
Ixoth - kevinburke
http://ixoth.com/
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axefrog
You know what's cool about Siri? Apple now has a vested interest in improving
natural language processing artificial intelligence as fast as it can. I don't
think there's ever been a commercial interest in that type of technology at
this scale before. And they probably have more cash to throw at this kind of
stuff than any other company on the planet. I will be extremely interested to
see where this develops in the coming years. You can imagine upcoming WWDC
events unveiling amazing new Siri developments.

Services like Ixoth may end up being able to develop into much more useful
products in the future, once they don't have to rely on hacks like SMS
responses.

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russell_h
I was thinking the other day how an Android equivalent of Siri could include
some mechanism for mapping spoken queries to Intents. If someone could find a
user friendly way to execute on this, any app could expose itself to voice
commands from a centralized interface much the way it can expose data for
search, etc.

This could be implemented as a third party app on Android by using the built
in speech recognition, then doing something similar to Ixoth in order to map
text queries to Intents. I don't know enough about iPhone development to say
whether such a thing is possible there, but if not its hard to imagine such a
thing hasn't been considered as a future Siri feature.

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BinaryBird
This blog post touches that subject: How to Integrate Siri with your App? -
[http://blog.roveb.com/post/11855331044/how-to-integrate-
siri...](http://blog.roveb.com/post/11855331044/how-to-integrate-siri-with-
your-app)

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paul9290
So I can hook up any web service that has a SMS offering to your service and
have it interface with Siri?

Yesterday I wrote a blog post re: checking my bank balance using Siri
(<http://ryanspahn.com/siri-checks-bank-balance.html>), as well as other
services(Foursquare - though they need to simplify the process & steps).

After writing this post I thought there should be one service that interfaces
with Siri(thru SMS) and all my favorite web services. If I'm not mistaken, I
think you just created it?

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paul9290
I am sorry that this article is not accessible anymore??? Google has
blacklisted each URL name change(changed it six times) of this article I've
created???

The article is written solely in HTML/CSS and only has two scripts within it
(Intense Debate's script for their comment system & Google Analytics). All
instances of this article have checked out fine when tested for malware or bad
actors using the Google Chrome extension & Google Webmaster Tools. I have no
ill intent. I love the Internet from desiging/coding sites to creating ideas
on the web like <http://sleep.fm> to participating in my local start-up
community.

It's very strange why this keeps getting blacklisted, as I am just trying to
share a thought/idea I had with interested parties. If you are interested in
reading the article i have it posted on my site @ ryanspahn.com

Re: your service I am glad others are thinking the same way. I will be using
your service. Good luck!

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patio11
Dang it, you just sold me an iPhone.

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eitland
As far as I saw, the only Iphone specific detail was the ability to speak the
message instead of typing it.

Or did I overlook something?

~~~
program
You can send SMS and email directly from the Siri panel, also Siri has been
added to the system-wide keyboard and you can use dictation even in third-
party apps.

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kristianc
Android already does more or less both of these things.

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bigethan
<http://ifttt.com/channels/sms>

Could be a nice interface for working with services that exist as ifttt
already has interfaces with a lot of services.

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nzadrozny
Neat stuff, qrush!

Some feedback: the order in which you introduce the concepts on the page seems
backwards. You're starting with the "how" and ending with the "why."

I know this is just an MVP and you're focused on the tech types, but I, for
one, had to read the page more than once to really 'get it.'

My humble suggestion:

1\. Set the context with the Siri screenshot, which iPhone 4S users will
recognize. ("Okay, I get this. We're sending a text with Siri.") 2\. Next,
demonstrate the value with the SMS-and-response screenshot. Hook the
imagination. ("Wow, that's cool! How can I do that?") 3\. Context established,
hook in place, continue with the how-to screenshots, technical details, email
signup.

Kudos again for the neat project. You may have just sold me a 4S, too!

~~~
qrush
Thanks nz, I too was trying to "get it", and I wanted to see if others would
too. Definitely could use some clarification and I'll continue to refine the
concept...once I get it in the hands of some more folks.

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aquark
I'm missing something ... where is the intelligence in how your message gets
translated to the hook?

As far as I can see the whole 'tell me the top story' bit it fluff ... isn't
it just matching 'hacker news' against the SMS?

