

Siri in practice - Liu
http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2011/10/15/siri-in-practice/

======
swombat
To me, the main shortcomings, at the moment, as a UK customer, are the male
voice (seriously... I want the nicer american female voice... it
subconsciously annoys me to think of "Siri" as a British male) and, perhaps
more importantly, the fact that Siri won't connect to Yell/GMaps/etc in the UK
yet, so I can't emerge out of the tube and ask "How do I get to 123 Some
Street?" and be presented with a map. I'm not quite sure why that doesn't work
in the UK - surely, the interfaces to Google Maps and even Yell don't differ
by country.

Despite those, it is already very useful. I'm using the timer all the time
("Set a timer for 3 minutes", "Wake me up in 20 minutes", "Wake me up at 7am
tomorrow"), and the weather ("What's the weather like tomorrow?"), and using
it to set meetings ("Add event 'drinks with Enrico' at 6pm on Friday").

The real killer, imho, will be the integration with services. The voice
recognition seems good enough, the "parsing what you mean" could be improved
but is good enough. What makes or breaks Siri is the integration with
services. The timer/reminders/calendar integration is extremely smooth and so
it is great and a huge help. Bits that aren't integrated (e.g. Twitter) or
less well integrated (e.g. sending SMS's), less so.

All in all, a great start, and useful from day one, though, like all new Apple
products, there's plenty of room for improvement. I'm waiting to see where
they take it - unlike some other companies, Apple do have a reputation for
relentlessly pushing forward after releasing an initial, "it doesn't do much
but it does it well" device.

~~~
Lewisham
Do you know if you can set the British English of Siri independent of the
phone language? As a Brit in the US, my Android phone doesn't understand
anything I say unless I say it in a so-bad-its-almost-xenophobic American
accent. Same with my car.

YouTube videos indicate that Siri does understand British accents, but if I
have to set the phone language to full on British, that would be a bit
annoying (sadly, it is now tires, color, favorite and temperatures in
Farenheit for me).

~~~
nirvana
Yes. The Siri Settings screen has a language choice that is Siri specific. I'm
pretty certain that Siri, like most open ended recognition systems has
separate recognizers for various accents, and of course, languages. (Though
Apple has apparently set Siri's responding voice using the same control, they
probably should have made them separate settings.)

[http://techbend.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-siri-look-like-
scre...](http://techbend.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-siri-look-like-screenshot-
video-apple-release/)

You can also turn off voice feedback if the British Male voice annoys you as
well.

~~~
X-Istence
I really like the Australian accent, but as soon as I turn that on Siri will
no longer find any businesses that are close to me since that is only
supported if set to US English.

~~~
Lewisham
Yes, I just popped down to the store to try this out. It's a bizarre
limitation... the phone knows where it is, why should it matter if I want to
speak to it in Australian/British English/Spanish?

------
X-Istence
If you set up the phonetic first and last name, Siri will pick up on them the
next time your data is shipped off to Apple (yes, your data exists in the
cloud when using Siri), also, I have set nicknames for certain friends, and
saying "Call <nickname>" works exactly as one would expect. This is a killer
feature, I have nicknamed my dad, my step-mom, and various other people so
that Siri knows to call my Dad when I ask it to.

I've already gotten better at asking Siri questions, yes it may seem unnatural
at first, but overall the benefit I gain from using a little less natural
language is enough for me.

I've had my new iPhone 4S for all of one day now, and it remains to be seen if
I will continue to use Siri, but this morning when I woke up and couldn't find
my glasses I was still able to find out what my boss texted me about, send him
a reply and all of this using my voice. That is fantastic and I absolutely
love it.

