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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

#31

Post by visarga »

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).

I also use "Call my wife" and "Text my wife" or "Tell my wife that ...". They work every time. Music playing is disappointing - if I want to open YouTube to play something, it can't.

I don't understand why they didn't at least add a few commands for YouTube. At least "play Band", "play Song by Band", "play Music-Genre", "play something like X", "I feel sad/happy/lonely/bored play some music".

If you want to understand the extent to which Siri is useful, you just have to look at the integration it has with the main apps. It's just Alarms, Calendar, Phone, SMS, Music, Weather and similar. It's not really groundbreaking AI, just a voiced command list to the main apps.

I am eagerly waiting for the moment when we could have more in-depth chats with our bots, but the current crop is dragging its feet when it comes even to simple commands sent to apps. Maybe they should ask the app creators to add hooks for voice commands, to make Siri more useful.

For example, if I can disgress a little, Google Now can't start playing the first video in the YouTube app on Android. If I am already in the YT app and say "OK Google, play the first track", it goes to web search instead and searches for "the first track" on the web! The same company made the chatbot, the app and the OS and they don't work well enough together. At least let users add new functions to the bot, if they can't be bothered to do it themselves.

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

#32

Post by natrius »

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.

I expect glorified menu systems to be fantastic. I'd like to replace every phone call I make to a corporation with a glorified menu system.

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

#33

Post by agumonkey »

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…

More and more I get back my Moto G with the OK Google widget on because of something on TV triggered it. Meanwhile it rarely understand me when I want. Fun.

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

#34

Post by visarga »

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…

> It's like reverse engineering an expert system, as a UI paradigm.

The rate of adoption will skyrocket when we reach a certain threshold, people will see other people speaking to their phones and they will learn to form useful voice commands as well. It has a big social factor.

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

#35

Post by mempko »

Another example of government funded invention being converted to dollars using capitalist innovation. People still don't understand how much our government is involved in bringing us the tech we have now. government invests and about 10-20 years we see it in our homes.

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

#36

Post by visarga »

jordanthoms wrote: post #28
modeless wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was recently trying to find why this happens. For me, sometimes the phone hears "Ok Google" but then just sits there as if there is no microphone, while being in portrait mode all the time, so, no screen rotation. Other times, as you said, being screen-locked makes it deaf. I have to manually unlock it to restart OK Google.

We're not suffering from too stupid AI, we're suffering from stupid app design and laziness when it comes to adding more variations to conversation. Just put a team of script writers to imagine thousands of replies, it is not that hard, people have been doing this kind of rudimentary chat bot scripts for decades now.

I'd like to be able to install an App and suddenly, new commands are available to me.

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

#37

Post by cageface »

Animats wrote: post #29
cageface wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good point. I've been thinking so much about the difficulty of inferring intent I hadn't really considered the consequences of getting it wrong. The more responsible we allow these chat bots to be the greater the risks become.

This is why I think that eventually people will bring this technology up to a useful level it's only going to be the kinds of companies that can make huge time and money investments and have access to huge datasets. Not startup territory really.

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

#39

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Communication is subtle, and most post 2000s computer inspired attempts are very bad. I need most spatial, with a bit of tactile, visual and audio cues / feedback. Nowadays it's very much vision centered, high latency / focus (need to pay attention to the screen, and your movements). Bad.

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

#40

Post by visarga »

slededit wrote: post #14
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.

I wanted to prevent this and only allow calling my favorite contacts (under 10) instead of my whole phone book which is over 1000 contacts. There is no way to set this option in Google Now or Siri.
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