
Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution - VierScar
http://blog.freshte.ch/2012/07/googles-answer-to-siri/
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seiji
The brilliance of Siri isn't the voice interface or the replies using text-to-
speech -- it's just the name. People feel they are talking to another person,
not a phone or a computer or a google. People understand Siri approximates a
person, so they can interact with it informally and somewhat personally.

You see it in all the news coverage. People refer to Siri as a person. It gets
into your brain. Have you seen normal people showing off Siri to their
friends? They are giddy with excitement over having a personal robot voice in
their pocket that knows them by name.

I feel google doesn't employ anybody who has an average family or knows
average people. Normal people don't know how things work. What's a "Google
Now?" You'd have to look up a definition. It's about ten different things
jumbled together under an Enterprise-Grade Naming Convention product umbrella.

Look at the Google Now product intro -- "Google Now has prepared an alternate
route for your commute." People have to _learn_ "Google Now" is a product
and/or service that does specific things. People simply _understand_ what Siri
is after seeing someone else use it for a few seconds.

Even the Google Now tagline requires a level of mental disambiguation:
"...with the predictive power of _Now_..."

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mtgx
Personally, I think that's a little gimmicky. I think it was very smart of
Google to not differentiate this too much, but let people think that this
smarter AI thing, is actually still "Google". So in the future people will
just refer to "Google" when doing stuff like this.

It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.

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maurits
>It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly what the future will bring us as
SIRI improves. People talking to it more or less the same you see them talking
to their pets now.

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idspispopd
It's difficult to observe someone talking to Siri. I believe Apple
preemptively realised that people wouldn't like to talk aloud to their phones
in public (and in the process revealing their personal requirements/plans to
anyone in ear shot). The much better method of using Siri in public is with
the handset against the ear.

In public it's much easier, more accurate and far less obvious to use this
other method of activating Siri: When the screen is on, picking up the phone
and putting the handset to ones ear will activate Siri, but far more
discretely that the usual full volume activation. Any casual observer won't
even realise that the user is engaging Siri, let alone talking to a robot.

This is also part of the problem with the "accuracy" studies of Siri in public
places. It's just non sensical to be shouting at your phone over street noise,
of course the accuracy is decreasing in this environment. Not even the users
voice is the same in this environment. However when using the handset to the
ear method: the accuracy remains acceptably high, and no one has to look silly
publicly announcing their dinner plans.

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z92
Which one can give the answer a fraction of a second faster, or who's voice
sounds less robotic means little to me.

I am more interested in knowing about speech recognition capabilities, edge
cases handling, frequency of getting something wrong, accented speech
recognition capabilities, artificial intelligence maturity and depth and
breadth of the knowledge base the systems use.

But this video has focused on the wrong things. I was expecting that the
presenter would be asking both some hard but useful questions and show us
which one comes out with the right answer.

~~~
molmalo
In almost all of the things you mentioned, google has the advantage to make a
better product. They have an enormous power to train their creation, to
achieve a higher level in terms of speech recognition and understanding. I'm
not saying that they are already there, only that they have what is needed.

But i really don't know how far are they willing too go, as taking it too far
away could end up being counterproductive to them, as they earn money showing
ads in their results, so they need people using their website. That's why they
released chrome now in iOS.

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simonster
> In almost all of the things you mentioned, google has the advantage to make
> a better product. They have an enormous power to train their creation, to
> achieve a higher level in terms of speech recognition and understanding. I'm
> not saying that they are already there, only that they have what is needed.

I'm not sure why you think this. Both Apple and Google probably have vast
amounts of unlabeled voice data that they could use to train their speech
recognition engines. Just having a product gives you that. Either would need
to collect labeled voice data for training purposes, and both have plenty of
money to do this.

As far as understanding goes, having a shitton of training data may not help
all that much. What you really need is a superior algorithm. While one could
argue that Google's engineers have more expertise in this regard, NLP isn't
really either company's specialty, and Apple can hire smart people too.

I think the advantage Google has is that they can do search better. That's
basically what this comparison shows. The reason Google Now is faster is that
Google does search better. I would think that Google should also be able to
get Now to answer harder questions, but this demo doesn't show that, and in
that respect I think it's a bit of a disappointment. I was expecting to see
Google Now do things Siri can't, but it isn't yet clear that it can.

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lmichelbacher
I've never tried Siri or S Voice so I can't say anything about the quality of
the services or the overall experience but judging by what I saw in the video
it didn't seem to me like it was "a complete blowout for Siri."

The main metric in the comparison seemed to be speed, at which S Voice was a
little bit better than Siri. Also, voice quality was slightly in favor of S
Voice.

The main differences were S Voice offering image results right away instead of
asking to open the browser. On the other hand, S Voice required non-voice
input to to specify the remineder time whereas Siri carried on "the
conversation". Other than that, the two products pretty much behaved exactly
the same. Ask something, get a result.

If you ask me, it was more of a 55:45 for S voice based on speed and
naturalness of voice but then I don't run a gadget blog...

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mtgx
Watch the video again. That's not Samsung's S-Voice. It's Google's new Voice
Search. And he's saying it's a lot better than Siri (as other sites and tests
have shown, too).

He only mentioned S-Voice because he tested S-voice and Siri in _another_
video (not this one), and in that one Siri beats Samsung's S-voice (powered by
Vlingo).

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netnichols
Google's voice assistant was definitely impressive, and clearly had an edge on
Siri in the tests he made, but to call it a "blowout" was a bit much.

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mtgx
Google's Voice Search seems faster, it's significantly more accurate (86% vs
68% for Siri), and it also comes with that smart Google Now thing, which
learns things about you and recommends stuff for you to do based on your
location, or behavior or whatever.

Oh, and Google's "voice" sounds a lot more natural than Siri, too, which
sounds more robotic.