------
mikeryan
My biggest issue is that my wife's name is "April" every time I say something
like "call April" or "text April" it try's to set a reminder for April 1st.

~~~
snprbob86
You can say "April is my Wife" and hopefully that will record the
relationship. If that doesn't work, go to your contacts and edit your own
contact info and add her as your spouse. Then you can say "call my wife" &
that should work.

------
antirez
It is _all_ a matter of how useful it is already. If it is already much better
than using the normal touch interface in many cases, the technology will
evolve a lot in some way. There will be more users willing to pay for it, more
competitors, and so forth. I really hope for this to happen.

On the other hand, if it is not good enough to be an improvement over the
normal touch interface it will likely not be very used if not to show it to
your friends for the first months. Next phone you buy you'll not care if it
has or not that feature (unless somebody else or newer iPhones will be able to
improve it a lot), and the technology will hardly evolve.

I don't still know as I don't have an iPhone 4s, and stories I read still
can't tell me if it is going to be used a lot or not. Also in the specific
case of Italian, I guess the at least the recognition can be near perfect as
Italian is a lot simpler than English to turn into text (probably simpler than
any other language given that things are spoken exactly as they are read). But
then the interpretation I guess will pose very similar problems, with the
disadvantage of not being a mainstream language.

~~~
swombat
_If it is already much better than using the normal touch interface in many
cases, the technology will evolve a lot in some way. There will be more users
willing to pay for it, more competitors, and so forth. I really hope for this
to happen._

That is the case (at least as far as I'm concerned, as a happy iPhone 4S user.
The use cases are still fairly limited, but for those use cases it works very
well, much better than the touch interface.

------
Tycho
One thing I'll say for Siri: a few months ago I had an idea for a dictaphone
device with a calendar function and voice recognition. As we know voice
recognition is notoriously unreliable, but I figured it could be heavily
optimized for the lingual subset necessary for setting appointments/reminders.
I think that would be extremely useful to people with bad memories (eg. many
elderly people), or lots to keep track of. Everyone I mentioned this to
thought it was a great idea.

Looks like Siri does precisely that.

------
paul9290
I've been using Siri as a utility and for entertainment for the past 48 hours.

It's incredibly useful especially when driving. I've plugged my iphone into my
car stereo and have been using Siri to get directions, recommendations, play
music and to compose messages. I'm able to get work done now while driving and
Im doing so safely.

The success rate that she understands me (im not speaking into a ear/mic piece
rather it's speaker phone like) is about 80%.

The only thing I have found to be a learning curve and source of frustration
is composing messages. You really need to think of exactly what you want to
say before speaking it. Also, you need to speak proper punctuation at the end
of each sentence, like "Do you want to get food <question mark>" "We can meet
at Applebees <period>".

This learning curve may turn some people off, though maybe others won't face a
similar challenge? Either way I have found Siri to be enjoyably useful!

------
klinquist
It's most valuable feature is the novelness of it - it is likely being used by
over a _million_ people right now. I assume that Apple is tracking result
click-throughs to guess when Siri is providing (or actually, not providing)
the right answer to your query. This should mean it'll become exponentially
better over time.

~~~
ramchip
I'd expect it to be more like a logarithmic increase than an exponential one.
The asymptote is the point where you reach perfect integration or fine tuning
of the algorithm, at which point extra feedback stops being useful. Or perhaps
I'm just taking "exponentially" too literally...

~~~
CamperBob
How does exponential growth differ from logarithmic growth? An exponent is a
logarithm, no...?

~~~
xxbondsxx
Woof! Someone's been out of high school for too long :P

exp(x) takes e (the constant) and raises it to the x power. Log(x) finds the
power to raise the base (usually 10 but sometimes e) to produce x. They are
essentially inverses of each other. Log(exp(x)) = x;

Graphically they are quite different:
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=exp%28x%29>

<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ln%28x%29>

