

The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model - blazamos
http://daringfireball.net/2011/10/buy_our_devices_model

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joebadmo
I'm skeptical about Siri. My wife got an iPhone 4S on opening weekend, and we
both did the requisite amount of playing with the new feature, and it was
amusing, but after the first couple of days she pretty much abandoned it.

There are some reliability problems, but I think the main problem is that Siri
still lives firmly in the AI uncanny valley. Which is exacerbated by the way
that Apple presents Siri, i.e. as AI.

With a clearly defined set of commands, you can be confident about what's
going to work and what isn't. And if you try something that isn't a command,
you relegate the failure to "oh, that's not a command." But with Siri, because
it's presented as an anthropomorphized, intelligent agent, it makes the
failure feel a lot more brittle and frustrating.

For example, "What's my next appointment?" works, but "When's my dentist
appointment?" doesn't. Why not? Well, I know why not, and you probably know.
It's because it's really, really, really not AI, and unless we make some kind
of breakthrough on strong AI, it's not going to be for a long time. But my
wife doesn't know that. All she knows is that Siri is cool when it works, but
is actually pretty stupid a lot of the time. Which means she's not _reliable_
, which is important because Siri is most useful when it must be _most
reliable_ , like when you're in a rush.

Apple will certainly continue to add commands and make Siri smarter and
smarter, but this will necessarily be incremental, and that failure will
always feel brittle to lay users.

[edit: btw, John Siracusa talks a bit about this on the most recent
Hypercritical: <http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/39-quasimodo-backpack>]

~~~
spiralganglion
I can't shake the feeling that the Siri of today is like the app ecosystem of
the iPhone 1.

• That Apple has a really solid plan for this feature, and we're only seeing
the very beginning of it now — the phase where we are introduced to the
interface, before they blow the lid off and open it up to every imaginable
use-case.

• That it will be significantly improved before most people ever buy a
supporting device, so the handful of customers being burned by the somewhat-
lacking version 1 product are vastly outnumbered by the people who get their
first taste of the mature, fully-realized vision.

~~~
tensor
Unlike some of Apple's other features, UI, Apps, and operating software, Siri
is not something that will be easy to improve. Siri represents the cumulative
efforts of decades of computer science research by numerous public and private
entities.

While it's easy to add more voice actions, making advances on the underlying
technologies will require additional decades of hard computer science
research. Apple, having no R&D division, will not likely even contribute to
this.

Unless your main complaint is a lack of canned question types that it can
answer, you won't likely see the fast improvements you are expecting in the
next few years.

~~~
jerf
I'd also observe that "let's create an 'AI' by piling on the special cases
until we have a generally-capable tool" has been tried numerous times, and
it's a known failure case. After a certain point, the piled-on rules being
negatively interacting with each other, and it requires one of 1. true AI
(thus begging the question) or 2. treating the set of rules as one of the
quirkiest programming languages ever to make effective use of it.

Many people are speculating about how wonderful Siri will be in the (near)
future; I'd submit that the evidence suggests that it has pretty much come out
of the gate with all the power it's going to have for the foreseeable future.
Natural language querying seems to have been stuck at the same plateau for a
long time, just like voice recognition technology has been.

~~~
mikeash
Is voice recognition technology really on a plateau? I have highly accurate
speaker independent speech recognition in my pocket now. I'm using it to
dictate this response. It didn't require any training, and it's nearly
perfect. I may be mistaken, but I believe this capability is relatively new.
Even if it's not, it's so close to being perfect that there's little room for
improvement, or so it seems.

And yes, I know that all of the smart are not in my pocket, but rather in the
cloud.

~~~
jerf
I bet you're enunciating clearly and that the mic is not picking up much
background noise. (Note that you may be in an environment with some noise but
there are easy ways to create noise-cancelling microphones or directional
microphones that are very effective. You'd have to check the recording to see
how much noise is on it.) I could get the same results from Dragon's voice
recognition software with careful enunciation and a bit of practice 10 years
ago. It is also well-known how to get very good accuracy on a restricted
dictionary. What has not been solved is improving beyond that. Situations in
which humans will easily extract speech, so easily that we do things like
casually lay music tracks over a speaker without much thought, software will
still just fail miserably for, as far as I know.

~~~
mikeash
Was Dragon's software speaker-independent ten years ago, and did you have to
train it? I looked into this recently and couldn't find any speaker-
independent PC software _now_ , and I think it all required training. Being
able to just pick up and talk without _any_ preliminaries is still a pretty
big deal.

I'm sure you're right about the other deficiencies. "Almost perfect" is very
strong, after all. Still, it's really excellent, and in my experience is
_much_ better than it was just a few years ago.

