

Siri Is a Gimmick and a Tease - tokenadult
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/11/siri_vs_google_the_search_company_s_voice_recognition_program_gets_closer.html

======
slurgfest
What makes this worth saying is the context provided by the media's initial
flood of breathless assurances that this would change everything. In the
intervening months, without much attempt to revise the initial estimates, they
have pretty much just stopped talking about Siri; the last I heard about it
was that Apple disabled prostitute-finding.

In that specific context it's good to have a story saying, actually this is
turning out not to be such a big deal.

When the two comments in this thread say "well yeah, Siri's probably over-
hyped and its usefulness is actually quite limited" they aren't disagreeing
with the article nearly so strongly as they are disagreeing with the majority
of what the tech press was saying when Siri first arrived.

------
nsns
A web slowly spinned:

    
    
       ...The bad news is I didn’t find it magical-
       while Google’s voice feature understood my 
       queries more often than Siri did, it still 
       made several mistakes, and it often failed 
       to give me useful answers.
       [...]
       But the best thing about Google Voice Search 
       is that she’s overflowing with knowledge. 
       Many times she’ll answer your questions with 
       exactly the right answer. Other times she won’t 
       speak but will at least give you a search page 
       full of answers, almost always correct ones.
       [...]
       Last week I met with Scott Huffman, 
       one of the engineering directors on 
       Google’s search team.
    

Is this a PR piece? It sure isn't about Siri.

------
acuozzo
Do other people __really__ want to speak to computers?

To me, at least, it seems silly... even for Star Trek.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I was with you, I mean really wouldn't it be embarrassing to be talking to
your computer? Wouldn't it bother people around you? And then I noticed that
people have decided that when they are on their cell phone nobody around them
can hear them (protip: we can) and I expect that this same suspension of
acoustical reality will make talking to your computer popular.

------
chrissr
While Google's voice recognition is much, much faster, the other comparisons
are mostly apples and oranges. As long as you stick to what's in their
wheelhouse, both perform fairly well.

Siri is a "personal assistant" while Google Search is more of a "personal
librarian."

------
chrisdevereux
> These limitations aren’t exactly by design; on the iPhone, Apple’s
> restrictions in third-party apps make it technically difficult for Google to
> do everything Siri does.

That explanation is just lazy journalism. Sure, some of Siri's OS integration
might rely on private APIs, but a lot of this stuff is exposed publicly [1].

It also obscures the real reason that Google Voice doesn't do this stuff,
which is that it's trying to solve a different problem to Siri. Google are
(unsurprisingly, when you think about it) making a voice interface to a search
engine[2]. Apple are making a voice interface to a phone. The difference in
capabilities reflects their different purposes.

The problem with Siri is that it isn't clear enough about what it's there for.
The skeuomorphic 'personal assistant' thing really doesn't help either. Maybe
Siri would have been better received if it had just presented itself as a new
way of setting appointments, etc.

1\. For example:
[http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/EventK...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/EventKit/Reference/EventKitFrameworkRef/_index.html)

2\. If it did this stuff, I bet it'd take you to your google calendar whether
or not the iOS APIs are public.

------
mikeash
I personally find it to be quite useful, _but_ you have to adapt to it and
figure out what it's good at. I use Siri for:

1\. Setting location-based alerts using Find My Friends. Saying "tell me when
my wife leaves work" is effective, convenient, and about twenty times faster
than setting up the alert by hand.

2\. Again with Find My Friends, finding out where people are. If I'm meeting
somebody I can just ask, "Where's Bob?" and it shows me, so I know if they're
running late or whatever.

3\. Setting reminders, especially location-based reminders. As I'm walking
along, I suddenly remember that I need to fix the windshield wipers on my car
or something. "Remind me to fix the windshield wipers when I get home", and
done. Again, way faster than setting this up by hand.

4\. Quick text messages while on the go. It can both read an incoming message
and write a reply. Faster than typing a reply, usually.

5\. Setting timers and alarms. Put a pizza in the oven, then "timer, 15
minutes", and I get an alert when it's done.

I don't think the article is wrong, but it's a bit narrow. It concentrates
entirely on search, and I agree that Siri is pretty weak with that. But Siri
is good at _doing_ stuff, at least certain stuff, on your behalf. Google's
voice search can't do this on iOS at all, and my understanding is that even on
Android its capabilities are much more limited.

Siri is probably over-hyped by Apple, but i personally still find it to be
quite useful. It's _not_ the all-powerful personal answer-machine that some
people want it to be, but it's a handy alternate UI for many of the phone's
functions.

~~~
oinksoft
Pardon my ignorance as I have never used a smart phone ... you are saying Bob
publishes his location to you, and you can check it at any time? I must be
getting old because that sounds terrible.

~~~
jholman
Terrible for whom? Recalling of course that both parties consented to the
idea.

I find it (or rather, Google Latitude) AWESOME. One, it's awesome for
rendezvouses. Both the planned kind (I arrive first, she's not here yet, where
is she, maybe I could walk a block and meet her first) and the unplanned kind
(sometimes I find out my wife is downtown when I didn't expect her to be... hi
honey!).

