10 ms·

How Apple fumbled a five-year lead in voice control

78 points by charlysl 9y ago

ghostcluster 9y ago
Notably, unlike Xerox, which developed the Alto and its technologies in-house and let them rot, Apple launched Siri through acquisition of a fully functioning application which was already distributed through the App Store. It's more like Flickr. There are some weird sweeping statements in this piece that I don't think represent reality, but I do agree that it seems Apple held Siri back from what it should have been, as a platform with a third party API, because it was afraid it would bypass Apple's control of the overall iOS platform somehow. Fatal mistake, and they lost a huge number of Siri's team by letting it rot the way they have.
- alwillis 9y ago
  Fatal mistake, and they lost a huge number of Siri's team by letting it rot the way they have. It’s not fatal—lets not be melodramatic here. I suspect they know they screwed up and have taken steps to correct. Remember that Siri on iOS, the watch, macOS and AppleTV were all different; they're working on a unified Siri across platforms so that the things Siri knows how to do aren’t in silos. We’re already starting to see the results of this: the new “read me the news” works on iOS 11.2.5 and also on HomePod: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/23/apple-releases-ios-11-2-5/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/23/apple-releases-ios-11-2...
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    It's not a good sign that they've lost so much of the original talent on the project. The WSJ had a very public exposé on the topic over the summer: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original-now-struggles-to-be-heard-above-the-crowd-1496849095 https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original-no... I don't know of any good redemption narratives for tech products that lose their founding teams after acquisition and exist in the headless/nebulous state that Siri appears to be in now — outside of the Macintosh itself, but it had to hire back its founder and spinoff product.
charlysl 9y ago
This is about much more than just voice control, if I got it right much of its added value could be realized by just typing, or more generally, by conversational text generated in any other way, of which online voice2text is one instance. Also interesting that just like structuring everything around Windows hurt Microsoft, Apple seems to be falling into this with the iPhone.
idreyn 9y ago
> Over 60% of text iMessages are composed using voice This seems dubious and I'd love to see a source for this claim.
- manmal 9y ago
  Yes, I simply don’t buy that either. I try comparatively hard to use Siri, and I don’t think I write more than 5% via Siri. It doesn’t work that well even while driving.
  - foz 9y ago
    I would guess that this statistic is about using the voice button on the keyboard, rather then commanding Siri "send a message to...". I've watched people that do this constantly, and perhaps they send more messages overall as a result of the behavior.
- kadal 9y ago
  From a single datapoint, senior citizens prefer speaking into the phone instead of typing out long messages.
  - blowski 9y ago
    Anecdatally, it seems to be quite common in Brazil.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  Composed or merely sent as a voice message?
- alwillis 9y ago
  100% of iMessages are composed by voice on the Apple Watch, which may be weighting this figure somewhat.
  - ramzyo 9y ago
    Err, huh? I use the scribble feature (not voice) on the Apple Watch to compose iMessages all the time.
mrarjen 9y ago
I'd still like to see someone make a "HER" type of OS even just as a prototype/demo piece touching new functionalities. Currently Siri indeed doesn't offer much, but even Google and Alexa aren't yet at the level that I'm likely to use it for much more than set a timer or put on some music in the long run...
- ladberg 9y ago
  It's not that people aren't trying to do that, it's just insanely hard. That is the end goal for all virtual assistants, but it's still years (I would even say decades) away.
headmelted 9y ago
Apple didn't fumble a five-year lead in voice control, they've just not closed Google's 15 year lead in AI. The article kind of touches on this topic but misses the point - Google is using data about you to inform it's AI. One could argue that the author not realizing the extent to which it does so is more likely a sign they've become very good at it.
- unobtaniumstool 9y ago
  Right well Google is preternaturally good at that shit. I want to know Apple's excuse for failing to outperform Amazon.
