

Iris Is (Sort Of) Siri For Android - Sato
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/17/iris-is-sort-of-siri-for-android/

======
zeratul
Context aware software can be built only when rich repositories of background
knowledge are available. They don't come cheap. Either you need hordes of
linguists and domain experts or you get garbage. One can try using OpenCyc,
FrameNet, WordNet or UMLS but it ain't easy. You might as well spent the time
on writing Q/A templates for your bot. Hurdles, hurdles, hurdles.

Nonetheless, Watson and Apple showed that there is something shiny on the
other side of the rainbow.

~~~
DallaRosa
if I heard of anyone actually using opencyc for anything, THAT would amaze me
more than Siri lol.

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robert_nsu
In all seriousness, they probably should have called it something other than
Iris. I'm not a fan of Android these days (since my Galaxy S died on me at a
really bad time), but this name will (most likely) fuel the fire of Android
being a total rip of iPhone.

Of course, I might just be reading too far into the name thing. Their humor is
pretty obvious.

~~~
drivebyacct2
What? Your hardware failed so you dislike Android and "Android is a total rip
of iPhone"? Ha, like notifications and multitasking?

~~~
robert_nsu
Not going into details, but yes, I was/am pretty mad at Google and Samsung.
Seven months of use followed by a total loss of data left me with a negative
attitude.

~~~
drivebyacct2
You probably should go into details. I've never, ever heard of anything
remotely close to this happening with an Android device.

------
Jun8
No it's not! And that is no suprise:

"Suddenly, I got the urge to do something similar for Android. Since we have
been working on NLP and Machine learning for over an year now, I had a crazy
belief that I could pull this off. " (from [http://blog.dexetra.com/a-day-
when-siri-inspired-us-to-creat...](http://blog.dexetra.com/a-day-when-siri-
inspired-us-to-create-iris-fo))

It's cool that they banged up a cool app in a very short time but to think
that this in anyway can compete with probably hundreds of man-years of
research that went into CALO (what became Siri) and, of course, with Apple's
polish is insane (just check these funny Siri comebacks to see this:
[http://pocketnow.com/iphone/funny-things-siri-says-
screensho...](http://pocketnow.com/iphone/funny-things-siri-says-screenshot-
gallery)).

Pushing half-baked apps as competitors to those from Apple with similar
functionality will only push more people to iPhones.

------
hmottestad
We can push buttons, we can touch screens, but the future will be the ability
to tell computers what we want them to do with our voice.

I hope this future will come in my lifetime as much as the next guy, though so
far every time I try speech-to-text and the likes of speech-command software I
use it optimistically for the first few days, then give it up.

Context aware software with speech recognition might be about to change all of
that. And maybe it's going to take another garage startup (think Apple) to
make it all fall into place.

But 8 hours of work seems like too small an effort if you're wanting to
compete with Siri.

 _Essentially all they have is a glorified search engine that accepts speech
instead of text and gives you a summary of one of the results. This isn't
Siri, or anything close._

~~~
joebadmo
I agree, except I think there are places for voice, and places for touch.
Things that would take multiple steps to accomplish, e.g. "remind me to take
out the trash when I get home," is an awesome application for voice, but for
choosing from a menu of a bunch of items, I want to just select the item.

My wife got a 4S, and from the few days we've been playing with it, we agree
that it's sort of still in the uncanny valley of AI. It's too hard to tell
what's going to work and what's not, esp. for the technically lay.

It's amazing, though, for Apple to have opened everyone's eyes (ears?) once
again wrt to what direction the near future will take.

~~~
gbog
> direction the near future will take.

It is hard to tell. I am not convinced that the near future is in natural
language and voice control. I stated why here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3119528>.

And the more I think of it, the less I am convinced. For instance, the hole
Chinese-speaking world cannot conveniently use speech to communicate with a
machine, because of Chinese language structure. If Siri do not understand an
English name I am telling it, I can always "spell" it. Not in Chinese. You
can't conveniently "spell" a Chinese character, and even if you could (using
wubi method), you would still need a visual feedback to confirm the correct
character has been chosen.

