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Siri's creators say they've made something better

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#11

Post by miguelrochefort »

Hopefully they'll stop focusing on converstional UI, as it's wildly innefficient. I'd much rather interact visually and spatially.

I'll give these guys the benefit of the doubt, but it seems like all of these businesses miss the big picture and try to emulate the way humans communicate. In trying to deal with the UI fragmentation problem, they're greatly decreasing the user experience. We don't need a chat bot, we need an app that does everything, where the GUI is the language.

I don't want to describe a location verbally, I want to point to it in a map. Most of the time, I don't know what I precisely want, and prefer to browse options rather than have a tedious conversation.

There is no doubt in my mind that the UI of the future will be more like Akinator/Tinder (Yes/Maybe/No) than English.

All the pieces already exist. All we need is some interface over a knowledge graph. Why don't people see this?

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#12

Post by skylark »

wyc wrote: post #7

According to an episode of Acquired[0], none of Siri's original technology is present in Apple's current products. Siri originally licensed Nuance's (also an SRI spin-out company) voice recognition technology and built some pretty (comparatively) simple tech on top of it, never changing out the speech-to-text engine. All current players (Google, Amazon, etc) use neural nets, so Apple scooped up many Nuance employees…

I think the biggest problem with voice commands is that if the command doesn't work the first time, it would have been faster to simply input the command yourself. I'm not confident that "get me directions to " will actually get me those directions. Because of that, I also use Siri exclusively to set alarms (which does work every time).

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#13

Post by miguelrochefort »

insulanian wrote: post #8

Didn't Microsoft present the technology for the exact same thing (even used the same pizza-ordering example) during their Build conference this year?

Perhaps that's because it's the most trivial of ideas and every single person in history has had that thought at some point in life?

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#14

Post by slededit »

wyc wrote: post #7

According to an episode of Acquired[0], none of Siri's original technology is present in Apple's current products. Siri originally licensed Nuance's (also an SRI spin-out company) voice recognition technology and built some pretty (comparatively) simple tech on top of it, never changing out the speech-to-text engine. All current players (Google, Amazon, etc) use neural nets, so Apple scooped up many Nuance employees…

Its not just the hidden functionality, for me Siri will frequently assume I want to call somebody when I ask it something. Explaining why I accidentally called someone I hadn't talked to in years (and by the how are you doing?) makes playing with Siri a high risk endeavour.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#15

Post by pessimizer »

redplasticcup wrote: post #3
cstavish wrote: post #2

The example of the pizza ordering is technologically impressive, yes... But from an end-user perspective it is at best "as hard" as calling the pizza place and talking to a human taking your order. There are many use cases where it could actually provide value, but I found it funny that they chose to demonstrate one to the press that really afforded end-users no advantage.

What if the pizza cost half as much now because it didn't require a human to standby and take the order?

People who work at pizza places make far less than a dollar a minute (assuming you have a very complicated, very small order.)

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#16

Post by mwfunk »

skylark wrote: post #12
wyc wrote: post #7

According to an episode of Acquired[0], none of Siri's original technology is present in Apple's current products. Siri originally licensed Nuance's (also an SRI spin-out company) voice recognition technology and built some pretty (comparatively) simple tech on top of it, never changing out the speech-to-text engine. All current players (Google, Amazon, etc) use neural nets, so Apple scooped up many Nuance employees…

I think the biggest problem with voice commands is that if the command doesn't work the first time, it would have been faster to simply input the command yourself. I'm not confident that "get me directions to " will actually get me those directions. Because of that, I also use Siri exclusively to set alarms (which does work every time).

This is the #1 problem with anything based on voice recognition and natural language processing IMO. It has to work 99% of the time to overcome this issue, but it seems like the nature of the technologies ensure that it will only asymptotically approach this threshold, and is currently stuck at 75% reliability at best.

Plus, even if it did work, it's just a really inexact and inefficient way to do anything. You always end up trying to see through the abstraction layer (natural language in this case) to the much more well-defined hidden system underneath. It's like reverse engineering an expert system, as a UI paradigm.

Programming languages made to resemble natural language face a similar poison pill, AppleScript being a prime example.

I totally get the appeal of trying to make software understand people better instead of forcing people to understand software, but in practice it just ends up being one more abstraction layer users have to struggle to get past in order to unlock the functionality of the underlying system.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#17

Post by chongli »

cstavish wrote: post #2

The example of the pizza ordering is technologically impressive, yes... But from an end-user perspective it is at best "as hard" as calling the pizza place and talking to a human taking your order. There are many use cases where it could actually provide value, but I found it funny that they chose to demonstrate one to the press that really afforded end-users no advantage.

The point they emphasize in the article is that Viv is supposed to allow you to say "get me pizza, flowers, a bottle of wine, and two tickets to the opera" and then it helps you figure out all that stuff and handles everything for you without you having to make any phone calls, type anything, or open any apps.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#18

Post by mwfunk »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #11

Hopefully they'll stop focusing on converstional UI, as it's wildly innefficient. I'd much rather interact visually and spatially. I'll give these guys the benefit of the doubt, but it seems like all of these businesses miss the big picture and try to emulate the way humans communicate. In trying to deal with the UI fragmentation problem, they're greatly decreasing the user experience. We don't need a chat bot, we ne…

Agreed 100%. I felt the same way 10 years ago when people would always bring up the Minority Report UI as some sort of holy grail we should all be working towards. It looks cool (or demos well, in the case of conversational UIs), but outside of a few very specific use cases it would be horribly inefficient to use all the time.

Conversational UIs almost seem like the ultimate form of skeuomorphism to me- it's only an illusion that it works like something from the non-computer world that you're already familiar with (talking to another person, in this case), but the reality is something far more complicated and far less robust than it leads you to believe.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#19

Post by ams6110 »

grogenaut wrote: post #5
redplasticcup wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the pizza cost half as much now because it didn't require a human to standby and take the order?

I can already order my pizza with an app or with Yo Dominoes... and they cost the same... Not sure if it's because the person on the phone is doing other stuff at the same time or if it's more like eBooks where they cost the same as Paperbacks because "more profit".

That is the case. Only when the store is very busy will they have dedicated phone order takers. The rest of the time the drivers who are waiting for the next delivery, the pizza makers, and/or managers handle the phones.

Used to work at a Dominos, though it was pre-internet days. Not sure how much online business the typical store now gets, I know I still always call when I order pizza because it's faster than dealing with the website.

Annoyingly at Dominos they now also have an automated attendant answer the call initially, which reads off the daily specials. That's a big reason I don't often order Dominos anymore but instead call a competitor who still has live humans answering the phone.

When I was at Dominos we had a standard of no more than two rings before a person picked up. People would sprint across the store to get the phone before the third ring.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#20

Post by meric »

mwfunk wrote: post #18
miguelrochefort wrote: post #11

Hopefully they'll stop focusing on converstional UI, as it's wildly innefficient. I'd much rather interact visually and spatially. I'll give these guys the benefit of the doubt, but it seems like all of these businesses miss the big picture and try to emulate the way humans communicate. In trying to deal with the UI fragmentation problem, they're greatly decreasing the user experience. We don't need a chat bot, we ne…

Agreed 100%. I felt the same way 10 years ago when people would always bring up the Minority Report UI as some sort of holy grail we should all be working towards. It looks cool (or demos well, in the case of conversational UIs), but outside of a few very specific use cases it would be horribly inefficient to use all the time. Conversational UIs almost seem like the ultimate form of skeuomorphism to me- it's only an…

Yes, I think for a conversational UI to work, it needs to be aware of the human world - like JARVIS from Iron Man.
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