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Siri's creators say they've made something better

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#51

Post by dzhiurgis »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #9
calbear81 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real savings would come if you have a pizza bot that made pizzas without much human intervention and a drone picked it up and dropped it off and flew back to base.

Automated pizza making machines already exist[1] (skip to near end of video to see it in action). Proof of concept: Simply take the end product and pick it up with a multi-rotor and have it autonomously deliver it to the next room. I've definitely eaten some frozen pizza that were as good as or better than the $5 pizza's from Dominos, I'm in Australia, YMMV. I imagine if this was more profitable than the existing tec…

Dominos and Pizza Hut are awful in Australia and New Zealand. $5 here is pretty much poverty food; even McDonalds cost way more. In UK Domino's is ok, but cost around 15 pounds delivered.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#52

Post by [deleted] »

dfischer wrote: post #10
cstavish wrote: post #2

The example of the pizza ordering is technologically impressive, yes... But from an end-user perspective it is at best "as hard" as calling the pizza place and talking to a human taking your order. There are many use cases where it could actually provide value, but I found it funny that they chose to demonstrate one to the press that really afforded end-users no advantage.

That's like saying it's just as easy to call a taxi company than use Uber. (It's about the ux).

[deleted]

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#53

Post by miguelrochefort »

dfischer wrote: post #10
cstavish wrote: post #2

The example of the pizza ordering is technologically impressive, yes... But from an end-user perspective it is at best "as hard" as calling the pizza place and talking to a human taking your order. There are many use cases where it could actually provide value, but I found it funny that they chose to demonstrate one to the press that really afforded end-users no advantage.

That's like saying it's just as easy to call a taxi company than use Uber. (It's about the ux).

It's like these fools forgot that natural language sucks as an interface.

Look at the whole bot/messaging craze. The way people get excited by this is beyond me.

Surely, all of this is a symptom of howuch people hate software fragmentation. Fortunately, there are other ways to fix it.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#54

Post by jonathankoren »

I wish them luck, and the ability to hook into 3rd party APIs is good, but ordering a pizza is essentially just straight forward form filling, and quite frankly, something I could do 30 years ago. SoundHound's Hound[0] shows refinement and retargetting, which is much harder because you have to entity resolution on implied subjects / objects, pronouns. Now maybe VIv can do that too, but that's not what they demoed. What they demoed isn't actually all that interesting.

[0] http://www.soundhound.com/hound

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#55

Post by jonathankoren »

modeless wrote: post #23
mwfunk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the #1 problem with anything based on voice recognition and natural language processing IMO. It has to work 99% of the time to overcome this issue, but it seems like the nature of the technologies ensure that it will only asymptotically approach this threshold, and is currently stuck at 75% reliability at best. Plus, even if it did work, it's just a really inexact and inefficient way to do anything. You alway…

The funny thing is that voice recognition is no longer the problem. For years the reason you couldn't do voice command interfaces was that transcription didn't work, but today transcription works amazingly well. My commands are transcribed perfectly, even in my car when I'm doing 65 on the freeway with my phone stuck in a cupholder. The problem now is Android randomly kills the "OK Google" background listening proces…

I have to disagree. Mostly your right, but I have a very specific fail case that happens every time with Siri. I can't call my wife by name. I have to always call her "wife", because it thinks I want to change my name. Now it's a name in the address book, but it never matches against it.

I can also use it dictate an email or search the web, and occasionally it fails (maybe 10% of the time?), but it almost never gets my wife's name.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#56

Post by zarify »

slededit wrote: post #14
wyc wrote: post #7

According to an episode of Acquired[0], none of Siri's original technology is present in Apple's current products. Siri originally licensed Nuance's (also an SRI spin-out company) voice recognition technology and built some pretty (comparatively) simple tech on top of it, never changing out the speech-to-text engine. All current players (Google, Amazon, etc) use neural nets, so Apple scooped up many Nuance employees…

Its not just the hidden functionality, for me Siri will frequently assume I want to call somebody when I ask it something. Explaining why I accidentally called someone I hadn't talked to in years (and by the how are you doing?) makes playing with Siri a high risk endeavour.

I've been saved most of the time by having lots of similar sounding people in my address book. The other night I was lying in bed and was setting a reminder and it almost called one of my coworkers (or someone I trained with a few years ago).

So the obvious solution is either to have duplicate contact entries or only associate with people who sound like those you already know, so that Siri has to go to the "do you mean Person A or Person B?" state :)

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#57

Post by coldtea »

visarga wrote: post #31
skylark wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest problem with voice commands is that if the command doesn't work the first time, it would have been faster to simply input the command yourself. I'm not confident that "get me directions to " will actually get me those directions. Because of that, I also use Siri exclusively to set alarms (which does work every time).

I also use "Call my wife" and "Text my wife" or "Tell my wife that ...". They work every time. Music playing is disappointing - if I want to open YouTube to play something, it can't. I don't understand why they didn't at least add a few commands for YouTube. At least "play Band", "play Song by Band", "play Music-Genre", "play something like X", "I feel sad/happy/lonely/bored play some music". If you want to understan…

>I don't understand why they didn't at least add a few commands for YouTube. At least "play Band", "play Song by Band", "play Music-Genre", "play something like X", "I feel sad/happy/lonely/bored play some music".

Because YouTube ain't a music player? [1] And besides they have their own music app.

[1] Seriously, even though some people use it as such, this is far from most. According to YouTube itself, the average user only spends 1 hour per month listening to music on YouTube -- consumption is mostly non-music videos.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#58

Post by pjc50 »

natrius wrote: post #32
cageface wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm very skeptical of this current craze for chat bots. It seems to me that they're really only useful if they can infer a wide range of intent from the user's input, and that seems like it's still very much an unsolved problem. Otherwise they're just glorified menu systems.

I expect glorified menu systems to be fantastic . I'd like to replace every phone call I make to a corporation with a glorified menu system.

Indeed. I'd like to see this the other way round: a nice web page representing a business's phone tree and scripts, some forms I can fill the answers into, and then I can have a smart text-to-speech robot wait in the queue and answer the questions on my behalf.

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#59

Post by eric-hu »

jonathankoren wrote: post #55
modeless wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that voice recognition is no longer the problem. For years the reason you couldn't do voice command interfaces was that transcription didn't work, but today transcription works amazingly well. My commands are transcribed perfectly, even in my car when I'm doing 65 on the freeway with my phone stuck in a cupholder. The problem now is Android randomly kills the "OK Google" background listening proces…

I have to disagree. Mostly your right, but I have a very specific fail case that happens every time with Siri. I can't call my wife by name. I have to always call her "wife", because it thinks I want to change my name. Now it's a name in the address book, but it never matches against it. I can also use it dictate an email or search the web, and occasionally it fails (maybe 10% of the time?), but it almost never gets…

Okay I'll bite.

What's your wife's name?

Re: Siri's creators say they've made something better

#60

Post by kccqzy »

cududa wrote: post #22
miguelrochefort wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps that's because it's the most trivial of ideas and every single person in history has had that thought at some point in life?

Pretty sure the first iPhone demo involved Steve Jobs ordering a pizza to the Moscone

He ordered Starbucks coffee not pizzas.
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