Two, I'm still tracking friends back home even though I don't live near them
any more. It emphasizes the community in the world. It'd be better if more
people used Latitude, though.

~~~
Someone
_"sometimes I find out my wife is downtown when I didn't expect her to be...
hi honey!"_

Some people will find that terrible in itself, but even if you don't, there
are unintended consequences. Suppose she is out there buying you a surprise
present. You catch here with the present in hand; she is disappointed that you
found out about it. So, next time, she switches off the 'find me' feature. You
see she switched it off, and either think 'she is trying to surprise me', in
which case half the surprise is gone, or worse, 'what is she hiding?'.

~~~
jholman
> _"Some people will find that terrible in itself"_

Right, and if they do find it terrible, they don't use the software. It's not
rocket surgery.

> _"What is she hiding"_?

Please, I'm not a sitcom character.

To attempt to address the apparently spirit of your concern, of course there
are unintended consequences (to anything). The important question is whether
the net effect is "terrible" (GP's impression), "awesome" (my experience), or
somewhere in between. It seems to me that the main differentiator is what
relative value you (and the close friends who would be candidates for sharing
location data) put on secrecy (among those close friends) vs information
(about those close friends). And I am reporting that in my life, I have yet to
experience any downside, I've experienced plenty of upside, and some of the
upsides have been awesome.

I would certainly be horrified and angry if Google turned this feature on by
default, or if user locations were published to people they hadn't consented
to, or something like that.

~~~
oinksoft
> what relative value you ... put on secrecy ... vs information

For the last time, privacy is not about secrecy, and it is not a battle
against information. It's about dignity. It's great people get value out of
these features, but do understand that to those who have not assimilated into
this new culture, the idea that having to dawdle in uncertainty for 10-15
minutes while you wait for your wife to meet you downtown is some burden is
... crazy!

I thought mobile phones were supposed to solve that problem anyway. It seems
nobody's content enough to agree on a meeting and patiently wait for their
company anymore. Either that or they are worry-warts, or just plain
distrusting. I find these new values very difficult to relate to, as I cannot
imagine another reason for tracking your companion like they're a specimen of
some endangered species.

~~~
mikeash
I'm not sure what to say to this besides, I don't know, try harder to
understand other people's points of view, if you want to. Or don't, it doesn't
much matter to me, although I don't see the point of popping up in these
discussions otherwise.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Voice recognition software has been like that for ages, that is an area that
hasn´t improved much. There are no huge differences between them, they will
just fail at different tasks.

I remember using IBM´s Via Voice back in 2000´s to dictate my school work, and
it worked flawlessly - when it worked. Small deviations from the pattern were
enough to make the software fail miserably.

Voice recognition is not about making it _understand_ everything perfectly as
much as it´s about providing sane failure modes.

------
Florin_Andrei
I used it back when it was a standalone app (I'm on iPhone 4). Unless it's
gotten worse meanwhile, it's far from a "gimmick".

------
scoofy
Siri is quite good at a few mundane tasks like setting alarms and such. Is it
a gimmick? Sure, but most applications are one trick ponies. It's far from
completely useless. It may not be the best press for "it just works" Apple,
but it's worth pursuing.

------
duaneb
Did anyone in the tech community with knowledge of the complexity of NLP
(which I would hope to be most of HN readers) really believe that Siri was
anything but a gimmick? It's not as if it introduced ANY new technology--
Siri's functionality has been in OS X for as long as I remember, and has
sucked just as much the whole time.

However, I really like it when driving, so I don't think it's entirely a
gimmick.

~~~
mcphage
> Siri's functionality has been in OS X for as long as I remember

I thought it was a recent acquisition?

Wikipedia claims April 2010: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_(software)>

------
marknutter
What Siri was going to be before it was acquired by Apple was a voice
activated way of interacting with a whole host of web services out there, like
getting movie tickets from fandango, reservations from open table, etc. I
think Apple will eventually get there, but it seems to be happening slower
than I thought it would. It should really be my personal assistant.

~~~
cwe
Siri already talks to Open Table, and fandango can't be far behind with all
the movie stuff you can do with Siri already.

Very interesting look at Siri's potential (via everyone's favorite Gruber):
<http://counternotions.com/2012/11/12/siri-future/>

------
evoxed
If Apple would allow developers to extend Siri with some sort of script (MAS
approved even) it would be awesome. Even if the functionality was limited to
speaking an address macro and then pause-to-tab you could do a lot with some
personal server-side action and basic webform.

~~~
Terretta
OmniFocus came up with a hack for this, using the Siri to email bridge. You
can email OmniFocus, Evernote, Pinboard, etc. by making a contact for the app
name. So you can Siri to them too, though at the moment only OmniFocus takes
Siri related actions.

------
frozenport
Apple is a Gimmick and a Tease

~~~
jolohaga
Open minded.

------
panacea
I only tried Siri once before deciding it was useless for me.

I asked Siri "How many inches in a foot?" which Siri heard as "How many inches
in a _fort_ ". I retried it about twenty times modulating my voice to try and
get it to hear foot instead of fort and eventually gave up.

~~~
randomdata
If you edit the result, changing fort to foot, it seems to quickly learn the
nuances of your voice. Depending on when you tried, iOS 6 also seemed to
improve the results significantly, at least for me.

~~~
enraged_camel
Yeah, it boggles my mind that people use it and expect it to work right away
100% of the time. It's almost as if they have no experience with computers or
technology in general.

~~~
Thrymr
Or Apple has set unrealistic expectations for their product.

