of a problem. I'm sure there are good use cases, I'm just skeptical
that they are profound enough for voice to be our primary medium for
interaction.

~~~
Cogito
More generally, I think the thing you are noticing is that visual and physical
items offer random access.

Compare trying to find a specific piece of information in a book, vs in some
training DVD.

If I'm just learning how to cook, watching a professional demonstrate the
whole thing is going to be very helpful, but if I already know how to cook in
general it's easier to flick to the right section of a book and scan the page
for the bit of information I need.

Or compare the difference between listening to a phone system's 7 different
options vs seeing all the options available on a single screen.

The other side of this is precision. Not only do input methods like a keyboard
allow you to give extremely explicit, high information, instructions with no
need for interpretation, they also have extremely fast feedback loops. Imagine
trying to use your voice to click on a specific part of an image, or draw a
circle around it. Far, far easier to move a pointer with your hand, watch
where it goes, and then click when it's in the right position.

So visual comprehension probably is better than auditory, but I think the main
things that are important are random access, specific and information dense
input, and low latency feedback loops on input - all things that we are far
better at achieving with physical/visual methods than auditory or speech based
methods.

~~~
pmart123
This is very well said and a great point. A lot of this relates to random
access and which has an O(1) lookup. “Play season 2, episode 3” could be
better as voice versus “if you want to reach reception, dial 1” is much better
as an interface.

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m0zg
It's just unbelievable to me that the company sitting on a quarter trillion
dollars is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that hoard to hire the best
of the best in order to fix the very thing that will kill their cash cow in
the next 5 years. I'm on iOS myself (and have been faithful since the first
iPhone), but $30 Google Home puck feels like it's from the future. Understands
me perfectly, comes up with decent answers, doesn't require rigid commands,
etc. Whereas Siri is so bad I use it only to set alarms and timers. Not even
setting of reminders is reliable.

~~~
Despegar
I'll take that bet. The iPhone is going to keep printing money for the next
15-20 years at least.

Apple is a 40 year old company, and they're still raking in the dough from
their original product category.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
15-20 years? How are you SURE that smartphones will still be a thing in 20
years? Let alone that Apple will still be the hip premium brand? 20 years is a
LONG time. The average lifespan for an S&P 500 company is less than that these
days.

~~~
Despegar
Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. The smartphone is unlikely
to be replaced for a long time to come. There will be plenty of head fakes
along the way no doubt (smart speakers and voice bots come to mind), but the
smartphone is simply too good and has too much utility to be easily
challenged.

And you also have to make a bet that Apple won't come to dominate that area as
well (even if they aren't first to it). AR glasses have some promise to be a
new general purpose computing platform, but even then I'm skeptical that it
will be able to mount a serious challenge to the smartphone.

~~~
rabidrat
> Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare.

They've only happened every decade so far: 1960 (IC), 1970 (DARPA), 1980 (PC),
1990 (GUI), 2000 (Internet), 2010 (smartphone).

~~~
Despegar
The GUI is not something I'd break out separately from the PC. And the
internet is something that massively improved the utility of PCs and increased
demand for them, it wasn't something that was going to replace it.

~~~
philwelch
> And the internet is something that massively improved the utility of PCs and
> increased demand for them, it wasn't something that was going to replace it.

No, it just devastated the market for native PC applications.

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paganel
Wiki link on the guy for the lazy, as I had no idea who he was:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Giannandrea](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Giannandrea)

~~~
landr0id
Pretty short page but solid background.

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mjlee
Hopefully this is a signal that Apple is going to take steps to improve Siri.
If Apple can find a way to get the best of both worlds from data privacy and
machine learning then it will have been well worth the wait.

~~~
baxtr
I am really annoyed by Siri these days. I was so excited when they introduced
it in 2011 (?). But I feel like there was almost no progress since then. It’s
so painful to use Siri even for the simplest of tasks

~~~
threatofrain
After so many years Siri still doesn’t do “take me to the nearest McDonald’s”
like Google Assistant can. And whenever Siri isn’t “confident” it just
launches Safari, but it’s often not even the best starting point, and Siri
sometimes gives up silently without feedback.

Also for a bit of fun, ask Siri for the population of Buffalo NY. I noticed
because Siri also tells you that Buffalo is big, and then goes on to say...

~~~
scarface74
I just tried “take me to the nearest McDonalds” and it replied “which local
business, tap the one you want” with a list from nearest to farthest and when
I click on it, it gives me directions to the one I choose.

As far as the second question - yeah that one was weird. It said that the
population was 69 but the text summary that it displayed was 269,000. It’s the
only city that displayed that bug.

~~~
threatofrain
Did you see how Google Assistant handles the nearest McDonald’s request?
Google doesn’t ask you which McDonald’s is the closest one, tap the one you
want.

~~~
scarface74
But that’s more of an interface choice than a technical limitation. Siri both
understood the question and had the ability to navigate to it.

In my case, there were 9 McDonalds within a 10 mile radius.

In cases where there was only one location nearby, it took me right to it.

