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

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

#41

Post by justinschuh »

Tloewald wrote: post #28

Here's a question: how well will the voice recognition features of the next version of Android compare with the next version of iOS? And what proportion of Android users will be able to upgrade to it? Releasing a slightly superior clone of a feature in a rival product over six months after the first product shipped isn't enormously impressive, although it is more impressive than shipping an inferior clone of a produc…

Android has had voice actions and voice search since 2.2--over a year before the Siri beta was even announced. Speech control has been a rapidly evolving and increasingly robust set of features in Android, but for some reason people are claiming Apple moved first. Honestly, I'm amazed at the extent to which marketing can completely overwrite people's recollection of objective reality.

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

#42

Post by simonster »

molmalo wrote: post #22
z92 wrote: post #14

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 wron…

In almost all of the things you mentioned, google has the advantage to make a better product. They have an enormous power to train their creation, to achieve a higher level in terms of speech recognition and understanding. I'm not saying that they are already there, only that they have what is needed. But i really don't know how far are they willing too go, as taking it too far away could end up being counterproducti…

> In almost all of the things you mentioned, google has the advantage to make a better product. They have an enormous power to train their creation, to achieve a higher level in terms of speech recognition and understanding. I'm not saying that they are already there, only that they have what is needed.

I'm not sure why you think this. Both Apple and Google probably have vast amounts of unlabeled voice data that they could use to train their speech recognition engines. Just having a product gives you that. Either would need to collect labeled voice data for training purposes, and both have plenty of money to do this.

As far as understanding goes, having a shitton of training data may not help all that much. What you really need is a superior algorithm. While one could argue that Google's engineers have more expertise in this regard, NLP isn't really either company's specialty, and Apple can hire smart people too.

I think the advantage Google has is that they can do search better. That's basically what this comparison shows. The reason Google Now is faster is that Google does search better. I would think that Google should also be able to get Now to answer harder questions, but this demo doesn't show that, and in that respect I think it's a bit of a disappointment. I was expecting to see Google Now do things Siri can't, but it isn't yet clear that it can.

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

#43

Post by pvidler »

Tloewald wrote: post #28

Here's a question: how well will the voice recognition features of the next version of Android compare with the next version of iOS? And what proportion of Android users will be able to upgrade to it? Releasing a slightly superior clone of a feature in a rival product over six months after the first product shipped isn't enormously impressive, although it is more impressive than shipping an inferior clone of a produc…

In fairness, the video seems to be comparing exactly this -- the sports questions seem to show that he's using iOS 6.

Speed and voice quality are irrelevant to me, but I do really like what he was able to do with the image search on android. It wasn't clear if the android version integrates with wolfram alpha, or any of siri's other sources.

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

#44

Post by dhughes »

This great but it's nearly entirely dependent on the network connection otherwise they're both useless.

I supposedly have an HSPA+ 21Mbps connection yet only get 1Mbps/.03Kbps maybe 5Mbps/950Kbps Kbps on a good day and latency is 100ms or more, Bell Mobility in Canada. I'll never get 21Mbps but less than 25% at best?

Google and Apple can make fancy tech but it's ruined by poor networks.

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

#45

Post by geon »

seiji wrote: post #39
geon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Well. The definition of AI, should not be the sophistication or success, but the intention.

A chess AI is little more than a recursive search for a maximum return, or a database search. There is not really anything distinguishing it from any other algorithm. Just the intention of the developer.

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

#46

Post by justinschuh »

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…

>Currently, Google has the best infrastructure to do that, but Apple seems to care more. I live in Holland, for example. No siri, but at least we can buy content from iTunes. Google isnt selling anything but apps in its playstore.

I'm not sure you appreciate the issues at play with licensed content. The iTunes Store opened in 2003 and was restricted to the US for over a year. Apple expanded it into international markets very slowly, over several years time, and didn't even move outside the western world until just last year.

My point is that it takes quite a bit of time and effort to address complex international issues with content licenses and rights holders. Apple has spent almost a decade working on this and they're only recently getting to a level of international ubiquity. Whereas Google has been at it for barely a year, but is moving pretty quickly as far as I can tell.

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

#47

Post by rryan »

z92 wrote: post #14

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 wron…

Well, I can't seem to find the raw source material -- but here's a news article about the relative accuracies of Google vs. Siri. 86% accuracy (Google) vs. 68% accuracy (Siri).

This is not surprising. Google has been doing question answering on web search for many years now. I believe it started answering direct free-form questions in its oneboxen in 2007 -- maybe earlier.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/29/minneapolis-street-te...

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

#48

Post by WiseWeasel »

brcrth wrote: post #31
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.

Siri doesn't support Portuguese, or any Latin languages other than French at this time. iOS 6 adds Spanish and Italian, and I assume Portuguese can't be far behind.

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

#49

Post by lmichelbacher »

lmichelbacher wrote: post #3

I've never tried Siri or S Voice so I can't say anything about the quality of the services or the overall experience but judging by what I saw in the video it didn't seem to me like it was "a complete blowout for Siri." The main metric in the comparison seemed to be speed, at which S Voice was a little bit better than Siri. Also, voice quality was slightly in favor of S Voice. The main differences were S Voice offeri…

OK, it Google's new Voice Search and not S-Voice. I still think that you can't say that it is vastly superior to Siri based on this video.

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

#50

Post by brcrth »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #48
brcrth wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Siri doesn't support Portuguese, or any Latin languages other than French at this time. iOS 6 adds Spanish and Italian, and I assume Portuguese can't be far behind.

So what? My point is that Siri doesn't apply as a valid/common "person" name in some languages and used the meaning in portuguese as an example.
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