I'm skeptical about Siri. My wife got an iPhone 4S on opening weekend, and we both did the requisite amount of playing with the new feature, and it was amusing, but after the first couple of days she pretty much abandoned it.
There are some reliability problems, but I think the main problem is that Siri still lives firmly in the AI uncanny valley. Which is exacerbated by the way that Apple presents Siri, i.e. as AI.
With a clearly defined set of commands, you can be confident about what's going to work and what isn't. And if you try something that isn't a command, you relegate the failure to "oh, that's not a command." But with Siri, because it's presented as an anthropomorphized, intelligent agent, it makes the failure feel a lot more brittle and frustrating.
For example, "What's my next appointment?" works, but "When's my dentist appointment?" doesn't. Why not? Well, I know why not, and you probably know. It's because it's really, really, really not AI, and unless we make some kind of breakthrough on strong AI, it's not going to be for a long time. But my wife doesn't know that. All she knows is that Siri is cool when it works, but is actually pretty stupid a lot of the time. Which means she's not reliable, which is important because Siri is most useful when it must be most reliable, like when you're in a rush.
Apple will certainly continue to add commands and make Siri smarter and smarter, but this will necessarily be incremental, and that failure will always feel brittle to lay users.
I can't shake the feeling that the Siri of today is like the app ecosystem of the iPhone 1.
• That Apple has a really solid plan for this feature, and we're only seeing the very beginning of it now — the phase where we are introduced to the interface, before they blow the lid off and open it up to every imaginable use-case.
• That it will be significantly improved before most people ever buy a supporting device, so the handful of customers being burned by the somewhat-lacking version 1 product are vastly outnumbered by the people who get their first taste of the mature, fully-realized vision.
Unlike some of Apple's other features, UI, Apps, and operating software, Siri is not something that will be easy to improve. Siri represents the cumulative efforts of decades of computer science research by numerous public and private entities.
While it's easy to add more voice actions, making advances on the underlying technologies will require additional decades of hard computer science research. Apple, having no R&D division, will not likely even contribute to this.
Unless your main complaint is a lack of canned question types that it can answer, you won't likely see the fast improvements you are expecting in the next few years.
I'd also observe that "let's create an 'AI' by piling on the special cases until we have a generally-capable tool" has been tried numerous times, and it's a known failure case. After a certain point, the piled-on rules being negatively interacting with each other, and it requires one of 1. true AI (thus begging the question) or 2. treating the set of rules as one of the quirkiest programming languages ever to make effective use of it.
Many people are speculating about how wonderful Siri will be in the (near) future; I'd submit that the evidence suggests that it has pretty much come out of the gate with all the power it's going to have for the foreseeable future. Natural language querying seems to have been stuck at the same plateau for a long time, just like voice recognition technology has been.
Maybe for domain independent stuff, but for a domain specific thing (like scheduling), I think heuristics could go a long way. Yes, it's like a programming language, and yes, it has quirks.
Just making sure the weak AI is clear about its interpretation through explicit confirmation ("Sir, I understand that you would like to launch the missiles at Russia in 15 minutes, am I correct?" "No. Siri, please book lunch with my sisters at the Russian restaurant on the 15th.") would probably make up for a lot.
Is voice recognition technology really on a plateau? I have highly accurate speaker independent speech recognition in my pocket now. I'm using it to dictate this response. It didn't require any training, and it's nearly perfect. I may be mistaken, but I believe this capability is relatively new. Even if it's not, it's so close to being perfect that there's little room for improvement, or so it seems.
And yes, I know that all of the smart are not in my pocket, but rather in the cloud.
I bet you're enunciating clearly and that the mic is not picking up much background noise. (Note that you may be in an environment with some noise but there are easy ways to create noise-cancelling microphones or directional microphones that are very effective. You'd have to check the recording to see how much noise is on it.) I could get the same results from Dragon's voice recognition software with careful enunciation and a bit of practice 10 years ago. It is also well-known how to get very good accuracy on a restricted dictionary. What has not been solved is improving beyond that. Situations in which humans will easily extract speech, so easily that we do things like casually lay music tracks over a speaker without much thought, software will still just fail miserably for, as far as I know.
Was Dragon's software speaker-independent ten years ago, and did you have to train it? I looked into this recently and couldn't find any speaker-independent PC software now, and I think it all required training. Being able to just pick up and talk without any preliminaries is still a pretty big deal.
I'm sure you're right about the other deficiencies. "Almost perfect" is very strong, after all. Still, it's really excellent, and in my experience is much better than it was just a few years ago.
People often get carried away thinking about linear progression from the current state when the general problem is NP-hard.
