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

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

#41

Post by gumby » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:32 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…

> They chalked the failure up to the disadvantages of a UI where the full extent of the functionality is hidden and difficult to understand, leading to bad experiences. I imagine this technology will have many of the same struggles.

This is super hard. Not only do you have hidden functionality (what a great insight!) but they are trying to do something better than the current state of the art (which is human-to-human). What do I mean? Just listen to yourself when you get something over the phone. You don't call the restaurant and say "give me a reservation for four at 8." You typically use an interactive process of query and response ("can you fit four in at 8pm?" "Yes, today." "No, not five, four". Then they repeat it back to you just in case.

We get annoyed at how crappy the voice recognition systems are, and they are crappy, but human voice recognition reminds me of a TCP session negotiation, or maybe the baud rate negotiation of a bell-compatible Hayes-style modem. It's hardly a one-shot process, yet we want our machines to be.

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

#42

Post by Stratoscope » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:34 AM UTC

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…

> It's also incredibly easy to fall off the blessed path where you can interact solely with voice...

I had this happen with Google Maps the other day. I was driving into San Francisco with the turn-by-turn directions when it said something like, "There is a faster route available in two miles. It will save 5 minutes. Tap 'Accept' to take this route."

So I had to fiddle with my phone in a hurry, in traffic (after all, traffic was why there was a faster route coming up), and hope I don't tap the wrong button or crash into anyone while looking for it.

Why couldn't I just have said "Yes! Please and thank you. Of course I want the faster route, why wouldn't I? Oh, sorry, I mean 'Accept'!"

The funny part was that the "faster route" was the way I usually go into that part of town anyway, but Maps had been sending me a different way because of congestion on the usually-faster route. Why did it even ask me to "accept" the faster route instead of just redirecting me the way it does automatically on most occasions?

Like the time I was heading south on 101 through Morgan Hill and Gilroy and Maps had me get off the freeway and take a side street for a couple of miles because traffic was stopped on the freeway due to a car fire. It didn't ask me to tap Accept then, it just gave me some very practical directions on the fly. That's how it should work.

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

#43

Post by visarga » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:41 AM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #30

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 o…

Or do the same, but on Android. Why can't devs add new voice commands to the system?

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

#44

Post by Animats » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:57 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…

It's a touchscreen device with voice as an afterthought. Devices where voice is primary will be designed differently.

Car navigation systems would be a good place to start.

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

#45

Post by Animats » Thu, May 05, 2016, 7:10 AM UTC

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…

For those of you who haven't seen "The Devil Wears Prada", here's Miranda giving orders to her assistant:

I need 10 or 15 skirts from Calvin Klein.

-What kind of skirts do you… -Please bore someone else with your questions.

And make sure we have Pier 59 at 8:00 a.m. Tomorrow.

Remind Jocelyn I need to see a few of those satchels that Marc is doing in the pony.

And then tell Simone I'll take Jackie if Maggie isn't available.

-Did Demarchelier confirm? -D-Did D-Demarchel…

Demarchelier. Did he… Get him on the phone.

Uh, o… okay.

-And, Emily? -Yes?

That's all.

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

#46

Post by spyder » Thu, May 05, 2016, 7:19 AM UTC

It sounds like they still have to partner with the different services to create custom integrations with their APIs so they can interact only with these preprogrammed services. But the real impressive AI thing would be if it could figure how to do the order of a service on its own: mimicking how humans do it by using forms on the webpages or writing e-mails or making phone calls for reservations. That would make the interaction look like just a regular order from the service providers perspective, so there would be no need to create partnership for the API integrations with each service provider.

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

#47

Post by PeterisP » Thu, May 05, 2016, 8:01 AM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #9

calbear81 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real savings would come if you have a pizza bot that made pizzas without much human intervention and a drone picked it up and dropped it off and flew back to base.

Automated pizza making machines already exist[1] (skip to near end of video to see it in action). Proof of concept: Simply take the end product and pick it up with a multi-rotor and have it autonomously deliver it to the next room. I've definitely eaten some frozen pizza that were as good as or better than the $5 pizza's from Dominos, I'm in Australia, YMMV. I imagine if this was more profitable than the existing tec…

As with many other jobs, the only advantage humans currently have is that they can do it cheaper than robots. For now.

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

#48

Post by dzhiurgis » Thu, May 05, 2016, 8:09 AM UTC

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).

> which does work every time

Except when it doesn't. I had number of times when siri would fail to set reminders. I do not have a need to set alarms that often, but people seem to have problems with it too: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7280346?start=0&tstart=...

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

#49

Post by ttrmw » Thu, May 05, 2016, 8:19 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #41

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…

> They chalked the failure up to the disadvantages of a UI where the full extent of the functionality is hidden and difficult to understand, leading to bad experiences. I imagine this technology will have many of the same struggles. This is super hard. Not only do you have hidden functionality (what a great insight!) but they are trying to do something better than the current state of the art (which is human-to-human…

Which is probably why solutions like Open Table exist and succeed. For me at least, avoiding this kind of inexact interaction is desirable. Simple forms on web pages can provide a smoother UX than talking to huamns for the this type of interaction. If these can provide that one shot process, then inevitably that is the expectation set of any replacement UI.

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

#50

Post by mcintyre1994 » Thu, May 05, 2016, 8:36 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…

I've never seen anything suggesting Siri is any smarter than just looking for keywords. One thing I've tried using it for is a timer while cooking, already a bit rubbish because iOS only supports one. But here's a sample of how that goes:

Open Siri (hands free Hey Siri works for me 5% of the time at best)

"timer 20 minutes"

"Okay, 20 minutes and counting"

A little later, oops that'll need 5 minutes longer than I thought

"add 5 minutes to the timer"

"are you sure you want to change the timer?"

"yes, change it"

"Okay, 5 minutes and counting" Great...

Other than simple keyword commands like that its voice recognition doesn't seem to be good enough for things like transcribing messages anyway.

It's sometimes quicker than spotlight for a web search because of that weird way spotlight hides the search web button for a few seconds when it can't find anything to show.