Siri will likely have a much larger impact on the future of technology than any other thing if it is indeed as efficient as it has been portrayed to be... but I'm not sure if the credit really belongs to Steve. The core tech was built else where, integrated with iOS by others, bought by Steve and added deeper into iOS by others. I'm a big Steve Jobs fan but this article might be "reaching" in it's premise. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
I am aware of Siri's history. Tablets, phones, personal computers are other peoples creation as well. Steve Jobs did...whatever he did to them. The same will happen with A.I. Sadly, he won't be with us when it all happens. But you should see the YouTube video where Mossberg and Jobs talk about Siri. Mossberg keeps saying that Siri is search. Steve keeps correcting him. No, Siri is A.I. Siri is A.I. You should see the look on his face.
Hi. Author here. I am aware that Siri is not started at Apple. However, the point is that it will be finished by Apple. Steve Jobs did not invent cell phones, tablets or PC's for that matter, either. But he made them better. The same will happen to Siri.
Well - a good test would be for someone to survey the population today, see what percentage of them are happy with their voice activated personal assistants, then do so a year, two, five from now and see how the numbers change.
The challenging part, as always will be to understand what percentage of this technology would have been deployed regardless of what Apple did, and whether it would have been deployed with the same attention to detail and quality.
I understand that Droid's are already somewhat voice controlled. Will be interested to see how Apple's implementation compares with that, and the Windows Phone 7 voice control. Anybody have a droid and windows phone 7 that would like to comment on how well it's implemented on those platforms?
As far as I know, Siri doesn't have hard-coded voice commands, like 'SEND TEXT TO PAUL' articulated in a robotic voice. It aims to understands natural language with infinite variations.
One of the examples was: 'Do I need a raincoat today?' and you can continue 'How about tomorrow?' or 'where can I buy one?', and Siri understands the context. This is far far more advanced than any 'voice control' there is, and gives just a glimpse of what's coming.
The key point here is integration though. Just putting a speech recognition app on a phone isn't doing much. But making sure the most common cases you are going to be using it for, e.g. appointments/reminders, searching for specific things, finding a nearby hotel etc. work reliably no matter in what way you phrase it, is the part that makes it really useful. Also consider how you can make sure this works as expected by using all the context available onm a modern smartphone (location/movement, weather, calendar, emergency information, congestion) If Apple does the polishing work for that to work it will be a huge success. They probably aren't there yet though, otherwise their presentation would have put much more emphasis on it.
I tested the current state of voice recognition on Android and was mostly disappointed (bad recognition, and nowhere the "intelligence" you would expect).
The point is, you could already integrate with Maps/Calendar/Address Book etc from the app.
Yes, the integrated Siri is going to be better, but is it going to blow your mind and revolutionise the world? No. Get back to me when it can understand a non-Germanic language.
I think something that's been somewhat overlooked in the Siri discussion is the expectation of usability. Our expectation relating to standard touch screen/keyboard/mouse usability has been fairly standardized by devices over the last ten to fifteen years. With Siri this expectation is not yet present, meaning we may have unrealistic expectations for the timeframe between command and action, and we will have far less tolerance for misunderstanding, mis-communication or failures with Siri than we might with traditional user interfaces.
The bottom line is that Siri better be basically perfect - if it's unreliable, even within what in engineering terms would be totally acceptable standards for such an advanced bit of software, people will just not bother and revert back to standard UI mechanisms. This is always the danger with any new user interface, but, I think, especially relevant here. After all, people tend to get pretty annoyed when you don't listen to them.
I think you are spot on. I think this is the problem Siri has solved or will solve. People tend to underestimate Siri as a voice recognition system. Siri is A.I. . Given Apple's recent history I wager that they would never released Siri if they didn't believe that they are onto something. This is not some knock off voice recognition nonsense. This is A.I.
This goes far beyond searching for restaurants or wheather. Screw that noise. I am sure all of you can imagine the doors this opens in scientific research and analysis of data.
Yes, seriously. Siri is not voice recognition. Siri is not restaurant recommendation. Siri is A.I. I speculate that Apple is on the verge of making A.I. commonly available. I am sure you can imagine the possibilities. I speculate that this will change our lives as much as Internet has. In a not so distant future, we will look at the day Siri was announced as the moment in history it all began.
Clearly, some other company can beat Apple in this game. But what I am speculating is that A.I. is going to be the next big thing. Siri is the first mainstream use of A.I. Even if another company might be the winner in the A.I. race which just began, Siri's public introduction will be remembered much like Apple II's or the first Mac's.
