

Why Google And Microsoft Are Bad-Mouthing Apple's Chatty Siri - bond
http://www.fastcompany.com/1789282/why-google-and-microsoft-are-bad-mouthing-apples-chatty-siri

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joebadmo
My wife got an iPhone 4S on opening weekend. Our consensus so far is that Siri
is largely a gimmick. Fun to mess around with the first couple of days, but
she hasn't used it once since.

Three problems:

1\. AI Uncanny Valley. It's hard for her to know what's going to work and
what's not. Things that seem like they should work, don't. It feels like it
understands things sometimes, but obviously doesn't at other times. This makes
the experience feel fragile and unreliable.

2\. It's actually unreliable. The speech recognition is not quite good enough,
and the connection/server issues were intermittently awful.

3\. Robopsychology. My wife doesn't actually want everyone around her to know
who she's calling or what she needs a reminder of, sort of for the same reason
she leaves the room to take a phone call. It's socially awkward to broadcast
your private interactions that way. This is true at work and in public, which
greatly diminishes the opportunities she might have to use it. When she does
get the opportunity, it never occurs to her.

~~~
foobarbazetc
3 -> Enable "Raise to speak". Hold phone to head, talk to Siri like a normal
phone call. Problem solved.

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pedalpete
Though I find the comments of both Lee and Rubin to be very short sighted,
this article is equally limited in vision.

I doubt Google or Microsoft are as far behind as the author describes.

Microsoft has already been working with voice interaction with Kinect on, and
WP7 has voice search. The Kinect API is being built into Windows 8.

I haven't used Android (about to install it on my touchpad), but my
understanding is that the voice capabilities are there, just not as refined as
Siri.

Apple has a lead here, but I doubt it is insurmountable. The challenge once
again for Google and MS is that Apple has jumped up and said "we're the first
to do this", and are marketing the hell out of it, so everybody else just
looks like imitators.

~~~
contextfree
Voice control has been built into Windows since Vista, fwiw.

------
sixtofour
tl;dr: "Lee [Microsoft] and Rubin [Google] must be nervous."

And don't have anything that obviously competes.

And to Rubin's "you shouldn't be communicating with a phone." Assuming he's
talking about personal assistant-like communication, which personal assistant
am I personally supposed to be communicating with? The one I can't afford and
don't have?