~~~
AllenKids
If you are referring to Gene Munster's research, then it does not pit Siri
against Google's new voice search, but the plain old text search.

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geon
Nice to see a speed improvment, but I could live with a slow Siri if the AI
was actually usable. It is broken all the time. If I say

"Play music by Milk Inc."

It might ask me if I want to buy milk. Or if I say

"Play Acappella by Kelis."

It will respond

"Sorry, I can't find a capella in your music."

Stuff like that. And it is borderline unusable at all if I'm out of breath,
like when I'm running and handsfree controlls makes sense.

Siri doesn't need a speed improvment. It needs orders of magnitude better AI.

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seiji
I propose we stop calling machine transcription and fixed-field extraction
"AI." Second?

We all realize Siri is just a fancy Eliza with Internet access, right?

We can resume calling something "AI" when it can order a flight for you from
the Ryanair website without making any mistakes (I'm not even at that level
yet).

~~~
geon
No. Machine transcription requires strong AI to be really good. As you saw in
my example with the Kelis song, it isn't enough to just transcribe the input
syllable by syllable. You need the software to be able to "understand" that
I'm requesting a song, and that "play a capella" makes no sense, and adjust
the transcription to tale into account that the artist Kelis has a song with
the name "Acapella".

There are thousands of cases like this, where natural language is amibigous,
but a human has no trouble understanding the intention.

Siri has tons of databases avsilable and knows my taste in music. It should do
a _better_ job than a human understanding what song i want.

~~~
seiji
Excellent point. Perhaps I should have specified "current-level, mostly-non-
situationally-contextual machine transcription." Once tone, intent, situation,
and context are taken into account we get closer to actual communication
instead of "listen to some discrete phonemes then try to assemble appropriate
words based on parts of speech."

~~~
geon
Well. The definition of AI, should not be the sophistication or success, but
the intention.

A chess AI is little more than a recursive search for a maximum return, or a
database search. There is not really anything distinguishing it from any other
algorithm. Just the intention of the developer.

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lordmatty
As I posted on the freshte.ch blog, the commercial drive behind Siri is that
you don't use Google when on Apple's platform.

Google coming out with a competitor that stacks up feature-wise doesn't fix
that for them because it will only run on Android.

Google's going to miss out on a lot of search/ad revenue due to Siri in the
future.

~~~
ralfn
If its better, the question becomes: does Google release it on iOS as well,
and will Apple allow them too.

However, i think the US readers are missing the most important aspect: how
many people in the world can you serve?

This is a system selling feature during a crucial generation. The speed they
can rollout new languages, will determine the world market and the long tail,
which will prove crucual.

Currently, Google has the best infrastructure to do that, but Apple seems to
care more. I live in Holland, for example. No siri, but at least we can buy
content from iTunes. Google isnt selling anything but apps in its playstore.

I think whoever is able to actually give me all these features first, wins
Holland. Why would it be any different in any other country?

There are markets up for grabs, and the first one to realize that fully, wins.

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thrownaway2424
Apple has one (1) datacenter in the entire world, and it's in the USA. How
good do you think the latency from Holland will be? Google has datacenters in
Groningen and Eemshaven, and all over Europe.

~~~
easp
You are wrong about Apple, they have one huge datacenter in the US where
people suspect the Siri backend runs. They also have a smaller data center in
California. We don't actually know what runs where, and we don't know what
they are running in leased space in 3rd party datacenters. And, they are
building other datacenters in the US.

In any case, wherever Siri runs, I don't think that Internet latency comes
close to explaining the latency, and, I think, Siri can actually hide a lot of
latency.

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prezjordan
I'm curious if Google's new thing has the capability to carry on a
conversation. With Siri I can ask her something, see it, then say "email that
to ___" and she can do it.

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Tloewald
Here's a question: how well will the voice recognition features of the next
version of Android compare with the next version of iOS? And what proportion
of Android users will be able to upgrade to it?

Releasing a slightly superior clone of a feature in a rival product over six
months after the first product shipped isn't enormously impressive, although
it is more impressive than shipping an inferior clone of a product two years
after the first product shipped, so that's definitely progress.

~~~
justinschuh
Android has had voice actions and voice search since 2.2--over a year before
the Siri beta was even announced. Speech control has been a rapidly evolving
and increasingly robust set of features in Android, but for some reason people
are claiming Apple moved first. Honestly, I'm amazed at the extent to which
marketing can completely overwrite people's recollection of objective reality.

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dhughes
This great but it's nearly entirely dependent on the network connection
otherwise they're both useless.

I supposedly have an HSPA+ 21Mbps connection yet only get 1Mbps/.03Kbps maybe
5Mbps/950Kbps Kbps on a good day and latency is 100ms or more, Bell Mobility
in Canada. I'll never get 21Mbps but less than 25% at best?

Google and Apple can make fancy tech but it's ruined by poor networks.

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mjleino
Comparing efficiency of pre-release software is kind of pointless. Either one
might be missing some optimizations that are put in on the final release.

~~~
dannyr
Both Siri and Jelly Bean has been released to the public.

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shawndumas
what happens with jellybean when you make an appointment for a time slot when
you already have one at that time slot?

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tomelders
How many languages does google support?

