

Siri is the Next Big Thing - orhanturkoglu
http://gerger.co/yalimslodge/2011/10/13/siri-artificial-intelligence-revolution-has-begun/

======
jenius
I don't understand how this article rose to the top page of HN... it's not
telling us anything that's interesting, new, or news in any way. Artificial
intelligence has been around since the dawn of computers (think Clippy),
helping us do our shit. In fact, AutoCAD is a bunch of 'artificial
intelligence' that's letting you draw vectors and write code in a more
intuitive way (ok, not exactly and technically, but you know what I mean)

It seems like the author of this article has never in their life seen a
computer do anything more than push numbers, but machine learning and AI have
been around for at least a decade. This is just a very mainstream case of very
well developed AI.

Saying that 'this is the start of a revolution' is not only ill-advised, but
totally baseless. What's the innovation? What has changed in what was
previously possible? For a revolution to occur, there needs to be an
innovation that causes expansion of technological capabilities. Although Siri
is (supposedly) great, it does not represent an expansion of technological
capability. Just because the team behind Siri spent years building out a great
voice activated AI system does not mean that we all can now do it. Computers
have not become smarter... they are the same as they ever were. People have
not realized a more efficient way to create AI... it's the same as before.

I'm truly surprised that such a shallow and misguided article made it to the
popular page in a community like this.

~~~
yalimgerger
Hi Author here. Thank your for the harsh words. I guess I gotto take it to the
chin.

Please allow me explain my point in another way. I think Siri is to A.I. what
Apple II is to computers. Does this analogy explain what I am trying to tell
better?

~~~
john_b
I think that was clear from the article. What jenius, I think, was saying is
that you don't offer much support for this claim. How, for example, can
startups get on the AI-as-a-service bandwagon without having the resources and
experience of a company like Apple?

~~~
jenius
Exactly right john_b... the author's follow-up comment addressed nothing that
I said, just made another baseless claim - that "I think it's like the apple
II of computers". Why? What makes it like the apple II? You have to back
yourself up. I personally think they are nothing alike, and here's why:

The Apple II was a revolution of personal computing. It brought the personal
computer to the masses, and made it infinitely more accessible in both form
and function. The form and parts for the Apple II became the base for all
other computers. Nobody had ever made anything like the Apple II before. The
Apple II on its own sold like crazy, and brought the entire company to
success. Siri is a small piece of software on an already successful device
(which is significantly more 'revolutionary' that siri on its own). The idea
for siri has been come up with and implemented many times before, in the exact
same manner (see the many android comments). Apple just worked really hard on
it and they allegedly did a good job.

~~~
yalimgerger
Hey the author again. :-). It is true that in the article, I did not explain
why I think that the era of A.I. started on October 4th. The article starts
with the assertion that it has begun and moves on from there. I guess more
than anything, the article is a call for action. I wanted the discussion to
start and it did.

If I can present my chain of thoughts leading up to my decision in an
interesting way I may write another article called "Why I think Siri is the
Next Big Thing".

But here is my chain of thought for the curious mind in a very crude way:

What I did was to observe the moves of Apple and try to figure out their
strategy. I put together the information that is available on the Internet. I
connected the dots.

I knew Apple bought Siri for about $200 mil. I knew about Siri's history. You
don't buy voice recognition software for this price. I watched the Mossberg-
Jobs interview where Mossberg keeps insisting that Siri is in the search area
and Jobs keep correcting him saying no Siri is in the A.I. area. I watched how
the critical question "What are you going to do with it?" got lost during the
conversation. When Mossberg said that the iPad is great for consumption but
not for creation, it was very clear that Jobs did not see it like that at all.
I also watched some Apple videos from late 80's which depicts a professor
talking to his computer and getting his daily business done. It seemed to me
that they had this vision all along and now they were implementing it.

Then I realized how iCloud fits in to this all. With the introduction of Siri
it was clear to me that the next frontier the competition is moving to is A.I.
Apple is going all in. IBM is pushing hard. Apparently, Google is baking some
stuff.

While I was thinking about all these and trying to find its meaning, the
interview between Fred Wilson and Carlota Perez helped me to put it all in
context.