  - headmelted 9y ago
    Yeah fair enough. I'd be interested in knowing that myself.
manmal 9y ago
The author makes it seem that everybody is eager to use voice assistants to replace their Android or iOS screen interactions. But I don’t know anybody who would dictate their private messages on the subway, or even at home - they are called private for a reason. And just imagine requesting „tell me the current value of a bitcoin“ while at work - I don’t think this would go well. There would be a lot of noise pollution everywhere, with people constantly murmuring to themselves, alternated with an unresponsive silence while listening to the device‘s answer. It would seem like everybody is on the phone, all the time. Also, for me, digesting information via text is way easier, because I can jump back and forth to support short term memory - good luck with that with a voice assistant. The iPhone (and friends) disrupted the PC because they made reading and writing mobile. Voice assistants are not iterating on this paradigm, but they are rather iterating on phone calls. I‘m skeptical that this is suitable to replace the iPhone I‘m writing this on.
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  Before the Internet, you had to talk to people to do all the things we now do with apps and web browsers and texts and so on. A lot of time was spent on the phone. So the world has gotten quieter, but it's not like it was that quiet to begin with.
  - manmal 9y ago
    We had those phones on the wall though, confined to a dedicated location, and not in our ears.
- modernerd 9y ago
  This is the future that Her presents[1]. There's a scene on the subway where everyone's chatting away to their AI, and you can see how it could be normalised. [1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    Sure, but we're nowhere near that at the moment.
lobster_johnson 9y ago
I'm probably living in a bubble, but I don't understand the current focus on all of these voice-operated AI things. For one, I don't see anyone using them. I've never seen anyone use Siri on a phone, with one exception: I have a friend who uses voice transcription to write emails and text messages. (Not sure if that counts as Siri.) I don't know anyone who uses speakers such as Amazon Echo or Google Home, or mentions wanting them. I've used Siri on my phone a few times to try out silly things like asking about the weather or converting units, but it's seems so obviously bad that I've never tried going "Siri first". It's on my Apple TV, but I've not used it. Are people actually using this stuff as much as this article (and all the current focus on AI-powered speakers etc.) implies? I'd love true AI -- a personal assistant that actually understood me, knew my tastes, remembered my choices and so on -- but that doesn't exist. So we get an uncanny valley where speaking to a device comes with uncertainty about whether the device will actually be able to service the request (see the numerous annoyed threads on Reddit about Siri not understanding incredibly basic things), requiring the user to carry around with them a mental model of the receiver's inadequacies. And we get that problem where many tasks that would be super useful to have done by an assistant is actually too difficult for a current AI. For example, booking a trip. I've never booked a flight that didn't involve pouring over pages of results, weighing the various compromises (optimizing for price vs departure time vs airport distance vs layovers vs airline crappiness etc.) and of course filling in a whole lot of information about myself. Let alone booking holidays (I spend many days on research for such a task). Bus and train tickets -- maybe, if it's a simple route with few variables. Dinner reservations and movie tickets, sure. Home automation, well. Once a home is fully outfitted with all lights, doors etc. being connected to a home automation system -- maybe. None of this is automated in my apartment, and I've never seen a home that is set up like this. There's also the inherent limited utility that comes with an AI being unintelligent. For example, my Apple TV. I rarely know what I want to watch. To only rarely would I be able to say "Siri, play The Grand Budapest Hotel". Usually it would have to be something like "Siri, list me some sci-fi movies". But then I would still have to navigate the results. If it could respond to "Siri, show me French movies with an IMDb score of 7.0 or higher, or with a four-star review from Roger Ebert, that came out after 1990", well, now I'm interested. But somehow I doubt that those sort of multi-dimensional cross-referencing mechanics are currently available. Edit: With the comments saying how good Google Assistant is compared to Siri, I tried it out. My first queries failed ("What is the weather in Washington State like in March") because it thought I was finished speaking and cut me off at "What is the weather", and showed me today's weather in my city. After a few attempts I got results, but then it returned Fahrenheit units (my phone is set to use metric/international units), and then it continued giving me Fahrenheit after I changed it, because apparently climate information is a "web search" returning text, not data: https://imgur.com/gallery/LI8Sc https://imgur.com/gallery/LI8Sc. Not so impressive. Meanwhile, Siri on the phone doesn't understand the query at all, ignoring the "in March" part and giving me today's weather, no matter how I phrase the question. I can see a future where AI voice control is incredible, but it requires an enormous advance, and it seems like even the best AI of today just comes with frustration and failure. That's surely why companies like Apple and Google are working on this, but it doesn't explain, to me, why the current voice AI is being pushed so hard.
