Siri's creators say they've made something better • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by seanp2k2 » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:06 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #19

grogenaut wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dealin…

Why not get headsets like they have at fast food places? Edit: I feel like that would be a lot cheaper than even one worker comp claim slipping on a flour-covered floor in a pizza place.

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

#22

Post by cududa » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:10 AM UTC

miguelrochefort wrote: post #13

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?

Pretty sure the first iPhone demo involved Steve Jobs ordering a pizza to the Moscone

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

#23

Post by modeless » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:15 AM UTC

mwfunk wrote: post #16

skylark wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alway…

The funny thing is that voice recognition is no longer the problem. For years the reason you couldn't do voice command interfaces was that transcription didn't work, but today transcription works amazingly well. My commands are transcribed perfectly, even in my car when I'm doing 65 on the freeway with my phone stuck in a cupholder.

The problem now is Android randomly kills the "OK Google" background listening process, or it fails because it can't handle a handover between wifi and cell data, or it "can't open microphone" even though it just heard me say OK Google, or any one of many other Android problems rears its ugly head.

The reliability of voice transcription now is far better than the general reliability of Android on my Nexus 5X, and the Android team ought to feel pretty bad about that.

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

#24

Post by nl » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:17 AM UTC

I always find these articles (and the response to them) a bit strange.

The hard part of this problem isn't the voice-part - that is doable. The hard part is parsing the question or order! That is so, so far from being solved. Accuracy rates on QA tasks in academia are around 60-70% (depending on the task), which is much worse than the 95-99% accuracy achievable with speech-to-text.

That's why the pizza ordering thing is impressive - the software has to understand intent.

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

#25

Post by partiallypro » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:18 AM UTC

How is this different than a pizza app using Microsoft's Cortana API in Windows?

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

#26

Post by developer2 » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:19 AM UTC

miguelrochefort wrote: post #13

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?

Because the list of words the speech recognition system has to understand reliably is extremely limited. There are probably what, 200-300 words the system has to understand for a pizza service? It's fairly simple to fine-tune speech recognition if you have a small dictionary of keywords you've given the engine extra training on. A pizza demo is perfect because it appears to be non-trivial, but I assume the engine has been fine-tuned a lot specifically for the demo. The interesting aspects of speech recognition are in handling natural sentences from the entire language, rather than a subset that has been heavily tuned to weigh specific words as being more expected for a given domain.

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

#27

Post by cageface » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:22 AM UTC

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…

This is why I'm very skeptical of this current craze for chat bots. It seems to me that they're really only useful if they can infer a wide range of intent from the user's input, and that seems like it's still very much an unsolved problem. Otherwise they're just glorified menu systems.

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

#28

Post by jordanthoms » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

modeless wrote: post #23

mwfunk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alway…

The funny thing is that voice recognition is no longer the problem. For years the reason you couldn't do voice command interfaces was that transcription didn't work, but today transcription works amazingly well. My commands are transcribed perfectly, even in my car when I'm doing 65 on the freeway with my phone stuck in a cupholder. The problem now is Android randomly kills the "OK Google" background listening proces…

Exactly this - There is a bug where if your phone is locked, and in a position where it thinks it's in landscape, when you say 'OK Google' the phone will unlock in portrait, start listening, rotate to landscape and in the process kill the app listening to your voice, and then rotate back to portrait and lock itself again.

It's also incredibly easy to fall off the blessed path where you can interact solely with voice - when setting a reminder, for example, if it doesn't hear 'Yes' when it's expecting to it'll just sit there and you need to touch the screen to continue - defeating the whole point of voice interaction.

Google's voice search has incredible voice recognition and text to speech and can tap into an amazing amount of information through the knowledge graph, but they don't seem to be capable of fixing the basic bugs and UX issues preventing all that technology from actually being usable.

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

#29

Post by Animats » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:52 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #27

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…

This is why I'm very skeptical of this current craze for chat bots. It seems to me that they're really only useful if they can infer a wide range of intent from the user's input, and that seems like it's still very much an unsolved problem. Otherwise they're just glorified menu systems.

This is easy to do badly and very hard to do well.

It's not just about inferring intent. Most discourse systems have little or no model of the consequences of their actions. Systems that can act on the user's behalf need to know if they're potentially making a big mistake or a little one, as guidance of when to ask for clarification. This requires some degree of "common sense". AI systems still suck at that.

Systems that actually do something need to be much better at this than ones that just answer questions. There needs to be some cost/benefit analysis of whether it's necessary to repeat back info and ask for confirmation. Without that, the system will either ask for confirmation too much, or screw up too much. The system needs to have a model of how clear the user is in their intent.

Pizza ordering is relatively low-risk. Travel reservations are a higher-stakes item. Medical is a long way off.

As I wrote last time, I recommend watching "The Devil Wears Prada", the scenes of Andy's first day as Miranda's personal assistant. That's the level of performance you want.

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

#30

Post by EGreg » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:01 AM UTC

The main problem is that Siri wasn't opened up to third party apps to hook into, and thus remained rather limited and stupid.

Each app could have bundled a voice interface, and Apple's phone would have been the first futuristic and extensible "star trek computer". Oh well, opportunity missed. And by a company whose founder had the Mac speak onstage. I think Jobs would have gone in this direction and demoed the crap out of it!

As usual, there is a systems level challenge to solve for building a foundation for app developers. Namely, how to make a fair and EFFECTIVE way for app developers to all share the same namespace / tree of commands?

If I was in charge of the Siri team, I would have made the following changes:

1) Fork OpenEars or another open source package and spearhead it as a first pass on the phone to eliminate the need for internet connection.

2) Have apps register prefixes for commands

3) Have apps register for "voice intents" and verbs that connect like they have for inter-app audio and app extensions

4) When an app is open, have a way to speak to the app through using the iOS library. This can be used to issue commands or dictate an email etc.

5) Feature apps that make ingenious use of voice commands and have them pitch PR stories about how the iPhone is becoming like Star Trek and is far ahead of Android.