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How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

nytimes.com

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Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

#11

Post by MBCook »

melling wrote: post #6
tormeh wrote: post #2

Holy shit, we live in the future!

We're definitely getting close. I wish Apple would take Siri to the next level. It should be easier to make corrections, for example. I bought Dragon Dictate for my Mac a couple days ago just so I could try to do a little more with voice recognition. It'll be great to be able to program mainly with voice like in this video: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html At the moment, I can simply say "open term…

How do you like it? I've been very interested (dictation in Mavericks leaves a lot to be desired) but the reviews on Amazon seem to savage it pretty good as buggy and not up to the standards of the Windows version.

Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

#12

Post by jknightco »

ntumlin wrote: post #4
iLoch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at work today and decided to buy the new Halo game that comes out in three weeks. Paid in two taps, and was notified that my Xbox at home would be turned on immediately and the game would begin to download. Sure enough I got home and all 65GB had been downloaded. I paid for a game that will be released in the future and it got to my house before I did. What?

It amazes me that the new Halo game is 65 GB.

To be fair, the "new" Halo game is technically the first 4 games all redone for the Xbox One packaged together.

Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

#14

Post by cbhl »

arjie wrote: post #9

Wow, what a piece! I am incredibly impressed with the range of responses that Siri has. I wonder just how many questions they've entered responses to. Certainly some stuff can be learned, but responding to requests to marriage is certainly written at some level by a human.

Almost certainly they special-case some inputs -- have you ever recited the Konami Code to Siri? What amazes me is sheer variety of questions that people ask Siri that s/he can now answer humorously. It wouldn't surprise me if they watch the number of queries (from actual users) that don't get an answer and/or fall back to Wolfram Alpha to see if there are any new ones that need special treatment.

That said, most of the information that Siri spits out was "written at some level by a human", such as the Wikipedia articles s/he quotes (by Wikipedia authors), or the flight information for planes overhead (by airline employees).

Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

#15

Post by aaronem »

melling wrote: post #6
tormeh wrote: post #2

Holy shit, we live in the future!

We're definitely getting close. I wish Apple would take Siri to the next level. It should be easier to make corrections, for example. I bought Dragon Dictate for my Mac a couple days ago just so I could try to do a little more with voice recognition. It'll be great to be able to program mainly with voice like in this video: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html At the moment, I can simply say "open term…

I gather Yosemite brings Siri to OS X, which I expect will be an interesting evolution, especially once people start figuring out how to add new capabilities and integrations.

I saw Rudd's demo and have been tantalized by its possibilities ever since. More than the specific technologies in use, what really fascinated me was the way he invented what could almost be described as a shorthand language optimized for efficiently driving the editor via voice, with various unique (and otherwise meaningless) phoneme combinations to represent things not easily expressed in ordinary English -- for example, "lep" instead of "left parenthesis", one syllable in place of five. That's the real win, I think; the specific dictation pipeline in use hardly matters, so long as it supports the necessary interfaces and customization capabilities.

Some day I mean to find the time for a really deep dive into the subject, ideally one from which I'll surface with something I can distribute to others wishing to drive their editors the same way.

Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

#17

Post by aaronem »

ntumlin wrote: post #4
iLoch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at work today and decided to buy the new Halo game that comes out in three weeks. Paid in two taps, and was notified that my Xbox at home would be turned on immediately and the game would begin to download. Sure enough I got home and all 65GB had been downloaded. I paid for a game that will be released in the future and it got to my house before I did. What?

It amazes me that the new Halo game is 65 GB.

Texture mapping has come a long, long way. It's a shame AAA game mechanics haven't kept up, but, hey, that's a hard problem.

(I just bought Alien: Isolation the other day, and found it disappointing -- silly me, thinking I'd bought a game I could play as I pleased, rather than a movie which would punish me for trying to step outside the predefined narrative it wanted to relate.)

Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

#19

Post by saryant »

cbhl wrote: post #14
arjie wrote: post #9

Wow, what a piece! I am incredibly impressed with the range of responses that Siri has. I wonder just how many questions they've entered responses to. Certainly some stuff can be learned, but responding to requests to marriage is certainly written at some level by a human.

Almost certainly they special-case some inputs -- have you ever recited the Konami Code to Siri? What amazes me is sheer variety of questions that people ask Siri that s/he can now answer humorously. It wouldn't surprise me if they watch the number of queries (from actual users) that don't get an answer and/or fall back to Wolfram Alpha to see if there are any new ones that need special treatment. That said, most of…

The flight information is powered by Wolfram Alpha which appears to source it from ADS-B data via (I assume) the FAA, so that actually is entirely automated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...

Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

#20

Post by dubfan »

MBCook wrote: post #13

Can anyone get the "Are there any flights me?" query to work? It just keeps doing a Bing search showing pages talking about the fact that Siri can do it. Wolfram Alpha can answer the question if I got to the site, so the data is definitely there.

It didn't work for me either. Pretty much the whole of the city I live in is under a flight path, so it's definitely not a lack of data. On a related note, Siri has regressed for me since iOS 8. It won't shuffle my music by genre anymore, always telling me "I'm having a bit of trouble".
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