
Apple's VocalIQ AI - walterbell
http://www.techinsider.io/how-apples-vocaliq-ai-works-2016-5
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groby_b
10,000 data points, modeling an extremely complex system, and 90% "success"
rate?

The word "overfitting" comes to mind.

Assuming that VocalIQ knows what they're doing - and that's a fairly safe bet,
I think - that's not the case. So they've either acquired a _massively_ larger
data set, reduced the complexity of the system, or redefined "success". My bet
would be on the second one.

They've been in the news before, for working on voice IO for cars. That'd make
_much_ more sense than a generic system that massively outperforms all others.

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ctvo
Summarize:

\- Acquihired VocalIQ

\- Unreleased product

\- Unnamed sources

\- Uses machine learning via 10,000 data points from the Mechanical Turk of
people asking questions to beat Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple.

I want to believe.

~~~
tkubacki
'Remember context forever' \- that's serious privacy issue - isn't it

~~~
haikuginger
Depends on how it's implemented. As with most things.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> VocalIQ’s success rate was over 90%, while Google Now, Siri, and Cortana
were only successful about 20% of the time, according to one source.

That could be very impressive except we have no idea what VocalIQ was
successful at, 90% of the time (if indeed it was 90% of the time and not
something completely irrelevant).

~~~
millstone
Well the query was "find a nearby Chinese restaurant with open parking and
WiFi that’s kid-friendly.” So I suppose it's successful at doing that.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
If that's all it does, then it's not very impressive. You can trivially create
a program that finds nearby Chinese restaurants with open parking and WiFi
that's kid friendly, by creating a table of all such establishments and their
"nearby" locations.

Presumably, this was supposed to prove something else- what else? How did they
measure that "90% success rate"?

Just throwing percentiles in the air like that says nothing and makes the
whole thing appear not a little dodgy.

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colemickens
"Apple is working on an AI system that wipes the floor with Google and
everyone else"

Right. Google Now and Siri aren't even in the same realm right now and Google
has access to massively more data than Apple. I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
threeseed
Google doesn't have massively more data than Apple.

Apple has been crawling the web for a few years now to power their suggested
sites feature on Safari. And they also have access to Maps, Siri searches and
all the data sources they linked to power it.

It's an advantage but not a massive nor insurmountable one.

~~~
colemickens
And Google has _literally all_ of that, plus all of Google Search plus all of
Hangouts plus all of Gmail plus all of Google Voice (with voicemail).

I still think it's safe to imply that Google has a massive leg up on the data-
side when compared to Apple, not to mention the today-comparison of Now vs
Siri.

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galistoca
The reason VocalIQ's success rate was "over 90%" is probably because they were
constrained to a specific domain (car control). This is very common approach
among NLP community. Of course you will perform better when your algorithm is
constrained to a specific domain.

All the previous speech recognition platforms like Siri, Cortana, etc. perform
worse since they are for general purposes. On the other hand, the reason
Amazon Echo works so well is because it has very limited purpose.

We all know just because AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol doesn't mean AlphaGo is smart
enough to take over the world.

Spinning this "90%" vs. "20%" just sounds like a bullshit marketing.

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brisance
Has anyone tried Hound? How does it compare with Echo/Google Now?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2RK3z6aiQc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2RK3z6aiQc)
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXVfDSAcpnhMCYGPuFGFIMw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXVfDSAcpnhMCYGPuFGFIMw)

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Roritharr
Google, commanding the largest voice and spoken question dataset, probably the
largest knowledgegraph in the world and for all intents and purposes infinite
resources is to be beat by a small Cambridge Startup at the game they have
basically tried to play since they've been founded?

[http://i.imgur.com/dTmqF1i.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/dTmqF1i.jpg)

~~~
frik
...yeah, by closing down the Freebase website and its community. Now they use
it inhouse.

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chae
It seems rather odd not to mention Viv at all here.

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amaks
I wouldn't call Steve Kovach as credible journalist in tech. His articles in
businessinsider just prove the point.

