

Slackbot vs. Siri – Battle of the virtual assistant - rezist808
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/17/scarlett-johansson-facebook-moneypenny-and-corporate-productivity/?mod=ST1

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mikhailt
> The company, which last week turned two, just hired its first data
> scientist, and it’s looking to invest in artificial intelligence.
> Butterfield acknowledges the challenge, saying his company will need
> partners with major AI capability.

> “Apple spent billions of dollars on Siri and worked on it for a very long
> time with hundreds of engineers and a huge dataset of voices – and it’s
> f–ing idiotic. Siri is nearly useless,” he says. Apple declined comment.

He doesn't yet have a solution and what he does is talk trash about an actual
product that does exist and for many people, does work as expected for their
own needs.

Right, all he did was lose creditability for me. It makes me think he's using
Apple's name to hype his nonexistent bullshit up.

Show us your solution or STFU.

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GuiA
Welcome to Silicon Valley. Read most interviews with startup founders and the
"visionaries", and you'll find plenty of that kind of rhetoric. "industry X is
completely outdated", "product Y is absolutely worthless", etc. when industry
X and product Y typically have the merits of 1) existing for more than 12
months before being acquired by $MEGACORP and 2) being of use to more people
than the few lucky San Francisco residents with high Twitter follower counts
that were accepted in the startup's private beta.

I was talking with a San Francisco teacher last week who was telling me about
all the different partnerships her school has done with startups, and how they
all had 2 things in common: they only added more work for the teachers without
providing much benefits, and they thought they knew better than anyone.

Nothing to see here. To quote Torvalds, "talk is cheap, show me the code".

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dreamdu5t
> “Apple spent billions of dollars on Siri and worked on it for a very long
> time with hundreds of engineers and a huge dataset of voices – and it’s
> f–ing idiotic. Siri is nearly useless,”

He betrays how ignorant he is about Siri, or manipulative if its all a ruse
for the press. Slack is a simple text chat application! The hubris!

~~~
oautholaf
And for how long was Siri just a set of regular expression rules?