~~~
CamperBob
Sure, but that's just a matter of how the terminology is used. Setting aside
natural logs for a moment, consider that log10(1000) is 3, where 3 is
simultaneously the "exponent" to which 10 must be raised to equal 1000, and
the "logarithm," in the sense that it's the result of the log10 function, as
might be found by looking in a table of logarithms.

~~~
ramchip
I understand what you mean, but the problem is that the terminology has a
precisely defined meaning, and if you ignore the convention you will be
misunderstood. It would be like saying that a certain O(log n) algorithm has
an exponential complexity -- the meaning is completely different. The growth
of a function concerns the dependent variable, so y=e^x has exponential
growth, while y=ln(x) is logarithmic. See also:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_growth>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth>

(Sorry for the off-topic tangent!)

------
alexholehouse
Having now actually used it, I've got to say it's pretty impressive,
especially for location based searches ("Where's the best steak in town?" got
me a load of steak restaurants, whether or not their the best is probably
another matter, but I was impressed none the less).

Tell it, "I love you Siri". The response made me smile.

------
zerostar07
today i learned that windows seven can do speech recognition. I wrote this
comment with it but it took me five minutes.

------
foobarbazetc
Unfortunately, the English (Australia) recognition is infuriatingly bad.

It works okay (75%) for built in commands, but anything to do with
transcription (messages etc) is about 50/50. And that's really not good enough
for a shipping product.

~~~
alastairpat
Just curious - does it recognise 'full stop' instead of 'period'?

It's very unfortunate that it doesn't transcribe Australian English that well
- do you have a particularly broad accent, if you don't mind me asking?

------
woj
I noticed the new address book has entries for phonetic first/last names (use
the Add Field). I assume those are used by Siri (just like the Related People
fields) and would solve your name problem.

~~~
StavrosK
Weren't those there since 2.x? I remember using them.

~~~
woj
Possible. What were they used for before? Voice control?

~~~
StavrosK
Sorting, I think.

------
Groxx
For things like names, has anyone tried using the "Phonetic First/Last Name"
field in their address book? I suspect it's there for reasons like this.

~~~
Someone
I cannot check this, but <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard#vCard_extensions>
seems to indicate that is for alternative Japanese spellings, not for truely
phonetic entries. If it is for phonetic entries, I would expect that one would
have to use the international phonetic alphabet for entries there.

------
nirvana
We've been down this road before with both the Newton and the Palm Pilot. The
Palm couldn't properly recognize text at all, and so its users learned a
custom form of hieroglyphics in order to use it. The newton had some trouble
with particular letters in particular handwriting --where really the letter
isn't properly formed at all, but humans are able to get it with more context
than the recognizer. A slight change, like better writing, resolved the issue.

So, users will adjust to Siri some.

At the same time, whenever Apple introduces a new technology, it is always
lacking in some area. Apple limits the breadth and polishes what it does ship
to as high a degree as they possibly can... and then extends it over time.
Siri doesn't work in all languages or all places right now.

Apple's always extending, and unless the initial version is so useless that it
has no adoption, over time Siri will get better and we'll adjust.

The real question is, whether Siri is useful enough now to use regularly... or
if it will be a passing fad, soon forgotten.

~~~
wrs
The hype around Siri as a "personal assistant" and the carefully-crafted ads
that show it working in an ideal context remind me a lot of the hype around
Newton, which caused a backlash when it turned out to be just a computer after
all.

The problem is deeper than recognizing what you said or wrote. Newton's
"intelligent assistant" had the same sorts of trouble with meaning, like
having to use literal text from your data ("When is Dentist?" vs. "When is my
dental appointment?") Apparently while computers are better at determining
what words you said than they were in 1992, there hasn't been a ton of
improvement in _understanding_ what you said, even at this apparently simple
level.

~~~
mechanical_fish
The problem with Newton is that there was little alternative to struggling
with the handwriting recognition. You could plug in external keyboards, but
they added even _more_ bulk. I believe there was an onscreen keyboard, but who
on earth wanted to tap out text with a _stylus_?

When Siri screws up you can laugh off the problems and go with Plan B: "Use
iOS the usual way, like we all did last month".

------
chugger
Siri is a game changer. Wait for siri-enabled apps in the future.

~~~
chugger
"I want to watch Hot Tub Time Machine on Netflix"

"Send 3 dozen roses to my wife tomorrow"

"I want two large pizza delivered to my house"

------
Sakes
Siri is saving me from a lot of typing while driving.

~~~
antirez
while driving? It is saving your life as well I guess.

~~~
Sakes
You've never punched something into google maps while on the road? Am I alone
here?

~~~
recursive
> You've never punched something into google maps while on the road?

Correct.