I think this is the time to invest in A.I. If a VC expects huge returns from
his investment in 5-7 years, I think A.I. is the right way to go. If an
entrepreneur wants to do something amazing, I think A.I. is the right way to
go. My speculation is in 1-2 years this is going to be all we talk about.

I think A.I. is where the puck is going now. I might be wrong, I might be
right. We will know soon enough.

------
baggachipz
What a blindingly ignorant rant. A couple breathless prognostications that
really annoyed me:

"If A.I. knows about insurance, will you ever google for it?" Uh, all the
"A.I." is doing is googling it. So basically Siri will use speech-to-text
(which I've had on my Android phone for years) and put it in the google search
box for me. Then it will read the first result. Zippity-doo-da.

"We will teach it how to use Excel." Can you possibly imagine trying to _tell_
a speech recognition system to input into a spreadsheet? Quite a step
backwards, if you ask me.

Look, the interpretation of language into meaning and then into commands has
been around for a while, and it's been constantly improving. Siri is another
product in that crowded market. It's really swell that they included it in
iOS; like I said, I've had it on my Droid for two-plus years and it's pretty
handy. This is the worst kind of blind Apple fanboy-ism. They are a good
company that makes some great products. Stop it with the hyperbole simply
because you want to justify your new phone purchase to your wife before you're
off-contract.

~~~
alexholehouse
While I agree with you in principle, I feel like the conceptual use cases
you're imagining implement current practices with basically a speech to text.
What the author is suggesting is that it would be beyond this, skipping out
the step where you determine _how_ you do something, but instead telling Siri
_what_ you want to do. For example, with excel I'm not sure he envisaged
something like "A5 is 20, A6 is 30" and so on, but more like, "Take my taxes
from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet".

That said, irrespective of any kind of AI revolution Siri may (or as I
suspect) may not induce, I feel like predicting it's impact before we've even
had the chance to test it out in any kind of capacity (OK the 4S has been on
sale for two hours, but you know what I mean) is somewhat short sighted.

~~~
Tichy
Except Siri doesn't do anything of the kind. It would be trivial to build
"take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet" into Siri (or
indeed any speech recognition engine). But that would only be one more special
case. The code is literally "if (recognizedText == "take my taxes from this
PDF and put them into a
spreadsheet"){writeExcelSheet(parsePDFTable("taxes.pdf"))}

That's nice, but it is not AI.

~~~
alexholehouse
Sure, and I'm not for one second Siri could do that, but

a) I was under the impression Siri was doing some kind of semantic analysis
rather than straight text recognition?

b) I just meant if we suspended disbelief and Siri was this magical AI tool it
would do something like that, my second point is just that because we don't
know what Siri can/will do it seems ridiculous to say it's going to change the
world.

I totally agree with you, I'm just saying there are almost two separate
discussions here, one being Siri and it's implementation, the other being the
impact of AI on our lives. If Siri _was_ the new AI, then these would be the
same discussion, but as I don't think it is, it's not.

------
agentultra
Is the AI winter really over?

Or is Siri simply the practical application of machine learning and NLP which
we've manage to derive from off-shoots of AI research?

I think it will be some time yet when I can make a natural language query and
have an AI agent fetch relevant data, sort it, and present it contextually. Or
sketch an idea for a building and have an AI do all the hard work of creating
the blueprints.

In the near future though it's obvious that we'll see more practical
applications of AI in every-day products and I think that's pretty neat.

