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How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

mashable.com

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Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#131

Post by chirau »

robotkdick wrote: post #126

Siri has 20x more active users than Alexa. Not sure about Google. While they are perceived as having fallen behind, Apple is still way, way ahead. And when she works, like driving directions, people aren't even aware they're using Siri. Damned impressive given the car is moving through a vast network of roads/traffic/construction while instructions are being given. Meanwhile, Alexa gets to sit at home and help with b…

Clearly a fanboy, I see. Numbers don't mean anything, technically. Siri is imposed on every iPhone owner. That should account for the numbers.

Also, you trust Siri for directions over Waze-integrated Google Assistant? Good for you player!

As for voice comprehension? I pity the fool who cares compare Siri to Alexa. But what do I know? You probably have a MacBook, an iPhone an iWatch and could not imagine anything better in your life.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#132

Post by scarface74 »

dmd wrote: post #116
scarface74 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and it can also remind you to do something when you "get in the car" or "get out of the car", if you have it paired to your Bluetooth in your car.

But what none of them can do is what people actually need, which is "remind me to do X before I leave work".

What signal could it pick up on before you leave work besides when you get in your car or after you leave somewhere?

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#133

Post by madeofpalk »

microtherion wrote: post #115
ktta wrote: post #37

Team dysfunction seems to be a part of it. The 'head' guy for Siri, Dag Kittlaus left Apple to start Viv Labs in about a year since Siri was released. Their assistant Viv, looked pretty okay[1], and was since acquired by Samsung[2]. I feel if he had stayed on, Siri would have been better. Samsung seems to be trying pretty hard to get people to use it[3]. It's relatively new so I'm interested to see where it goes, esp…

I remember that Viv got positive press when launched. But how good did it actually become? It seems to me we'd be hearing more about Samsung's voice assistant if Viv did really live up to the hype.

Eh. Theranos got “positive press”.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#134

Post by breatheoften »

I will believe that someone is trying to improve Siri when the implementation is updated so that the time between when I push the button and when I can start speaking is reduced to the minimum possible with a only a short reliably deterministic delay length.

The inability of Siri to provide me a way to know when I can start talking absolutely (waiting for that horrible beep is just insanely terrible) completely breaks the experience. The fact that no one seems to have noticed this flaw enough to figure out a fix suggests to me that the people developing the project do not have sufficient understanding of the interaction model to ever improve it ...

There should be zero network requests that need to be complete before I can start talking. If Siri is unavailable for network reasons tell me after (or during) my query — but don’t slow down every single interaction and add ridiculous amounts of uncertainty to the responsiveness of the interface for the sake of the uncommon cases ...

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#135

Post by MBCook »

flounder3 wrote: post #71
CharlesW wrote: post #31

It's sort of sad to read a story about a story, and not be able to figure out which problems were created in the source vs. the retelling. Mashable: "Right now, it looks like Siri won't be blown up and a [sp] rebuilt". Yeah, well, that'd most likely be a huge mistake[1] depending on your definition of "blown up" and "rebuilt", and also Siri's already been rebuilt twice.[2] The Information: "One of Apple’s original pl…

Regarding [1], the move to Mesos was not a rewrite. Some core components had to be improved, but [2] was primarily an infrastructure upgrade that happened to make Siri considerably faster by ditching hypervisors. It was a massive feat that was accomplished by relatively few engineers. There were always many components under review for reengineering; keep in mind that Siri was released before WebSockets was a thing, l…

I always wondered how much of a toll Apple’s multilingual support was compared to the small number that Google and Amazon have.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#136

Post by [deleted] »

tinus_hn wrote: post #122
IBM wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Forstall and his direct report were responsible for two botched product launches, Siri and Maps. This is a big blow to the camp suggesting firing Forstall was a mistake.

Siri may have stalled now but it definitely wasn’t a botched launch. And Apple maps may not work great in all cases but it did succeed in forcing Google to provide decent maps on iOS. Before Apple Maps the vector maps were an Android exclusive.

[deleted]

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#137

Post by ilyaeck »

xiaq wrote: post #67

> "It was slow, when it worked at all," Williamson said. "The software was riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original Siri team, certainly not me." Wow. It those were his original words, I don't doubt a bit that this guy should be responsible for Siri being left behind.

What a disgrace for a (former) leader to trash his team like this.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#138

Post by ilyaeck »

Say what you will about Siri, but it was the watershed product that unleashed a new generation of mass-market voice assistants, including later bloomers such as Alexa, Google Assistant, etc. Yes, it was (is?) relatively rudimentary technology, but the founding team was visionary. As for the mismanagement, Apple's bureaucracy is to blame.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#139

Post by photojosh »

phxrsg wrote: post #35
Consultant32452 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you listed are my primary uses of Google Assistant, but here's some others. What time is it in [location]? What's the temperature outside? Change the temperature inside (nest). Turn off all the lights. Really the only thing you can't do with Siri that I'm aware of is home automation. But I could be wrong about that.

Siri can do home automation with HomeKit and it actually works really well. The disadvantage here is that HomeKit has less supported accessories because, as I understand it, it's less open/requires certification of the accessory. That said, for engineers in the crowd I know that I and others get around it by making a HomeKit RPi adapter for things that don't support it...

I recently got a certified smart lock, and it's been superb. Any communications outside my network are handled through Apple/HomeKit and I trust them a lot more than some random Chinese IoT supplier.

> That said, for engineers in the crowd I know that I and others get around it by making a HomeKit RPi adapter for things that don't support it...

Yep, they're using HomeBridge. [0]

I'm planning on doing this for my garage door (with a little WiFi dev board) and for a video doorbell (with a RPi with camera). Others have used HomeBridge with a cheap $20 Chinese IP camera to do the same thing, although you have to install an alternate firmware if you don't want the camera to phone home to China... :O

[0]: https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#140

Post by petee »

spullara wrote: post #39
veesahni wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's voice recognition is excellent. I trust Assistant to help me throughout my day with a number of things now: - Cooking & laundry timers - Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home) - Directions (Take me to the nearest X, take me home, etc) - Checking hours of business (what time does X close today) - Initiating phone calls (Call X) - Checking weather (is it going to snow today? How cold is it right now?) -…

All of those Siri can do. Anything else?

can do, not will do.

I've yet to meet anyone who got siri to do anything, let alone useful, on the 5th try. I can mumble microcontroller part numbers to google, or other odd non-standard words/phrases and 90% of the time its correct on the first try; half the time i'm astonished that it even was able to figure out what i said

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