With Siri, however, I'm not interested in it being a person, but something that can help set reminders, timers, appointments, and dictate text messages while I drive. That's huge for me. Rather than breadth, if Apple focuses on depth then the problem is more tractable because you have more context with which to reduce complexity.
Apple's R&D is applied, so it will have a product focus and get to market quicker. If they can make Siri really good at a specific number of tasks then people will understand what it is good for, rather than be disappointed, and it will improve faster.
That you don't usually have a mac in your pocket. Voice is only really good when your hands are busy and you don't have a chance to sit down and pull out a laptop.
Apple sold more iPhone4s than all previous iPhones combined. I expect that iPhone4S will sell even more. Releasing Siri as a beta to such a large customer base is not the same as releasing the "somewhat-lacking version 1" iPhone, and then iterating it forward.
I really don't get this notion of a lot of Apple supporters that just because they put something out and call it AI, Apple has now solidly invented AI. Weren't they usually praised for not announcing things before they are ready? According to your theory, with Siri they would have broken the rule. The current Siri would merely be an announcement that one day they would deliver real AI, and in the meantime they would deliver the current broken version.
In 5 years it might add to something, but I don't think people should be buying iPhone 4S because of it right now, when they're probably only going to use it in the first week.
What about the feasiblity of using voice commands in a public environent, e.g. at work or on a train? I'm interested in hearing how people deal with that.
That's definitely another issue too. My wife has specifically said that she doesn't like to do that, even in semi-private (e.g. work), because she doesn't necessarily want to say stuff about her private schedule out loud, or broadcast her next text message, or even who she's calling.
As you may already know, you should be able to hold the 4S up to your ear, so at least it looks like you’re talking to another human, and Siri won't speak aloud. (I have not actually used a 4S, so my apologies if I'm mistaken.)
This doesn't change the fact that she has to talk out loud. I don't like to take personal calls at work, either. I usually go out into the hall or somewhere more private. I don't think this is rare behavior.
It doesn't talk out loud if you hold the phone up to your ear. To use Siri with minimal noise (aside from your own speech):
Push the power button to turn on the screen.
Hold the phone to your ear.
Wait for the be-beep sound, played quietly through the ears-only speaker.
Speak.
Keep the phone against your ear. Siri will respond through the ears-only speaker.
You're correct. I tried this with my girlfriend's 4S this evening—if the screen is on and you hold the phone to your ear, you will hear the ding prompting you to start speaking.
Minor nitpick; it's the proximity sensor which is used for this function, not the accelerometer.
I can verify that my iPhone 4S is polling the proximity sensor continuously, activating Siri whenever the phone is brought to the ear, while my 3GS only appears to poll the proximity sensor during phone calls.
[Edit] After further testing, it does seem to be a combination of gyroscope and proximity sensor, as you do need to perform the motion of bringing the phone to a position with its front facing somewhere between sideways and upwards and its bottom somewhere between straight down and sideways on its edge while covering the upper portion of the device to activate Siri. It does not work if you're laying down horizontally on your back or on your side, nor when you bring it to a straight vertical for example. It seems to have a fairly narrow tolerance for the angle to which the phone must be brought in order to activate Siri, that being the angle at which you naturally hold a phone to make a call while sitting or standing straight up. [/Edit]
I'm pretty sure the accelerometer has to be monitored continuously, with our without Siri. After all, how do you think geo-fenced reminders work? The mostly-low-powered accelerometer can wake up power-hungry location services to see if you've left your geofence. There's no reason to have the GPS running all the time (and your battery life would suffer significantly from that).
Can't you relabel things with Siri? I.e. at home say "Siri, when I say 'water polo' I mean gynecologist" (replace 'water polo' with a sport you would never actually play under any circumstances, otherwise you could end up with a big surprise at some point). Then you can have siri change your water polo appointment on the bus without issue. :)
With enough commands in its library, Siri will not only be indistinguishable from real AI, it will be intelligent (please see also the behaviorist view of AI, Descartes' language test and the Turing Test).
Aside from the fact that this has been tried and not yet worked (see Lenat's Cyc, for example), having to use the Turing Test as a measure of sapience is an artifact of having no idea what sapience is. If we knew (or, once we know) what algorithm produces consciousness, we can test for that directly, and it seems unlikely to me that a giant lookup table will have an internal experience of consciousness in the way that I do.
Apple launches new hardware with new software features. ALWAYS. Siri is the, "What if I could just talk to my device, and it would be able to disambiguate and give me exactly what information I wanted." Okay, Siri explained.
Just like FaceTime and Garageband and iMovie before it, Siri will help Apple to sell more devices.
And I didn't even need to write dozens of paragraphs to explain that.
It's really a stretch to believe that Siri is how Apple is going to compete with Google and Microsoft on search -- Apple doesn't do search! Siri calls out to existing search services from Google and Wolfram Alpha to do the actual work.
