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I'm a bit confused about why they purchased Siri. I don't see anything truly groundbreaking about the app(I'm not saying its a bad app (I have never used it)).
by CoryMathews 16y ago
I'm a bit confused about why they purchased Siri.
I don't see anything truly groundbreaking about the app(I'm not saying its a bad app (I have never used it)). Nothing that apple would see worth buying at least.
As noted by paulgb siri uses Nuance (http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/products/editions/preferred.asp http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/products/editions/pr...) for speech recognition so they must not be buying it for better speech recognition. (assuming this statement is correct)
Siri does not seem to have anything that Apple could not have just reproduced. Apple could have paid a fraction (assuming the $200mil this author estimates) to write the app and then just banned siri from the app store as reproducing existing features..
- troystribling 16y agoSiri is based on natural language processing technology developed by the DARPA CALO AI Project http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_stealth_startup_siric.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_stealth_startu..., http://caloproject.sri.com/about/ http://caloproject.sri.com/about/. There is more to it than speech recognition. I have used it and it has acceptable performance in recognizing simple tasks verbally.
- siong1987 16y agoThe argument that Apple could have paid a fraction to write the app is fundamentally false. If you look at all the acquisitions happened between Google recently, how many of them Google can build with a fraction of the money they have paid for? And, that's why a good programmer produces 10x more value that a normal programmer. But, how to hire a good programmer? Acquisition is definitely one of the methods to hire a good programmer.
- jsz0 16y agoIt took them 3 OS versions to introduce a cruddy voice control feature so maybe they just weren't confident with what they had in-house.