~~~
yalimgerger
I think it is. I view Siri as Apple II of personal computers. Siri crosses the
threshold and I believe the race is on.

~~~
prat
I won't judge siri, as I do not know the details of technology or the machine
learning algorithms used by it, but I would say this much: your one line pitch
might just impress some businessweek readers but I don't think a really cool
technology needs punchlines like that (..apple II..) - your article sounds
like its coming from a non-technical observer for a non-technical audience -
and that would be okay if the product had passed the stage of hype into early
stages of common usage.

At this stage though I am more interested in how is it different from 100s of
other AI applications that failed to take over the world or become the next
big thing.

My need to criticize primarily came from your last paragraph where you are
appealing to developers to jump in without realizing that that segment of your
audience looks not very respectfully at phrases like 'buckle up' and 'amazing
ride'

------
zipdog
It's interesting that the Printing Press didn't make the list of previous
revolutions, because I think this highlights two different ways of thinking
about intelligence (and thus AI). We can either build AI systems that give us
a correct answer 95% of the time and we don't care how they got it, or we can
build systems that have some sort of designed thinking (ie we understand our
own thoughts and try and replicate their process to some degree).

I think at some point the former became dominant, because its more
achieveable, but its also the one that gets most interesting when it fails.
Because of the way this AI learns, when its wrong it can be brutally wrong.

I think there will be a revolution in AI getting into more spaces, but only in
areas where its ok to screw up (ie ultimately a human is filtering the AI
response at some degree, whether its the user knowing when to ignore the GPS
or Siri, or an overseer looking over the AI output and checking it before it
goes out). I'd be really surprised to see AI doing anything important by
itself.

Also, I thought Google already had a fairly solid AI research effort well
underway.

~~~
yalimgerger
Hi, Author here. I think you make an excellent point. I think the revolution
will start from small things where it is OK to make an error. Stuff like Siri
does. Then it will move on to productivity tools or the like...where it is
still OK to make a mistake. And A.I. will improve really fast, like the PC has
improved. I think in 5-10 years we won't believe what we have accomplished. I
think Siri crosses an important threshold.

Didn't know about Google. They might be working on something but I don't know
of any production use of their A.I. software.

~~~
helton
Google Translate uses AI. It uses currently translated text to predict
translation of strings that you provide.

~~~
yalimgerger
True. Thank you for pointing that out. I missed it.

------
Geee
No matter how innovative company Apple is, I wouldn't give them credit just
because they bought Siri and integrated it into iOS. I somehow find it odd
that no one was talking about Siri before Apple's blessing, although it has
existed for many years. It has been constantly evolving, and would have
without Apple. There's lots of information about Siri available and the vision
and goal of the project has been clear all along.

~~~
mikeash
Taking an impressive but not all _that_ practical technology demo and
integrating it into devices that are going to be in millions of people's hands
deserves some credit. The major part of the credit goes to those who developed
the technology, of course, but identifying the technology as practical for the
masses and getting it out to them is important too.

------
ericb
Can anyone point me to write ups of Siri's implementation and history? I know
Siri was previously a product on the iPhone, so I'm wondering what company
created the the technology, and if they perhaps had a more open attitude in
discussing their technology than we might hear from Apple and whether they
might have some blog posts to look through, etc.

~~~
Geee
It was originally not a product for iPhone. That was the spin-off. It was
originally CALO <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO>

------
Tichy
Is Siri really more than a little bit of sugarcoating on top of stuff others
have been doing for years (Google, Wolfram Alpha)? I suspect it is doing ok
for some tasks (calendar), but that is about it. For example on Android people
have been calling contacts by saying their names for a quite a while already.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Android user here who frequently uses the voice commands. The primary
differences I see between what we have and what Siri offers are:

\- More built-in app integration (like GPS). "Remind me to call Jennifer when
I leave work" wouldn't compute. The Wolfram Alpha integration is also a nice
touch.

\- Improved contextual awareness. "Is it going to rain today?" or "I'm in the
mood for Italian" don't work for me. I have to explicitly use keywords like
asking for a "map of italian restaurants".

\- 2-way conversations. I only speak a command and the voice command opens
another application based on that command. Siri can talk back to you and
resolve conflicts, such as calendar schedule overlaps.

Have we had voice commands on our phones for what seems like forever now? Yep.
But that doesn't make me any less jealous of the neat innovations that Apple's
done in the speech recognition AI field. Again, a great example of the fierce
competition driving innovation, and the consumer wins.

~~~
Tichy
Still, I think those are only some special cases (weather, calendar).
Admittedly they are nice, but I doubt they are an AI revolution.

Also I suppose it is kind of a "desktop search" for the mobile phone. Google
can not search your contacts and calendar (it could, but the Google search is
not really tied into it yet, I suppose).

------
barryfandango
The only way we're going to achieve AI in the short term is by loosening the
definition of the phrase, for example to include a new generation of complex
automatons. I look forward to AI meaning about as much as "cloud" does today.