Apple isn't good at services; iCloud may be the most satisfactory result after a long list of so-so and downright terrible attempts. There's no technology here that either Google or Microsoft couldn't do better.
They really didn't do AI until a few weeks ago either. And they didn't do music until they did music. Would you really be shocked if one of the headlines tomorrow morning was that Duck Duck Go was acquired by Apple?
If they bought Duck Duck Go, that would be something. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about Siri. A product with a relatively small scope that the punditry is blowing out of proportion. This is the very same media that insisted we'd see an iPhone 5. There's no substance here -- it's all baseless wishful thinking.
How about storing the most common successful searches by the user base for certain phrases, then skipping the search path once over a certain threshold?
What's going to stop Google from creating an "open" alternative to Siri? Siri is just a technology, not a business model. Google is really good at recreating competitor technologies around their own ad-driven model.
I'm not trying to be a contrarian, either. I use an Android phone, but only because the iPhone isn't offered on my carrier of choice. I love Apple. But I don't see how Siri ("Finally") gives them occasion to undermine Google.
Considering Siri is the commercialization of a lot of public research, it wouldn't be that hard for a company like Google to extend their existing voice actions technology using the exact same body of research. They might even be able to license much of the exact same technology as Apple did when they bought Siri the company.
My complaint with the quotes and blog post is somewhat different. They both seem to claim Siri will revolutionize search. But Siri isn't about search at all, it's about taking spoken words and turning them into an appropriate text based search query. It still relies on databases and search engines to do the actual searching. At most, it can add a bit of extra context to the query that you might not be able to infer from the text alone. It also represents a unified interface to several domain specific databases. If anything, Siri is a complementing interface to existing search technologies. Buying a bunch of databases won't let Apple solve the problem of search.
If I'm taling to my phone, I'm not looking at the screen for ads. So how does Google bring ads to voice-recog? Is the voice reply interrupted by voice ads? I wouldn't use it.
Doesn't have to be ads. Suppose you run a restaurant. When someone asks their phone about restaurants nearby, how much would you pay to have your restaurant preferentially mentioned before other restaurants? How much would you pay to get access to a list of questions people ask about restaurant-related terms near you, and how the person reacted to the results? Did they ask further questions about your restaurant? Did they view your page? Did their phone's GPS indicate that they visited your establishment?
I'm assuming you are referring to Android. It currently has many features that don't drive ads. How much Android makes for Google and how it does that is a good question though.
Not only that, but Siri acts as a layer of indirection between you and the search engine. She can decide which search engine to use based on the query. That opens the door for subject-specific search engines to steal chunks of traffic from Google without forcing users use a bunch of different sites and interfaces.
Just because you're not seeing ads for a particular use case, doesn't mean that the data is not valuable for some use case in the future where you will be seeing ads.
It's Google's interest to make the best, easiest way for you to get your personal data in and out of their system.
I don't know if this is unambiguously a step forward from license sales or tacky ads... It could be just me, but don't "The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model" and "just-buy-our-devices-and-look-at-all-the-cool-shit-you-get-with-them" sound a lot like the way computer manufacturers competed with one another in Elder Days?
I think much of the commentary misses the fact that Siri is not a feature, its a UI, and a very early-stage one at that. Criticizing Siri as less than useful in its current iteration is like criticizing WIMP as less than useful 20 years ago.
The fact that Siri is UI and not a feature is exactly why Microsoft and Google and many other service providers should worry about it - it commoditizes the back-end and creates a new interaction point around which Apple, and currently only Apple, is creating business value. Both Microsoft and Google have technology cards to play in this area, but neither has deployed a new user-interface in the way that Apple recently has. I would expect them to each go after a solid play in this area, in the same way that Microsoft responded to the Wii with Kinect - with a strong competitive urgency. Whether or not they are successful in their response is something we'll know in time.
How is it an UI? I mean it is voice input. OK, that's an UI, but it is an UI that has been around for thousands of years. Non-Apple phones also had voice input for years. Now Siri adds some things it recognizes, like calendar dates. What is so revolutionary about it? Other vendors will also add more tasks to their voice recognition. Google is arguably in a better position to do so, because they have worked on the problem for years (not voice recognition, but what do users mean when they search for "x").
I never said revolutionary, you did. Had you asked, I would have probably characterized it as "evolutionary" more than anything - but most innovation is.
I disagree that this is imply "voice input". Siri takes a step beyond simple data input and manipulation and provides a new interface to several system functions and services in a cohesive and purposeful fashion.
If, as you contend, that Google is well positioned to respond to Siri, then they probably will - I'm not sure you actually read my original comment - I had pretty clearly indicated that both Microsoft and Google have assets that they can deploy in response to Siri.
