

Analyst: Siri more than just speech recognition - dr_
http://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2011/10/07/apples-next-big-thing-is-already-here-siri-more-than-just-speech-recognition-analyst-says/

======
ugh
And they needed an analyst to find that out?

I thought Apple was quite clear about that in their presentation, there was no
way any alert listener could have missed that.

Siri has the potential to be awesome because of that if it works well. We will
find out soon. I’m curious.

~~~
skimbrel
There's a lot of editorializing from the Android camp that seems to think Siri
is just Apple playing catch-up to Google's voice search.

Guess we'll see who's right in five days.

~~~
tensor
It's not "just" playing catch up. It's partly playing catchup, and partly
expanding on it. And to be fair, the credit should go to the Siri team more so
than to Apple as a whole. They innovated and Apple bought them and added
polish.

So why are some Android users less than impressed at the gushing over Siri?
Because we've been able to do many of the things you see in the video
demonstrations for a long time now. Some examples:

"Navigate to <local restaurant name>"

"Text <person> <some message>"

"What is the weather in New York?"

"What is the time in Paris?"

Siri integrates more features in a polished way and also adds context to the
queries. By context, I mean that the interpretation of the next request can
depend on the previous requests.

While little has been released on the actual technical constructs of these
systems, I would imagine that they work somewhat similar to this:

1 Translate voice to list of text interpretations. 2 Guess an intent based on
each text interpretation, combining the translation and interpretation score.
Pick the action of highest score.

The intents need to be hand coded. Siri likely modifies the second step by
allowing intent inference to be based on the last command or couple of
commands in addition to the current request. That is the innovation, and I use
the word innovation lightly as I'm sure the idea has been thought of in
academic circles.

A lot of people seem to think "you can throw anything at it" and I seriously
doubt that is true. The library of intents might be large enough to fool some
people, though. It isn't revolutionary, it's a well executed incremental
improvement on what we already have. It's worth mentioning that there are also
other applications such as Vlingo that try to expand the capabilities already
present on current day systems.

None-the-less, Apple's excellent marketing team seems to have convinced people
that this _is_ revolutionary and that Apple should be credited with yet
another huge world changing innovation. The media needs it's heros and there
can't be heros unless the valuable contributions of the many people whose work
led to this point are forgotten, marginalized, or simply reattributed.

~~~
swombat
_That is the innovation, and I use the word innovation lightly as I'm sure the
idea has been thought of in academic circles._

Just a quibble. Innovation is, according to the dictionary, the "introduction
of new things or methods". This is quite different from invention, which is
"an act or instance of creating or producing by exercise of the imagination,
especially in art, music, etc".

Invention can be done in academic circles, but innovation needs someone to
actually roll up their sleeves and _introduce_ the damn thing - in this
occurrence, introduce it to the vast, chaotic, challenging consumer
electronics market.

Apple certainly takes no credit for inventing voice recognition, or any of the
concepts used in Siri - in fact, Apple invents very little. However, they
should get full credit on the innovation side. As an easy example, tablets
were _invented_ for decades before the iPad, but they were not effectively
introduced to the consumer market until the iPad. That's innovation - turning
ideas into realities - as opposed to invention - coming up with new ideas.
Both are essential.

------
pkulak
I'm really interested to see if Apple's attempt is better than Google's. It
looks so from demonstrations, but then, Voice Actions looks really great in
demos too and I can almost never get it to do exactly what I want.

~~~
Geee
Just by looking where Siri comes from it should be clear it's better. The
biggest difference is that Siri doesn't have commands 'hard-coded', you can
throw anything at her. Thus, the whole design of Siri is completely different
than in voice control systems. Only thing that's comparable is the speech-to-
text accuracy.

~~~
feral
>you can throw anything at her

The word 'her' surprised me - 'it', surely?

But I guess this just goes to show, once again, how easily
anthropomorphisation comes to people; if the experience is good enough that
customers start thinking about the software as 'her' rather than 'it', maybe
Apple will have a hit on their hands.

~~~
Geee
Well, that was intentional. I'd like to think Siri as a person; she is
supposed to be intelligent after all. :)

------
spudlyo
I'd be more excited about Siri if I had a better way of talking to it. I wish
Apple would design a really great A2DP bluetooth headset, now that'd I'd be
excited about.

My Backbeat 903s have never really fit my ears right, so I'm looking for
alternatives. Any suggestions?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Try Jawbone's Era:

<http://jawbone.com/headsets/era/overview>

------
skimbrel
This.

If Siri works as well as advertised, it will be a triumph for natural language
processing as a field, not just Apple.

Getting that sort of parsing and semantic analysis into a form where it can be
done by a mobile device must have taken a lot of work, and I'm sure that was
only the start — Apple must have had to go back through every single data
source and API in iOS to add semantic tags for Siri to latch onto.

~~~
count
Isn't that done by a backend that's not on the phone? I know at least
dictation is done remotely...

~~~
skimbrel
I don’t think it’d be fast enough. Even in damn-near-perfect signal conditions
I have a RTT over 100 ms when I’m on AT&T 3G. That and how lame would it be if
Siri ceased functioning entirely (not just the maps/other network-requiring
bits) when you had no coverage?

~~~
simcop2387
Given that the original product that Apple bought worked that way, I'd find it
hard to believe that the newly integrated one changes things that
significantly. If they did get it working locally it would be very
interesting.

------
auston
What I am wondering, is when it will be available for people to hook their
apps into!

"Can you see if there are any open reservations slots at Prime Italia
tonight?"

"Can you tell me how many incomplete stories there are on the iCalledit
project in Pivotal Tracker?"

------
tocomment
Does anyone have any predictions on when android will have something
comparable. I really just want an easy way to make calendar reminders.

~~~
da_dude4242
Try the "Quick Event" app.