~~~
threatofrain
I think you give Siri too much of the benefit of the doubt when you say that
Siri understands your request. You may be correct, but maybe Siri just looks
for a location like "McDonalds" and most of the time just shows you a list?
It's easier when you're ignoring the rest of the sentence as if it has no
relevance to improving your response.

It's very hard for us to discuss Siri's internal state; by contrast it's
easier to discuss Google's observable performance, which is to semantically
differentiate between these two requests.

You can just ask Google, "Nearby McDonalds" and you'll get a list. "Go to the
nearest McDonalds" and you get navigation.

~~~
scarface74
Take me to the nearest McDonalds - gives me a list.

“McDonalds” - gives me a list.

“Take me to the closest McDonalds” - brings up maps and starts navigating to
the closest McDonalds.

After further experimentation. Siri doesn’t understand Nearest but does
understand “closest” to mean that I don’t want a list.

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bitxbitxbitcoin
His role: senior vice president of Machine Learning and Artificial
Intelligence Strategy.

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rglover
For all the folks lamenting Siri: that was likely just the prototype. I'd bet
good money that Apple is working on something far better than a personal
assistant for the home—that's just how they got their feet wet while staying
competitive. Siri is going to be a robot in your home one day—not just a
bubble on the credenza. In order for that to happen, their best talent needs
to be focused on that.

~~~
komaromy
This is giving them a lot of benefit of the doubt. Do you have any evidence?

~~~
rglover
Their track record and the caliber of folks floating around Apple.

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fuckthecops
Reading the dumb things people in this thread go to the effort of making a
voice controls for simply for the sake of using voice controls perfectly
summarizes how useless voice control tech is. You're literally saving seconds
of effort in order to open up yourself to an infinite amount of attack
vectors. You deserve to be pwned.

~~~
fuckthecops
Also the "Apple is gonna make voice control mainstream!" arguement in 2017+1
is hilarious. Apple has failed every new tech endeavor since the iPhone. The
tablet, the smart watch, the touch bar, the ear pods, forcing usb3- everything
has been a failure.

~~~
ClassyJacket
Was this sarcasm? Their tablet, watches and Airpods are all very well received
and successful. I have the Watch and AirPods and they're great. As for USB, I
assume you mean USB-C, what would you prefer? Another proprietary connector?

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jeffrallen
JG is a smart and nice guy. Congrats.

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freewizard
SVP is probably a very important position in corporate AAPL, however, I will
feel more excited for Apple if someone like Chris Lattner would join/return as
chief AI/ML engineer.

~~~
freyir
His experience seems to be entirely focused on compilers. He's a talented
engineer and leader, and his decision to join Google Brain indicates interest
in AI, but wouldn't the chief AI/ML engineer have some demonstrable expertise
in that particular field?

~~~
julien_c
Jeff Dean didn't have a demonstrable expertise in AI before heading Google AI.

~~~
iainmerrick
Yes he did -- He co-authored an influential deep learning paper in 2012:
[https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub40565](https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub40565)

I think his contribution at that time was mainly clever ways to drastically
scale up existing neural net techniques, but just scaling things up 100x or
1000x seems to be a large part of the magic of deep learning.

~~~
polishTar
And not only that. Even his undergrad thesis back from 1990 was on neural
nets.
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I1fs4sczbCaACzA9XwxR3DiuXVt...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I1fs4sczbCaACzA9XwxR3DiuXVtqmejL/view)

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aphroz
Apple is not an innovative company.They are a marketing company. What do
marketing teams do when they have a lot of money ? They start removing stuff,
remove the wires, remove the inputs/outputs and kill the company. Good bye
Apple, even this guy can't save you. I won't miss you.

~~~
briandear
Are we trotting out that old trope again? Two words for you: Apple Watch.
Nobody is even close to what they did with Watch and what they are doing with
health. Look at the camera and photos app: on device ML. Look at the tech
behind Memories for instance. They’re doing this without sending your photos
to some privacy-invading server. Look at FaceId. Sure Samsung had facial
recognition — but it could be fooled with a printed photo. Look at what Apple
has done with AR. Their computational photography stuff is also incredible.
But sure let’s lament the loss of a SCSI port and call it a marketing
decision.

~~~
aphroz
Yes, I couldn't resist. I am sorry, but I have maybe seen 2-3 people wearing
an Apple watch and never heard about Memories. Apple watch (and Siri) might be
a thing in the US but definitely not in Europe or Asia. I feel like Apple have
only 2 successful products: Iphone and Macbook. Their biggest success however
is creating a cult and closing personal computer hardware (remember
IBM/compatible).

~~~
randomsearch
And did closed turn out to be an invalid decision? Closed meant control,
control meant more security and privacy and avoiding reliance on advertising
revenue.

~~~
aphroz
Good marketing decision