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alexhaefner
Apple launches new hardware with new software features. ALWAYS. Siri is the,
"What if I could just talk to my device, and it would be able to disambiguate
and give me exactly what information I wanted." Okay, Siri explained.

Just like FaceTime and Garageband and iMovie before it, Siri will help Apple
to sell more devices.

And I didn't even need to write dozens of paragraphs to explain that.

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wvenable
It's really a stretch to believe that Siri is how Apple is going to compete
with Google and Microsoft on search -- Apple doesn't do search! Siri calls out
to existing search services from Google and Wolfram Alpha to do the actual
work.

Apple isn't good at services; iCloud may be the most satisfactory result after
a long list of so-so and downright terrible attempts. There's no technology
here that either Google or Microsoft couldn't do better.

~~~
Steko
"Apple doesn't do search!"

They really didn't do AI until a few weeks ago either. And they didn't do
music until they did music. Would you really be shocked if one of the
headlines tomorrow morning was that Duck Duck Go was acquired by Apple?

~~~
gujk
If DDG went mainstream it would probably hit the paid tier for the Google API
that generates most of its quality content.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
We don't use any Google APIs.

~~~
Tichy
But Bing I think? Would DDG work standalone?

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spiralganglion
What's going to stop Google from creating an "open" alternative to Siri? Siri
is just a technology, not a business model. Google is really good at
recreating competitor technologies around their own ad-driven model.

I'm not trying to be a contrarian, either. I use an Android phone, but only
because the iPhone isn't offered on my carrier of choice. I love Apple. But I
don't see how Siri ("Finally") gives them occasion to undermine Google.

~~~
tensor
Considering Siri is the commercialization of a lot of public research, it
wouldn't be that hard for a company like Google to extend their existing voice
actions technology using the exact same body of research. They might even be
able to license much of the exact same technology as Apple did when they
bought Siri the company.

My complaint with the quotes and blog post is somewhat different. They both
seem to claim Siri will revolutionize search. But Siri isn't about search at
all, it's about taking spoken words and turning them into an appropriate text
based search query. It still relies on databases and search engines to do the
actual searching. At most, it can add a bit of extra context to the query that
you might not be able to infer from the text alone. It also represents a
unified interface to several domain specific databases. If anything, Siri is a
_complementing interface_ to existing search technologies. Buying a bunch of
databases won't let Apple solve the problem of search.

~~~
delinka
If I'm taling to my phone, I'm not looking at the screen for ads. So how does
Google bring ads to voice-recog? Is the voice reply interrupted by voice ads?
I wouldn't use it.

~~~
Lexarius
Doesn't have to be ads. Suppose you run a restaurant. When someone asks their
phone about restaurants nearby, how much would you pay to have your restaurant
preferentially mentioned before other restaurants? How much would you pay to
get access to a list of questions people ask about restaurant-related terms
near you, and how the person reacted to the results? Did they ask further
questions about your restaurant? Did they view your page? Did their phone's
GPS indicate that they visited your establishment?

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for_shame
I don't know if this is unambiguously a step forward from license sales or
tacky ads... It could be just me, but don't "The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model"
and "just-buy-our-devices-and-look-at-all-the-cool-shit-you-get-with-them"
sound a lot like the way computer manufacturers competed with one another in
Elder Days _?

_ Genuine question - wasn't there, myself.

~~~
5teev
Except a lot of the time, it wasn't a lot of cool shit, it was a bunch of
crapware and you still had to buy software to actually do cool stuff.

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freejack
I think much of the commentary misses the fact that Siri is not a feature, its
a UI, and a very early-stage one at that. Criticizing Siri as less than useful
in its current iteration is like criticizing WIMP as less than useful 20 years
ago.

The fact that Siri is UI and not a feature is exactly why Microsoft and Google
and many other service providers should worry about it - it commoditizes the
back-end and creates a new interaction point around which Apple, and currently
only Apple, is creating business value. Both Microsoft and Google have
technology cards to play in this area, but neither has deployed a new user-
interface in the way that Apple recently has. I would expect them to each go
after a solid play in this area, in the same way that Microsoft responded to
the Wii with Kinect - with a strong competitive urgency. Whether or not they
are successful in their response is something we'll know in time.

