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Siri is the Next Big Thing

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Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#41

Post by Tichy »

podperson wrote: post #40
Tichy wrote: post #6

Is Siri really more than a little bit of sugarcoating on top of stuff others have been doing for years (Google, Wolfram Alpha)? I suspect it is doing ok for some tasks (calendar), but that is about it. For example on Android people have been calling contacts by saying their names for a quite a while already.

I've never been able to get squat out of Wolframe Alpha. Even on things that seem like it should be right up its alley ("compare health care costs in Texas to Wisconsin" -- "no data available" -- Oh really?)

Maybe, but Siri merely refers to Wolfram Alpha for most requests, so it is hardly an improvement.

I think it is an improvement in the way it is integrated into the phone, but not in AI capability.

Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#42

Post by prat »

yalimgerger wrote: post #14
agentultra wrote: post #4

Is the AI winter really over? Or is Siri simply the practical application of machine learning and NLP which we've manage to derive from off-shoots of AI research? I think it will be some time yet when I can make a natural language query and have an AI agent fetch relevant data, sort it, and present it contextually. Or sketch an idea for a building and have an AI do all the hard work of creating the blueprints. In the…

I think it is. I view Siri as Apple II of personal computers. Siri crosses the threshold and I believe the race is on.

I won't judge siri, as I do not know the details of technology or the machine learning algorithms used by it, but I would say this much: your one line pitch might just impress some businessweek readers but I don't think a really cool technology needs punchlines like that (..apple II..) - your article sounds like its coming from a non-technical observer for a non-technical audience - and that would be okay if the product had passed the stage of hype into early stages of common usage.

At this stage though I am more interested in how is it different from 100s of other AI applications that failed to take over the world or become the next big thing.

My need to criticize primarily came from your last paragraph where you are appealing to developers to jump in without realizing that that segment of your audience looks not very respectfully at phrases like 'buckle up' and 'amazing ride'

Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#43

Post by [deleted] »

zipdog wrote: post #3

It's interesting that the Printing Press didn't make the list of previous revolutions, because I think this highlights two different ways of thinking about intelligence (and thus AI). We can either build AI systems that give us a correct answer 95% of the time and we don't care how they got it, or we can build systems that have some sort of designed thinking (ie we understand our own thoughts and try and replicate th…

[deleted]

Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#44

Post by john_b »

yalimgerger wrote: post #22
jenius wrote: post #12

I don't understand how this article rose to the top page of HN... it's not telling us anything that's interesting, new, or news in any way. Artificial intelligence has been around since the dawn of computers (think Clippy), helping us do our shit. In fact, AutoCAD is a bunch of 'artificial intelligence' that's letting you draw vectors and write code in a more intuitive way (ok, not exactly and technically, but you kn…

Hi Author here. Thank your for the harsh words. I guess I gotto take it to the chin. Please allow me explain my point in another way. I think Siri is to A.I. what Apple II is to computers. Does this analogy explain what I am trying to tell better?

I think that was clear from the article. What jenius, I think, was saying is that you don't offer much support for this claim. How, for example, can startups get on the AI-as-a-service bandwagon without having the resources and experience of a company like Apple?

Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#45

Post by baggachipz »

baggachipz wrote: post #9

What a blindingly ignorant rant. A couple breathless prognostications that really annoyed me: "If A.I. knows about insurance, will you ever google for it?" Uh, all the "A.I." is doing is googling it. So basically Siri will use speech-to-text (which I've had on my Android phone for years) and put it in the google search box for me. Then it will read the first result. Zippity-doo-da. "We will teach it how to use Excel.…

I love how I'm being downvoted to oblivion when nobody is able to produce a single example of what Siri does that other products don't. That's my entire argument, that the technology already exists and is not some major revolution. I guess no place is impervious to Apple fanboyism, even HN.

Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#46

Post by baggachipz »

Tichy wrote: post #41
podperson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been able to get squat out of Wolframe Alpha. Even on things that seem like it should be right up its alley ("compare health care costs in Texas to Wisconsin" -- "no data available" -- Oh really?)

Maybe, but Siri merely refers to Wolfram Alpha for most requests, so it is hardly an improvement. I think it is an improvement in the way it is integrated into the phone, but not in AI capability.

Thank you, at least someone else in this thread understands. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in here.

Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#47

Post by Tichy »

Game_Ender wrote: post #34
baggachipz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of like how I just typed "When is thanksgiving day?" and Google told me the date. It understood my question and gave me the answer. How does Siri differ?

Try "will it rain tomorrow", or "should I wear a coat tomorrow"? Siri is an answer engine that tries to determine the meaning of your query and answer it. Google in recent years has started to add those capabilities to it's search interface, but it is not there yet. Siri is much more like Wolfram Alpha or IBM's Watson then a standard search engine.

Bullshit - Siri has some special loops for recognizing questions about date, location and the weather. That's it. It really is not more advanced than "call xyz", except it not only uses the address book, but also the calendar and the weather service.

Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#48

Post by Tichy »

alexholehouse wrote: post #21
baggachipz wrote: post #9

What a blindingly ignorant rant. A couple breathless prognostications that really annoyed me: "If A.I. knows about insurance, will you ever google for it?" Uh, all the "A.I." is doing is googling it. So basically Siri will use speech-to-text (which I've had on my Android phone for years) and put it in the google search box for me. Then it will read the first result. Zippity-doo-da. "We will teach it how to use Excel.…

While I agree with you in principle, I feel like the conceptual use cases you're imagining implement current practices with basically a speech to text. What the author is suggesting is that it would be beyond this, skipping out the step where you determine how you do something, but instead telling Siri what you want to do. For example, with excel I'm not sure he envisaged something like "A5 is 20, A6 is 30" and so on…

Except Siri doesn't do anything of the kind. It would be trivial to build "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet" into Siri (or indeed any speech recognition engine). But that would only be one more special case. The code is literally "if (recognizedText == "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet"){writeExcelSheet(parsePDFTable("taxes.pdf"))}

That's nice, but it is not AI.

Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#49

Post by suivix »

yalimgerger wrote: post #22
jenius wrote: post #12

I don't understand how this article rose to the top page of HN... it's not telling us anything that's interesting, new, or news in any way. Artificial intelligence has been around since the dawn of computers (think Clippy), helping us do our shit. In fact, AutoCAD is a bunch of 'artificial intelligence' that's letting you draw vectors and write code in a more intuitive way (ok, not exactly and technically, but you kn…

Hi Author here. Thank your for the harsh words. I guess I gotto take it to the chin. Please allow me explain my point in another way. I think Siri is to A.I. what Apple II is to computers. Does this analogy explain what I am trying to tell better?

>>Thank your for the harsh words.

Welcome to the Internet. Back on topic, I think Google started the A.I. revolution with their search.

Re: Siri is the Next Big Thing

#50

Post by suivix »

baggachipz wrote: post #33
mhashim wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yaaa....I think this flew over your head. You are saying that, for example, Wolfram Alpha is like Google. They are completely different: One gives you links that you still have to go through to reach what you need and one gives you a direct answer. Even Woz said in his interview on TC...we don't need search engines, we need answer engines. To say Siri is a search engine with voice to text is a great mistake. Voice re…

And I think that my post flew over your head. Wolfram Alpha and Google are different, sure, but at the end of the day they're simply algorithms that take requests, process the data to find the best answers they know how, and return results. That's it. To call those, Siri, or anything else more than that is intellectually dishonest. Siri might be a great interface, and I bet it's really handy to be integrated into app…

The biggest problem with the Segway is that you look like a total dork using it.

Do people on motorcycles look like lazy idiots? You totally missed the reason why it failed.

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