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I have used Siri faithfully from 2011 til about the start of this year where I bought a google home. Siri is flat out dumb and frustrating to use comparatively

I have used Siri faithfully from 2011 til about the start of this year where I bought a google home. Siri is flat out dumb and frustrating to use comparatively in terms of only understanding 85 percent of my queries vs. Google Home understanding 97 percent. It seems to me Apple has not taken all their hordes of cash and used it to up the AI game. Looks like they are solely focused on the present while competitors are building the future in which they foolishly try to catch up with. Like last weeks WWDC they debuted the AR kit but did not bother to create an amazing/innovate AR app to showcase and get the masses excited for AR and their possible upcoming AR gear.

k-mcgrady 9y ago
>> Like last weeks WWDC they debuted the AR kit but did not bother to create an amazing/innovate AR app to showcase and get the masses excited for AR and their possible upcoming AR gear. Why would they announce an app for supposed upcoming AR product before announcing the actual product? You announce the developer kit 6 months before that happens, get them working on apps, and then when you announce your AR product there are lots of apps, not just an in-house one, ready to go. Even if an AR specific product doesn't launch soon they've brought a good AR API to devs a few months before iOS 11 - and when it does (if developers take advantage of the API's) millions of people will be using AR daily on their iOS devices. Right now I know absolutely nobody using AR on any platform. That's going to change very quickly and an in-house app won't make a bit of difference.
JimDabell 9y ago
> Like last weeks WWDC they debuted the AR kit but did not bother to create an amazing/innovate AR app to showcase and get the masses excited for AR and their possible upcoming AR gear. It's a developer conference not a product launch, so of course it focused on the code rather than "getting the masses excited". The point is that developers can now spend the next few months creating those AR applications to impress people before iOS 11 with ARKit is launched to the public.
- paul9290 9y ago
  Yeah but they showed new features in iMessage, the camera app and etc. all copycat ideas. They could have built an AR feature into the camera app to show they are not just followers of all other companies who innovate they still are innovators. Further to showcase and get the masses excited about AR.
abritinthebay 9y ago
I feel this fundamentally misunderstands how each of their AI's work. You're describing an interface problem. Google's AI is extremely good at recognizing speech in comparison to Siri but that's a wholly different thing to deep understanding. Siri is a more advanced AI in many ways due to it's understanding of intents. Google's is much more command based (under the hood). However Apple's speech recognition is letting it down here. Intents are a much more sophisticated way to interact with an AI than Google's command based structure but they are correspondingly more complex to integrate and you realistically need to infer things more from the user (which Apple needs to get better at). I don't disagree that Apple needs to step up their game with how people interact with Siri, but it's a perceptual issue with the interface not with the underlying AI. (source - have discussed these exact issues with one of the founders of Nuance).
- kartD 9y ago
  So what would be an advantage of Apple's system (assuming they improve speech recognition) and how would that contrast with Google's approach?
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    The power to create connections between things of the underlying system is greater. Basically if Apple actually manages to get the voice recognition part down (so it parses intent/structure rather than just pure words) it'll be very powerful. Right now Apple has a frontend that is more suitable for a command-based system and Google has a frontend that is better for am intent based system. It's easier to improve the frontend than create a better backend though. So that's the competitive trade-off that Google has made. I actually think it was smart of Google, and quite un-Apple like of Apple to do it the way they did. Usually they are very focused on the interface as well. Then again, at the time, Siri was quite good at that. It's just Google focused on it (clearly).
    - kartD 9y ago
      Oh I see, thanks!

k-mcgrady 9y ago

>> Like last weeks WWDC they debuted the AR kit but did not bother to create an amazing/innovate AR app to showcase and get the masses excited for AR and their possible upcoming AR gear. Why would they announce an app for supposed upcoming AR product before announcing the actual product? You announce the developer kit 6 months before that happens, get them working on apps, and then when you announce your AR product there are lots of apps, not just an in-house one, ready to go. Even if an AR specific product doesn't launch soon they've brought a good AR API to devs a few months before iOS 11 - and when it does (if developers take advantage of the API's) millions of people will be using AR daily on their iOS devices. Right now I know absolutely nobody using AR on any platform. That's going to change very quickly and an in-house app won't make a bit of difference.

JimDabell 9y ago

> Like last weeks WWDC they debuted the AR kit but did not bother to create an amazing/innovate AR app to showcase and get the masses excited for AR and their possible upcoming AR gear. It's a developer conference not a product launch, so of course it focused on the code rather than "getting the masses excited". The point is that developers can now spend the next few months creating those AR applications to impress people before iOS 11 with ARKit is launched to the public.

paul9290 9y ago
Yeah but they showed new features in iMessage, the camera app and etc. all copycat ideas. They could have built an AR feature into the camera app to show they are not just followers of all other companies who innovate they still are innovators. Further to showcase and get the masses excited about AR.

abritinthebay 9y ago

I feel this fundamentally misunderstands how each of their AI's work. You're describing an interface problem. Google's AI is extremely good at recognizing speech in comparison to Siri but that's a wholly different thing to deep understanding. Siri is a more advanced AI in many ways due to it's understanding of intents. Google's is much more command based (under the hood). However Apple's speech recognition is letting it down here. Intents are a much more sophisticated way to interact with an AI than Google's command based structure but they are correspondingly more complex to integrate and you realistically need to infer things more from the user (which Apple needs to get better at). I don't disagree that Apple needs to step up their game with how people interact with Siri, but it's a perceptual issue with the interface not with the underlying AI. (source - have discussed these exact issues with one of the founders of Nuance).

kartD 9y ago
So what would be an advantage of Apple's system (assuming they improve speech recognition) and how would that contrast with Google's approach?
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  The power to create connections between things of the underlying system is greater. Basically if Apple actually manages to get the voice recognition part down (so it parses intent/structure rather than just pure words) it'll be very powerful. Right now Apple has a frontend that is more suitable for a command-based system and Google has a frontend that is better for am intent based system. It's easier to improve the frontend than create a better backend though. So that's the competitive trade-off that Google has made. I actually think it was smart of Google, and quite un-Apple like of Apple to do it the way they did. Usually they are very focused on the interface as well. Then again, at the time, Siri was quite good at that. It's just Google focused on it (clearly).
  - kartD 9y ago
    Oh I see, thanks!