Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 244 posts

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#161

Post by Karunamon »

skizm wrote: post #122

Lots of comments about improving Siri here. This is interesting to me for several reasons I won't address, but I will ask this: Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything? From a purely functional standpoint, they seem super awkward to me. I like buttons that click and reassure me of every input. I like to feel confident my actions won't be misinterpreted. I like that no one else near me will get weirded…

>Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?

You mentioned this, but constantly in the car, but it's not even sort of begrudging. I got an early sale on the Echo Auto devices (Alexa for your car, basically), and love it. Everything I could do by dinking around with my phone, I now don't have to.

Outside of the car, voice commands for stuff like home control is natural, and almost kinda magical. Walking in with both hands full of groceries and barking "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights" is awesome. Same for setting timers while cooking, turning on music, and so forth. So long as you remember that you're dealing with what amounts to a voice command line, not the Enterprise's computer, everything flows smoothly.

Conversely, I almost never use Siri even though by way of car bluetooth it should have the same kind of functionality.. but it's so limited and inaccurate as to be functionally useless.

>is no one else creeped out at always on mics and video cameras in their house?

Not for me, because a device that is local-only listening for a wake-word is not even sort of creepy. Your explanation, intentionally or not, paints it as a device that maintains a constant connection to the mothership and gives $company a live stream of everything happening around it.

This is an incredibly annoying misconception that I've grown weary of seeing.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#162

Post by zjaffee »

runako wrote: post #146
rabidrat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. They've only happened every decade so far: 1960 (IC), 1970 (DARPA), 1980 (PC), 1990 (GUI), 2000 (Internet), 2010 (smartphone).

Point of order: the last 3 transitions have been layering versus actual shifts. Text-based computing -> GUIs was a shift. Broadly speaking, there is no market today for consumer-facing computers where text is the only input capability. The most profitable company in the PC era also has the most profitable PC unit today. The Internet runs on top of the GUI layer. The smartphone is (in much of the world) an "also" not…

Tacking on to your comment, one could argue that voice alongside increasing number of sensors and inputs available on smartphones are very similar paradigm shifts to that of the text-based computing to GUI shift.

We're replacing the keyboard and GUI to one that is far more ubiquitous and backgrounded, and computing experiences are based on all data that is available and economical to process rather than having things be the more traditional user giving an input and then getting an output.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#163

Post by zjaffee »

icanhackit wrote: post #124
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15-20 years? How are you SURE that smartphones will still be a thing in 20 years? Let alone that Apple will still be the hip premium brand? 20 years is a LONG time. The average lifespan for an S&P 500 company is less than that these days.

> How are you SURE that smartphones will still be a thing in 20 years? I'm sure someone asked a similar question about personal computers in the early 80's. They didn't go away when smartphones became prevalent, they became computational work-horses and in the same way an AR system will never be able to pack the computing punch and battery life of a smartphone. But similar to how a smart-phone complements a PC, AR te…

Why should I believe that AR will even be it's own unique product platform rather than just a part of every single smartphone app. Smartphones were much easier for people to adapt too since virtually everyone had already carried around wallets and keys, and I'd be hard pressed to believe that wearing glasses will ever be something that the majority of people do voluntarily, in the same way smart watches never became completely ubiquitous, short of maybe within professions where you both need your hands to be free and where visual computing would be useful.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#164

Post by Karunamon »

miles wrote: post #110
kissickas wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you. I was severely unimpressed - I can't say "go to sleep in a half hour," but must say "go to sleep in 30 minutes." If I accidentally say "go to bed" I've got to start up a whole new "Hey Google" cycle again. At least I know it's not listening to me all the time.

> At least I know it's not listening to me all the time. Do you really though? Google admits its new smart speaker was eavesdropping on users https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/11/technology/google-home-mini... And while Google responded quickly: Google just permanently killed the feature that made some Home Minis eavesdrop https://www.the-ambient.com/news/google-home-mini-spy-proble... who is to say what the next update…

Let's keep some perspective here. By "eavesdropping", you mean a small handful (~4000 devices) of first gen devices that were never sold to actual customers with defective touch sensors causing the recording to be activated.