Nowadays, any technology that can't scale well to other languages than English
has a profound problem, I suppose.

~~~
hmottestad
Every tv-show with any amount of tech that I watched when I was a kid in the
90s featured a computer that talked and could be talked to. Plenty of people
hoping this will become a reality, even if only for languages using letters
(ie. not Chinese).

Any complex task that is somehow generic can easily be done with voice control
and makes the UI needed for simpler tasks to be more concise and less bloated.

For instance setting the alarm clock. You could scroll through your apps
looking for the clock app. Open it (ie. wait for it to load), then navigate to
the alarm clock tab, create a new alarm, set the correct time and hit save.
(on my nokia phone this is actually faster than saying saying the word
"alarm", but my ipod touch is slow as hell)

On a computer with a keyboard a lot of this can be sped up because I can
search for the application from the keyboard, I can tab through fields and use
shortcuts to do things (like ctrl-n for new). But my mum can never remember
any shortcuts, and she can't type very fast. And if you think that the new
generation is any better...then have a look at anyone studying in the human
sciences department...most of them have trouble enough using word.

My point is, if something doesn't require perfect speech recognition, is a
complex yet generic task...then voice control seems like a very good solution.

------
baddox
Are they purposefully mocking the stereotype that Android apps have poor
design?

~~~
ori_b
They built it in 8 hours. What do you expect?

------
DallaRosa
Android has a great voice recognition technology.It works like a dream. Also
it's pretty easy to integrate voice-to-text into your applications and again
it's very easy to launch apps/do google searchs/open a map/etc in Android with
Intents. I've been playing with command voices and writing emails etc since
maybe more than a year ago and if you have a little training in NLP (or even
if you don't) you realize it's pretty easy to get your Android device to
return wikipedia data in a pretty layout or get a few simple "natural
language"-like commands working.

But what's amazing in Apple's system is not sending an email by saying "email
to...". The really cool and difficult part is how the handle paraphrasing and
uncertainty. Paraphrasing ("how's the weather today?" x “What is the weather
like today?”) and ambiguity resolution ("What's up next" -> shows your next
appointments) are still very difficult problems in NLP and even though
research has improved lots[1][2] it's still totally non-trivial. The way they
got it to work in the phone is in a total different level from what those guys
working 8 hours achieved.

[1] <http://www.nist.gov/tac/2011/RTE/index.html>

[2] <http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.3747>

------
rjd
... has anyone done a cleverbot version? packaged it up as a semi serious app?
I think I could have some fun with that

------
nextparadigms
"SpeakToIt" seems a lot like Siri. It seems a lot of companies were already
doing this. It's just now that Apple pushed it to its new iPhone that people
are really starting to get interested in them.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myE498nyfGw>

~~~
paul9290
SpeaktoIt seems to have more personality based off responses it gives. It is
not as serious as Siri. Though Siri does have its Easter eggs too though less
so then speak to it. Both are equally useful and enjoyable and have their
strengths and weaknesses. Siri is built into iPhone and it's speech is
superior to speak to it.

------
azulum
in just 8 hours, they built the app…having already spent more than a year on
natural language processing and machine learning. in 8 eight hours they have a
working but unpolished simple app that plugs into a lot of research. does
anyone else find the sensationalism absurd? "just 8 hours"

and a question for HN—what is this fascination with techcrunch? if there is a
story out on the interwebs and techcrunch has covered it, it's usually at the
top. is it because they do venture capital pieces? is it because green is
(was) the color of money? is it because michael arrington held some sort of
strange fascination by tech culture at large that has remained now that he's
been ousted?

i humbly await the downvotes and replies.

thanks

hacker n00b

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irunbackwards
When does the narwhal bacon?

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funkah
Reminds me of this blog post, "How to clone Delicious in 48 hours"[1]. It's
cool that these people took their existing work and put a mockup of Siri's UI
over it, but getting it to work smoothly and be useful is going to take a lot
longer than 8 hours.

Besides, Android doesn't even need this, right? I thought it already had a
Siri equivalent, and Siri represents Apple yet again playing catchup. Right?

On the other hand, Siri has supposedly one of the largest engineering teams at
Apple. If a small shop can beat that team at their own game, that would be
pretty neat to see. But, I am not holding my breath.

[1] [http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-
in-24-hours...](http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-
in-24-hours.html)

------
warmfuzzykitten
Here we go again with the code dashed off over the weekend. Sigh. Will this
industry never grow up?