What happens when I want multiple actions for Hacker News? What if two people
want to register different hooks for Hacker News?

Hasn't this stripped all the Siri style 'AI' out of the equation beyond the
actual sending of the SMS?

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qrush
Hooks will be defined per user, it just a simple match right now. MVP, right?
:) Obviously there's a lot to figure out still, hence the beta.

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jamesjyu
Looks awesome (albeit, simple to make using twilio).

If this does get traction, one can imagine opening up a whole marketplace of
endpoints that can expose all kinds of interesting Ixoth functionality.

What I'm really looking forward to is when Apple opens up API support for
Suri. Suri with a whole ecosystem of apps would be mind blowing.

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nchuhoai
exactly, as with the AppStore in 2.0, Siri will really get off when 3rd party
support is finally there

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dkuebric
Neat. "ixoth" is a pretty unique name, pronunciation-wise. Anybody know if
there have been studies done exploring the sound-space of voice recognition?
E.g. if you could map typical sounds of (english) speech to some sort of
dimensional space, which areas are dense and which are sparse?

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dools
I don't get it - is that because I don't have an iPhone or understand how Siri
works or because I'm stupid?

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bradleyland
So assume you have an iPhone 4S. Siri, the new voice activated assistant, can
do all kinds of cool stuff, but it's sandboxed to the Apple-created uses.
There is currently no public API... sort of.

Siri can send SMS messages, and SMS looks remarkably like a messaging queue.
Given that, you have a basic messaging queue hook within Siri. So if your
receiving endpoint happens to be an application, rather than another mobile
phone, you need only to parse the input and take action.

This will not reach widespread adoption, however. The integration is too
loose, IMO.

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redslazer
I love this but it would be really cool if there was already a sample set of
commands, eg look up the value of a stock, top news item, price of an item on
amazon. That would allow non technical people to use it and still allow
technical people to develop their own.

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qrush
My focus right now is tech folks, it's going to be an API. Maybe eventually
I'll extract common actions performed, but I'd really just like it to be a
general API service.

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simondlr
This is fantastic. It is still a work-around, which won't fit well with the
UX, but it's a novel take! Really looking forward to some interesting
webhooks.

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username4
How do you pronounce Ixoth?

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rottencupcakes
Truthfully, it's a really bad name for a piece of software you're supposed to
reference verbally.

Luckily, you can name it anything you want in your address book.

"Watson, please order me the usual from Grub Hub"

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Raphomet
Presumably this was a design choice: "Ixoth" doesn't really sound like
anything else, which means Siri is unlikely to confuse it with another name or
command.

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qrush
Yep, this exactly. I purchased the domain originally because I was going to
write a roguelike game, but then I got an iPhone 4S :)

The name comes from a monster in Nethack, for the curious:
<http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Ixoth>

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richardburton
This is so cool.

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kwamenum86
Really sweet hack

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dstein
What really bothers me about Siri, is how Apple makes it tied to specific
hardware. Technologically, there should be no reason why Siri-style actions
are not available to every PC, and every smartphone.

Native platforms have been, and still are (thanks to Apple's success), the
major roadblock to innovation.

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jodrellblank
When Microsoft put speech recognition in XP, were you complaining? When Nuance
made Dragon dictate? When Kurzweil made Voicepad Pro? When Google made the
Android only Voice offering? Were you complaining they had hardware
requirements or were platform or OS specific? But now Apple buy and release it
in a way people like, easily a decade after this kind of technology was first
commercially and suddenly that's why nobody else has innovated?

And your complaint isn't even accurate aside from that - DARPA funded SRI for
military purposes, SRI finished their military contract and reformed to a
commercial company and Apple bought them (I.e. innovation happenings) and in
an interview with the company founder he said they had to struggle to get it
to run on the 3GS and implied it would be much better on better hardware.
Speculation is that it does voice recognition on the client (I.e. There are
plausible technical reasons why not every smartphone could run the current
implementation).

Having to differentiate their native platform drives innovation, its having to
support the lowest common denominator and backwards compatibility which
stifles it, and patents which roadblock it.

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dstein
My Macbook Pro should be powerful enough to run the Siri software. But Apple
doesn't let me use it because they only put it on a particular, expensive,
smartphone.

Your comparison isn't valid.