The software fix pushed out simply disables the "push-to-talk" feature entirely.

Unless you think Google has some kind of motive to listen to completely randomly-triggered recording (and they don't; the data would be garbage from almost any standpoint I can imagine), your post is incredibly misleading at best and malicious fearmongering at worst.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#165

Post by sl1ck731 »

roganartu wrote: post #154
yaseenk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20% of Google searches are made by voice. https://searchengineland.com/google-reveals-20-percent-queri... That number is probably a little outdated now. But it’s definitely not targeting a niche audience.

I find this absolutely fascinating when I compare it to my personal experience. It begs the question: how frequently does the average person Google something compared to power users? I consider myself to have above average googling skills, and I'm a developer so there's obviously a lot of documentation searching regularly, but even excluding all of that I surely perform a good 10-20 non-programming searches a day and…

The article says that it is 20% of mobile searches. I doubt many people are doing very lengthy research mobile. I have seen siri and okgoogle being used pretty commonly for mobile searching. I'd be interested to see how many searches happen on mobile vs desktop though.

I would also be interested in seeing if people looking for places/directions factors into this in some way.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#166

Post by tqkxzugoaupvwqr »

saagarjha wrote: post #52
goatherders wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any amount you want to bet...ill take the side that there will not be an "iPhone 25."

They might just rename it before that point to just “iPhone”.

Or use the iMac naming scheme, e.g. iPhone (Late 2027).

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#167

Post by briandear »

aphroz wrote: post #118

Apple is not an innovative company.They are a marketing company. What do marketing teams do when they have a lot of money ? They start removing stuff, remove the wires, remove the inputs/outputs and kill the company. Good bye Apple, even this guy can't save you. I won't miss you.

Are we trotting out that old trope again? Two words for you: Apple Watch. Nobody is even close to what they did with Watch and what they are doing with health. Look at the camera and photos app: on device ML. Look at the tech behind Memories for instance. They’re doing this without sending your photos to some privacy-invading server. Look at FaceId. Sure Samsung had facial recognition — but it could be fooled with a printed photo. Look at what Apple has done with AR. Their computational photography stuff is also incredible. But sure let’s lament the loss of a SCSI port and call it a marketing decision.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#168

Post by roadkillon101 »

skizm wrote: post #122

Lots of comments about improving Siri here. This is interesting to me for several reasons I won't address, but I will ask this: Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything? From a purely functional standpoint, they seem super awkward to me. I like buttons that click and reassure me of every input. I like to feel confident my actions won't be misinterpreted. I like that no one else near me will get weirded…

Ease of use and friendliness of the user interface is what the spirit of Apple Computers is all about. If I were to guess Jobs might be focusing on if he were alive would be the convenience and ease of use of Apple products. I think voice communications would be something he would use. That is based on his various biographies about him. Whether this is ethical or morally right to have tech go this direction is another matter. Ease of use is the trend.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#169

Post by philwelch »

Despegar wrote: post #65
rabidrat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. They've only happened every decade so far: 1960 (IC), 1970 (DARPA), 1980 (PC), 1990 (GUI), 2000 (Internet), 2010 (smartphone).

The GUI is not something I'd break out separately from the PC. And the internet is something that massively improved the utility of PCs and increased demand for them, it wasn't something that was going to replace it.

> And the internet is something that massively improved the utility of PCs and increased demand for them, it wasn't something that was going to replace it.

No, it just devastated the market for native PC applications.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#170

Post by spiritcat »

roganartu wrote: post #154
yaseenk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20% of Google searches are made by voice. https://searchengineland.com/google-reveals-20-percent-queri... That number is probably a little outdated now. But it’s definitely not targeting a niche audience.

I find this absolutely fascinating when I compare it to my personal experience. It begs the question: how frequently does the average person Google something compared to power users? I consider myself to have above average googling skills, and I'm a developer so there's obviously a lot of documentation searching regularly, but even excluding all of that I surely perform a good 10-20 non-programming searches a day and…

I thought the same, then visited family who use it constantly and it all made sense.
Post reply on HN