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Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#211

Post by eridius »

wstrange wrote: post #187
abritinthebay wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this fundamentally misunderstands how each of their AI's work. You're describing an interface problem. Google's AI is extremely good at recognizing speech in comparison to Siri but that's a wholly different thing to deep understanding. Siri is a more advanced AI in many ways due to it's understanding of intents. Google's is much more command based (under the hood). However Apple's speech recognition is letting…

This runs contrary to the experience of most people. See http://www.businessinsider.com/siri-vs-google-assistant-cort... Siri is dead last. Surprisingly, Cortana did quite well (I didn't realize Microsoft was catching up in this space). Those responses require a lot more than just voice recognition - they require an understanding of context and "intent".

That study isn't very useful.

> A recent study […] asked the major voice assistants 5,000 general knowledge questions

General knowledge questions is just one of the many things you can use voice assistants for. It's well known that Siri is the worst at general knowledge questions, but that doesn't mean Siri is the worst digital assistant.

Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#212

Post by paul9290 »

JimDabell wrote: post #73
paul9290 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used Siri faithfully from 2011 til about the start of this year where I bought a google home. Siri is flat out dumb and frustrating to use comparatively in terms of only understanding 85 percent of my queries vs. Google Home understanding 97 percent. It seems to me Apple has not taken all their hordes of cash and used it to up the AI game. Looks like they are solely focused on the present while competitors are…

> Like last weeks WWDC they debuted the AR kit but did not bother to create an amazing/innovate AR app to showcase and get the masses excited for AR and their possible upcoming AR gear. It's a developer conference not a product launch, so of course it focused on the code rather than "getting the masses excited". The point is that developers can now spend the next few months creating those AR applications to impress p…

Yeah but they showed new features in iMessage, the camera app and etc. all copycat ideas.

They could have built an AR feature into the camera app to show they are not just followers of all other companies who innovate they still are innovators. Further to showcase and get the masses excited about AR.

Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#213

Post by sjwright »

lqdc13 wrote: post #208
ClassyJacket wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've reduced the problem to only GPS location which is just wrong. Fact is, Android apps targeting 5.0 or lower can still read anything on my phone - SMS, location, photos, contacts, and well, everything else. And any root or ROM based add-ons to stop them are an impractical usability nightmare, where I could just own an iPhone.

Weren't such permissions made explicit when the app was installed? I'm not worried about SMS because everyone and their mother can see it now. I don't think apps that didn't require contacts during installation could access them. To me all Apple products are a usability nightmare. I am forced to do simple things the way Apple wants me to do them instead of the way I want to do them.

Or you could say:

To me all Android products are a usability nightmare. I am forced to do simple things the way Google wants me to do them instead of the way I want to do them.

That line of reasoning just doesn't scale.

Like only learning to type on a Dvorak keyboard, doing things "your way" can have consequences. Rampant, arbitrary customisation of interfaces is, in my estimation, more often than not an exercise in painting yourself into a corner.

Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#214

Post by AndrewKemendo »

freyir wrote: post #188
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, note the all available information. It's not perfectly efficient because there isn't perfect information, however it's more efficient than it otherwise would be. More information in the system = greater efficiency.

> More information in the system = greater efficiency. More information does not always increase market efficiency. In fact, it can have just the opposite effect when there is information asymmetry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry http://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Market_failures/Information...

For sure, but only in the short term. History shows that there is a push and pull here and that on aggregate more information is being input to the market from all sides and available for price discrimination. Inefficiencies are great for enterprises to attempt to capture, and by doing so exposing the inefficiency.

Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#215

Post by wvenable »

stouset wrote: post #151
wvenable wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are speaking to your device for this kind of question, the authoritative answer is what you want. You expect me, after taking to my device, to go over and pick it up and search through web results? If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have asked the question by voice in the first place!

I believe you have failed to understand the original point you are replying to. "Edam" might be authoritative, but it is not correct . The problem isn't simply that the answer is fundamentally subjective, the bigger issue is that there's not enough contextual information in the question to even arrive at an answer that one could consider subjectively correct. I replied elsewhere, but it's like answering the question…

For the record, this exact search with Google Assistant did not provide an authoritative answer for me and instead gave a bit of a voice summary and a link for more information. This is still way better than just directing me to the search with no more voice feedback.

Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#216

Post by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u »

stouset wrote: post #116
rosstex wrote: post #26

Me: Hey Siri, what cheese goes well with fruit? Siri: Here's what I found on the web for "What cheese goes well with fruit..." Me: Hey Google, what cheese goes well with fruit? Google: "Edam"

At least Siri acknowledges that it doesn't have the information necessary. Google Assistant comes up with an answer, but it might as well have picked a cheese at random. It's not like there's a universal cheese that pairs with all fruit. Would you have felt satisfied if you asked, "What wine goes well with dinner?" and heard "Zinfandel" in response? An actually useful AI would ask you what kind of fruit(s) you want t…

> At least Siri acknowledges that it doesn't have the information necessary.

I've had two failures in recent memory where Siri recognized the queries correctly, but completely misinterpreted them.

"What's Eastern Time in Pacific Time?" => time in Pacific, MO.

"Increase volume by 10%" => lowered volume to almost 0.

The latter failure took me a while to figure out: Siri had interpreted my query as set volume to 10 (out of 255?). Indeed, "increase / decrease volume by X" had the same behavior.

Also, asking Siri to play a particular song whose title's in Japanese might as well be asking it to play a random song. Setting its language to Japanese helps a little, but then of course I have the inverse problem. I wish I could switch Siri's language settings verbally, or be able to say "In , ."

Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#217

Post by y_u_no_rust »

PopsiclePete wrote: post #207
pwython wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the few in the "tech world" that isn't so much pro-privacy. Google can read my email, Apple can track my movements, my Amazon Echo can even listen in when it wants. The end result is a huge benefit to me. How is any AI supposed to know what I want, if I try to be an anonymous user? I prefer targeted ads. I prefer submitting my information to "robots" in the hopes that my user experience is tailored to what…

I'm also not so hung up on privacy. Think about the massive data gathering we could do in the medical field for example, to test the effectiveness of drugs and treatments if you could wear a "smart" bracelet that put its data in the cloud - how many more diseases could we cure? Not that I'd feel comfortable sharing my back account # with you...

Will any data i upload be paid for with shares in the companies using my work/information?

Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#218

Post by princekolt »

jayd16 wrote: post #195
old-gregg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making two assumptions that aren't necessarily true. First, you're assuming that you have control over what kind of information is being collected and shared, and you're assuming it's always good for you. Here's a fairly innocent scenario: if Amazon Echo can learn everything about you, they may discover that you're crazy about Paris and you have good income. Then they can sell this info to every travel websit…

Are we imagining a future where sellers can track our every want but consumers lose the ability to shop around? Why wouldn't market forces and competition protect us from this?

Because of companies like Amazon. Most specialized shops in many countries have died because they can't compete with Amazon's leverage and scale, and it will only get worse.

Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#219

Post by venachescu »

Mikushi wrote: post #147
starchild3001 wrote: post #133

This article ticks me off. Apple announced some really good features on Monday (CoreML and a bunch of ML driven features). Having this kind of article after WWDC is unfair. As a consumer, I applaud Apple's approach. The so-called AI as pursued by Google & other tech companies isn't AI at all. True AI won't need as much data. You do need data for Machine Learning (i.e. pattern matching). That's what other tech firms a…

> The so-called AI as pursued by Google & other tech companies isn't AI at all. True AI won't need as much data. Deepmind / AlphaGo, Watson, and other like them are about the best thing we have nowadays when it comes to AI. Let's not even talk about True AI, which if you take any of the definitions can only become reality with so much data we're only brushing on it actually. Saying True AI won't need as much data is…

All the examples you've given are either still very academic or just marketing for 'clever algorithms'. The whole idea that one company or another is owning 'AI' is mainly analyst and marketing words - anything that moves over into practice and actual use just gets callled 'technology'.

Re: Apple is struggling to become an AI powerhouse

#220

Post by cstrat »

jswny wrote: post #71
macinjosh wrote: post #3

I am an Apple fanboy but I am also a privacy fanboy. As AI, IoT, and consumer tracking continue to invade our daily lives I think Apple will continue to do quite well if they maintain there pro-privacy heading. Privacy is a feature, it's something people want, and unfortunately its becoming a luxury. That is something that attracts Apple's customers.

I seriously doubt that there is a significant number of customers that Apple attracts by being pro-privacy. On HN and similar environments, sure, plenty of people here value privacy, as do I. However, don't think for a second that the community on HN is in any way representative of Apple's customer base at all. Apple customers buy Apple products because they work well, look nice, are popular here in the US, etc., but…

I originally moved to Apple because they had amazing products which were leap years ahead of the competition in terms of build quality and features. These days I feel that they have fallen behind in this space, perfect examples would be the new Galaxy 8 for mobiles and the Dell XPS series for laptops...

A major reason for me as to why I continue to stick with Apple is exactly that, the privacy and security focus they have.

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