The article he links to is a really fine specimen of inane tech punditry. Why are tech execs downplaying a feature of a competing product? Uh, gee I dunno, because it's a feature of a competing product maybe? Is there really nothing better to write an article about?
I's suggest that Siri really is something new under the sun: it is the first large-scale, distributed AI system interacting with the 'real world' in an uncontrolled manner. It would not surprise me if somewhere in the back end queries are being looked at and humans are fine-tuning or making suggestions of possible responses. There is a scale here that's never been seen before. And Apple can afford a legion of unseen human beings helping in the background if it wants to experiment with this.
Siri is a nice technology (though, after having seen 3 attempted uses, I have yet to see it work), but the sell-hardware-backed-by-nice-software/services is not some revolutionary business model; further, often, it's not one that is sustainable for long. The problem is that as the non-hardware costs start to become material, the pressure mounts to show that they are actually related to hardware sales; now they are distributed across hardware sales as a per-unit transfer cost and become a cost-center; now investors and organizational politics begin to pay attention and the model of buy-random-shit-and-claim-it-is-accretive begins to sour.
This is why it is so hard to do hardware and software together. There are few examples of long term success in hardware/software and Apple is certainly not one of them (except in the '00s). IBM is one. But, if one area of the business takes off, the pressure to drop the other is immense (see Thinkpad and HP's current flail-ures). As XCode users will recall, there are also issues with adding significant value to past purchasers: if you paid $100 for a product that had $20 of awesome value added later by an upgrade, the company who took your $100 of cash should only be able to recognize $80 of revenue now.
> The problem is that as the non-hardware costs start to become material, the pressure mounts to show that they are actually related to hardware sales
I think that implicit in Gruber's argument is the idea that just buying Apple's devices isn't radically more expensive than the competitors. I've heard this attributed to Tim Cook, that lots of Apple devices are now roughly price-equivalent with other brands, but with so many other features.
For a company with no plans to float new debt or investment, and a CEO who plans to stay in his job for a decade, short term accounting games have no effect on company performance.
Consider iCloud — Apple now offers free-of-charge online services ad-free. It’s a sunk cost in the name of the overall experience for Apple device buyers.
BS, iCloud has paid upgrades, and I imagine those paid upgrades make the rest of the model break even or better, just like DropBox. It's not ad-model vs. devices-model, it's freemium product tacked onto device sales, further enhancing margins.
The statement you're quibbling with — "free-of-charge online services ad-free" — is unassailable. Anyone signing up for iCloud with the intention of using it for data sync (contacts, calendars, browser bookmarks), and/or application data, and/or the ability to track, lock, and wipe lost devices, will be hard-pressed to exceed the free 5GB.
Sure, iTunes Match or syncing several devices directly to iCloud might induce a heavy user to pay for more, but iCloud remains a bona-fide free service for the vast majority of its customers.
I don't have a 4S because I'm on the other upgrade cycle. i.e. I got the 4 at launch. After the initial "cool" factor I think Siri makes sense in certain situations, like when driving. I would love to have access to my iPhone by speaking to it while driving.
I was going to stick with my 4 for another year but ended up with a 4S through a rather circuitous route.
Anyhow, since if you have a 4S you're going to play with Siri, I've found that it's really quite useful even when not in a hands-free situation like driving. I've found it very useful for setting reminders faster than I would be able to manually, which I found quite surprising. I'm looking forward to finding more things like that in the future.
Remind me to... (like you said)
Wake me up at/in...
Call [name in my contacts]
Call [place not in my contacts]. Siri looks up business for you.
Note [something I want to make a note of]
There are some reliability problems, but I think the main problem is that Siri still lives firmly in the AI uncanny valley. Which is exacerbated by the way that Apple presents Siri, i.e. as AI.
With a clearly defined set of commands, you can be confident about what's going to work and what isn't. And if you try something that isn't a command, you relegate the failure to "oh, that's not a command." But with Siri, because it's presented as an anthropomorphized, intelligent agent, it makes the failure feel a lot more brittle and frustrating.
For example, "What's my next appointment?" works, but "When's my dentist appointment?" doesn't. Why not? Well, I know why not, and you probably know. It's because it's really, really, really not AI, and unless we make some kind of breakthrough on strong AI, it's not going to be for a long time. But my wife doesn't know that. All she knows is that Siri is cool when it works, but is actually pretty stupid a lot of the time. Which means she's not reliable, which is important because Siri is most useful when it must be most reliable, like when you're in a rush.
Apple will certainly continue to add commands and make Siri smarter and smarter, but this will necessarily be incremental, and that failure will always feel brittle to lay users.
[edit: btw, John Siracusa talks a bit about this on the most recent Hypercritical: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/39-quasimodo-backpack]