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The Story of Siri, by its founder [video]

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Re: The Story of Siri, by its founder [video]

#11

Post by jud_white »

Oct 4: Apple launches Siri

Oct 5: Steve Jobs dies

  One kind of side note. On October 5th, Steve Jobs died.
  He had been involved in a lot of the process leading up to it.
  We know that he was watching this launch from his house.
  I don't know what he thought about it, but I like to project
  that he saw it, said "It is good. This is the future, Apple's
  in the middle of it. I can go now." I don't know if that's true,
  but that's a projection that I like to put onto it.
I suppose this is the kind of statement you could expect from the creator of a predictive personal assistant, but wow.

Re: The Story of Siri, by its founder [video]

#12

Post by acheyer »

luxpir wrote: post #8
ar7hur wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In France, Siri has a male voice!

Pas mal! But lurking beneath France's crisp white egalitarian shell lies a deeply unequal, slime-ridden underbelly. Still, every little helps.

When designing Siri, the people involved crafted a backstory for Siri, answering questions like "Is Siri a male or a female?", "Is Siri human, computer, or something else?", "Is Siri an Apple employee (or what's the relationship to Apple)", etc. You'll be happy to know that Siri was designed to be neither male nor female, no matter what voice it speaks with -- ask it and you will see...

Re: The Story of Siri, by its founder [video]

#14

Post by revscat »

luxpir wrote: post #6
ar7hur wrote: post #5

Synopsys: Walking backward in time, Adam discussed the technical history of Siri as well as how the vision of virtual personal assistants evolved over time. He wowed the audience with a video from 1987 on a concept from Apple where predicted a Siri like device 24 years in the future and was only off by 2 weeks.

Unfortunately brought 1980s gender prejudices with it. Siri and Cortana defaulting to female voices? Way to miss an opportunity, market leaders.

1) Siri has a male voice available as a configuration option.

2) There have been frequent studies which show that there is a natural (i.e. not cultural) bias towards finding female voices more pleasant, and such preferences begin in the womb[1]. CNN[2] has a story which provides a good overview of this topic, and I am sure you could find other information about if you feel so inclined.

Basically, I do not think the decision to make Siri female was based upon simple prejudice. There are good, scientific reasons for doing so.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/208/4448/1174.short

[2] http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/tech/innovation/female-compute...

Re: The Story of Siri, by its founder [video]

#15

Post by tomphoolery »

I thought the talk about Siri being a service orchestration engine was pretty interesting. With the growing amount of internet services, and most importantly, services competing within the same domain, perhaps the most interesting web apps of the future will be mostly amalgamating the data between these services in intelligent ways.

Re: The Story of Siri, by its founder [video]

#16

Post by valleyer »

jud_white wrote: post #11

Oct 4: Apple launches Siri Oct 5: Steve Jobs dies One kind of side note. On October 5th, Steve Jobs died. He had been involved in a lot of the process leading up to it. We know that he was watching this launch from his house. I don't know what he thought about it, but I like to project that he saw it, said "It is good. This is the future, Apple's in the middle of it. I can go now." I don't know if that's true, but th…

I too found this extremely gratuitous.
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