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Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

blog.freshte.ch

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Re: Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

#11

Post by mtgx »

seiji wrote: post #9

The brilliance of Siri isn't the voice interface or the replies using text-to-speech -- it's just the name. People feel they are talking to another person, not a phone or a computer or a google. People understand Siri approximates a person, so they can interact with it informally and somewhat personally. You see it in all the news coverage. People refer to Siri as a person. It gets into your brain. Have you seen norm…

Personally, I think that's a little gimmicky. I think it was very smart of Google to not differentiate this too much, but let people think that this smarter AI thing, is actually still "Google". So in the future people will just refer to "Google" when doing stuff like this.

It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.

Re: Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

#12

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

seiji wrote: post #9

The brilliance of Siri isn't the voice interface or the replies using text-to-speech -- it's just the name. People feel they are talking to another person, not a phone or a computer or a google. People understand Siri approximates a person, so they can interact with it informally and somewhat personally. You see it in all the news coverage. People refer to Siri as a person. It gets into your brain. Have you seen norm…

Well, now we just need Google-tan...

Re: Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

#13

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

mtgx wrote: post #11
seiji wrote: post #9

The brilliance of Siri isn't the voice interface or the replies using text-to-speech -- it's just the name. People feel they are talking to another person, not a phone or a computer or a google. People understand Siri approximates a person, so they can interact with it informally and somewhat personally. You see it in all the news coverage. People refer to Siri as a person. It gets into your brain. Have you seen norm…

Personally, I think that's a little gimmicky. I think it was very smart of Google to not differentiate this too much, but let people think that this smarter AI thing, is actually still "Google". So in the future people will just refer to "Google" when doing stuff like this. It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.

Perhaps Google need to emphasise that you can "ask" Google questions, not just make "searches".

Re: Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

#14

Post by z92 »

Which one can give the answer a fraction of a second faster, or who's voice sounds less robotic means little to me.

I am more interested in knowing about speech recognition capabilities, edge cases handling, frequency of getting something wrong, accented speech recognition capabilities, artificial intelligence maturity and depth and breadth of the knowledge base the systems use.

But this video has focused on the wrong things. I was expecting that the presenter would be asking both some hard but useful questions and show us which one comes out with the right answer.

Re: Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

#15

Post by extension »

seiji wrote: post #10
geon wrote: post #7

Nice to see a speed improvment, but I could live with a slow Siri if the AI was actually usable. It is broken all the time. If I say "Play music by Milk Inc." It might ask me if I want to buy milk. Or if I say "Play Acappella by Kelis." It will respond "Sorry, I can't find a capella in your music." Stuff like that. And it is borderline unusable at all if I'm out of breath, like when I'm running and handsfree controll…

I propose we stop calling machine transcription and fixed-field extraction "AI." Second? We all realize Siri is just a fancy Eliza with Internet access, right? We can resume calling something "AI" when it can order a flight for you from the Ryanair website without making any mistakes (I'm not even at that level yet).

When we figure out how to do that, we won't want to call it AI anymore either. AI is human mental tasks that we haven't figured out how they work yet.

Re: Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

#16

Post by lordmatty »

As I posted on the freshte.ch blog, the commercial drive behind Siri is that you don't use Google when on Apple's platform.

Google coming out with a competitor that stacks up feature-wise doesn't fix that for them because it will only run on Android.

Google's going to miss out on a lot of search/ad revenue due to Siri in the future.

Re: Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

#17

Post by thirdsun »

geon wrote: post #7

Nice to see a speed improvment, but I could live with a slow Siri if the AI was actually usable. It is broken all the time. If I say "Play music by Milk Inc." It might ask me if I want to buy milk. Or if I say "Play Acappella by Kelis." It will respond "Sorry, I can't find a capella in your music." Stuff like that. And it is borderline unusable at all if I'm out of breath, like when I'm running and handsfree controll…

It is even worse if you use it in languages other than english since Siri only recognizes the language you have set before and that also applies to artist names and titles. In my case I would have to pronounce bands like "Real Estate" the german way in order to use this function.

Apple should have anticipated that and allowed music related commands to be analyzed in your native language and english.

Re: Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

#19

Post by slig »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #13
mtgx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think that's a little gimmicky. I think it was very smart of Google to not differentiate this too much, but let people think that this smarter AI thing, is actually still "Google". So in the future people will just refer to "Google" when doing stuff like this. It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.

Perhaps Google need to emphasise that you can "ask" Google questions, not just make "searches".

If you watch normal people using Google, you'll notice that they do this already.

Re: Siri is old tech now - check out Google's solution

#20

Post by maurits »

mtgx wrote: post #11
seiji wrote: post #9

The brilliance of Siri isn't the voice interface or the replies using text-to-speech -- it's just the name. People feel they are talking to another person, not a phone or a computer or a google. People understand Siri approximates a person, so they can interact with it informally and somewhat personally. You see it in all the news coverage. People refer to Siri as a person. It gets into your brain. Have you seen norm…

Personally, I think that's a little gimmicky. I think it was very smart of Google to not differentiate this too much, but let people think that this smarter AI thing, is actually still "Google". So in the future people will just refer to "Google" when doing stuff like this. It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.

>It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly what the future will bring us as SIRI improves. People talking to it more or less the same you see them talking to their pets now.

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