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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

#31

Post by brcrth »

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…

Siri in portuguese is crab. So the "People feel they are talking to another person" doesn't apply everywhere.

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

#32

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#34

Post by geon »

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).

No. Machine transcription requires strong AI to be really good. As you saw in my example with the Kelis song, it isn't enough to just transcribe the input syllable by syllable. You need the software to be able to "understand" that I'm requesting a song, and that "play a capella" makes no sense, and adjust the transcription to tale into account that the artist Kelis has a song with the name "Acapella".

There are thousands of cases like this, where natural language is amibigous, but a human has no trouble understanding the intention.

Siri has tons of databases avsilable and knows my taste in music. It should do a better job than a human understanding what song i want.

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

#35

Post by geon »

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…

> People simply understand what Siri is after seeing someone else use it for a few seconds.

Well, they understan what it should be, but it is so far from reaching that goal it's ridiculous.

Remember the introduction of Siri? It was presented as your personal assistant, understanding your commands and making sense of everyday speech.

So far from the truth.

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

#36

Post by thrownaway2424 »

ralfn wrote: post #24
lordmatty wrote: post #16

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.

If its better, the question becomes: does Google release it on iOS as well, and will Apple allow them too. However, i think the US readers are missing the most important aspect: how many people in the world can you serve? This is a system selling feature during a crucial generation. The speed they can rollout new languages, will determine the world market and the long tail, which will prove crucual. Currently, Google…

Apple has one (1) datacenter in the entire world, and it's in the USA. How good do you think the latency from Holland will be? Google has datacenters in Groningen and Eemshaven, and all over Europe.

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

#38

Post by ralfn »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #36
ralfn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If its better, the question becomes: does Google release it on iOS as well, and will Apple allow them too. However, i think the US readers are missing the most important aspect: how many people in the world can you serve? This is a system selling feature during a crucial generation. The speed they can rollout new languages, will determine the world market and the long tail, which will prove crucual. Currently, Google…

Apple has one (1) datacenter in the entire world, and it's in the USA. How good do you think the latency from Holland will be? Google has datacenters in Groningen and Eemshaven, and all over Europe.

Yes, so Google has the best infrastructure. But thats not motivating them to very inclusive with dutch consumers. Lets hope that changes.

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

#39

Post by seiji »

geon wrote: post #34
seiji wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

No. Machine transcription requires strong AI to be really good. As you saw in my example with the Kelis song, it isn't enough to just transcribe the input syllable by syllable. You need the software to be able to "understand" that I'm requesting a song, and that "play a capella" makes no sense, and adjust the transcription to tale into account that the artist Kelis has a song with the name "Acapella". There are thous…

Excellent point. Perhaps I should have specified "current-level, mostly-non-situationally-contextual machine transcription." Once tone, intent, situation, and context are taken into account we get closer to actual communication instead of "listen to some discrete phonemes then try to assemble appropriate words based on parts of speech."
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