~~~
Tichy
How is it an UI? I mean it is voice input. OK, that's an UI, but it is an UI
that has been around for thousands of years. Non-Apple phones also had voice
input for years. Now Siri adds some things it recognizes, like calendar dates.
What is so revolutionary about it? Other vendors will also add more tasks to
their voice recognition. Google is arguably in a better position to do so,
because they have worked on the problem for years (not voice recognition, but
what do users mean when they search for "x").

~~~
freejack
I never said revolutionary, you did. Had you asked, I would have probably
characterized it as "evolutionary" more than anything - but most innovation
is.

I disagree that this is imply "voice input". Siri takes a step beyond simple
data input and manipulation and provides a new interface to several system
functions and services in a cohesive and purposeful fashion.

If, as you contend, that Google is well positioned to respond to Siri, then
they probably will - I'm not sure you actually read my original comment - I
had pretty clearly indicated that both Microsoft and Google have assets that
they can deploy in response to Siri.

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contextfree
The article he links to is a really fine specimen of inane tech punditry. Why
are tech execs downplaying a feature of a competing product? Uh, gee I dunno,
because it's a feature of a competing product maybe? Is there really nothing
better to write an article about?

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alkimie
I's suggest that Siri really is something new under the sun: it is the first
large-scale, distributed AI system interacting with the 'real world' in an
uncontrolled manner. It would not surprise me if somewhere in the back end
queries are being looked at and humans are fine-tuning or making suggestions
of possible responses. There is a scale here that's never been seen before.
And Apple can afford a legion of unseen human beings helping in the background
if it wants to experiment with this.

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CoffeeDregs
Siri is a nice technology (though, after having seen 3 attempted uses, I have
yet to see it work), but the sell-hardware-backed-by-nice-software/services is
not some revolutionary business model; further, often, it's not one that is
sustainable for long. The problem is that as the non-hardware costs start to
become material, the pressure mounts to show that they are actually related to
hardware sales; now they are distributed across hardware sales as a per-unit
transfer cost and become a cost-center; now investors and organizational
politics begin to pay attention and the model of buy-random-shit-and-claim-it-
is-accretive begins to sour.

This is why it is so hard to do hardware _and_ software together. There are
few examples of long term success in hardware/software and Apple is certainly
not one of them (except in the '00s). IBM is one. But, if one area of the
business takes off, the pressure to drop the other is immense (see Thinkpad
and HP's current flail-ures). As XCode users will recall, there are also
issues with adding significant value to past purchasers: if you paid $100 for
a product that had $20 of awesome value added later by an upgrade, the company
who took your $100 of cash should only be able to recognize $80 of revenue
now.

~~~
rflrob
> The problem is that as the non-hardware costs start to become material, the
> pressure mounts to show that they are actually related to hardware sales

I think that implicit in Gruber's argument is the idea that just buying
Apple's devices isn't radically more expensive than the competitors. I've
heard this attributed to Tim Cook, that lots of Apple devices are now roughly
price-equivalent with other brands, but with so many other features.

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andrewljohnson
_Consider iCloud — Apple now offers free-of-charge online services ad-free.
It’s a sunk cost in the name of the overall experience for Apple device
buyers._

BS, iCloud has paid upgrades, and I imagine those paid upgrades make the rest
of the model break even or better, just like DropBox. It's not ad-model vs.
devices-model, it's freemium product tacked onto device sales, further
enhancing margins.

Glib, but wrong.

~~~
irons
The statement you're quibbling with — "free-of-charge online services ad-free"
— is unassailable. Anyone signing up for iCloud with the intention of using it
for data sync (contacts, calendars, browser bookmarks), and/or application
data, and/or the ability to track, lock, and wipe lost devices, will be hard-
pressed to exceed the free 5GB.

Sure, iTunes Match or syncing several devices directly to iCloud might induce
a heavy user to pay for more, but iCloud remains a bona-fide free service for
the vast majority of its customers.

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metafour
I don't have a 4S because I'm on the other upgrade cycle. i.e. I got the 4 at
launch. After the initial "cool" factor I think Siri makes sense in certain
situations, like when driving. I would love to have access to my iPhone by
speaking to it while driving.

~~~
zarify
I was going to stick with my 4 for another year but ended up with a 4S through
a rather circuitous route.

Anyhow, since if you have a 4S you're going to play with Siri, I've found that
it's really quite useful even when not in a hands-free situation like driving.
I've found it very useful for setting reminders faster than I would be able to
manually, which I found quite surprising. I'm looking forward to finding more
things like that in the future.

~~~
YooLi
Here's what I have found works faster with Siri:

Remind me to... (like you said) Wake me up at/in... Call [name in my contacts]
Call [place not in my contacts]. Siri looks up business for you. Note
[something I want to make a note of]

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10101010
"Siri, block all ads."

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

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krschultz
Commoditize your product compliments

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shareme
One of the author's points is incorrect:

-When you use web search on iphone which ad network do you see ads from?

You do not buy an iphone to avoid seeing search texts as you still see them