sparkpeasy 9y ago
What do people actually use voice for besides playing music, smart home, transcribing and "widget" stuff like timers and weather? Are there lots of people out there actually using it for productivity like scheduling, communicating, researching, comparing? To me it seems like until voice AI gets smart enough to respond to a query like "Alexa, how will our Q4 projected net profits change if I switch widget vendors from AlphaCorp to BetaCorp?" an interactive screen will be needed.
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  Companies see the Cambrian explosions of growth (and equities appreciation) that follow successful UI shifts and want to reproduce that with voice UI. You could do a hell of a lot by establishing a framework for third parties to use such that they don’t stomp upon each other and the system-reserved words/phrases, as well as homophone rejection/discrimination, then brute-forcing lots of recognized cases. Right now, I’m seeing second-system effects in voice UI efforts by everyone (possibly excepting the dedicated voice recognition outfits like Nuance), by trying to apply a general machine learning approach to all of it and eschewing brute-force as not pure/clean enough.
  - jxdxbx 9y ago
    Well, Alexa seems to be going the brute force route--using third-party skills is just like using a spoken command line utility. The problem is, while this approach is simple and it works, very few skills are useful.
mnm1 9y ago
I'd love to see such technologies developed more, but the focus needs to be on accuracy and speed. No current systems I've tried excel in those areas when used by people with accents. I've seen others code by voice, but for me, the voice recognition systems are about fifty percent accurate most of the time, aka useless.
skgoa 9y ago
Eh, this seems to be missing one important detail. At least it's massively important to me as a potential buyer of an AI home assistant. That detail is that HomePod doesn't spy on me. It does not upload audio recordings of my home and it even shows a visual indication when it is listening at all. Doing speech recognision on the device is way harder, so it's not a surprise to see them being later to market than others. However this makes Apple's product the only viable one on the market for me.
dustinmoris 9y ago
> When Apple bought Siri it had a solid 5 year lead in voice control. Ehm what? Siri was initially released in 2011, I think Google Assistant in 2016.. so yeah.. there's 5 years difference between Siri and a product called "Google assistant", but before that Google had "Google Now" which was also controlled by voice, and MANY years before that Google pioneered with Google Voice Search and other apps which could be controlled by voice. So let's get the facts right... Apple didn't have a 5 year lead, Apple was so far behind that they were forced to buy another product in order to even have a chance to catch up! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Voice_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Voice_Search
gambiting 9y ago
>>Apple is also fumbling the future—the Voice First future. Voice First simply means our primary mode of interacting with computers in the future will be with our voice. Oh god please no. Interacting with computers using voice is probably the second worst way of doing it, just after using motion gestures. There are some good uses for it(although I think even voice controls for lights is pushing it, it's more pain that it's worth), but having it as a primary mode of operation? No thanks.
hishnash 9y ago
i do see a lot of people believing the Alexas system is much better but int he end alaxa is just build up on regex. that is ok-ish for simple languages like English were the words themselves dont change. but in many other languages, the words in sentences change depending on their relationship to each other. eg simple information in English like "the cat is sitting on the bench" is encoding with the order of the words whereas in other languages the information the `cat` is `sitting` on the bench rather than the bench `sitting on the cat` is encoded in how the word `cat` and `sitting` and `bench` (and maybe `on`) change. This change can be rather complex based on lots and lots of factors such as gender of the `cat` and `bench` the type of verb eg `sitting` and the preposition `on` (some languages don't even bother with this since it's added to the verb). apple's approach is much more upfront work since they do all this natural language logic in every language they support. But for developers who use Sirikit is is much better.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  I'm sure it's fixed now, but a few months ago right in the middle of the whole "Siri is a completely failure, Alexa is much better" I asked Alexa to "turn all my lights off" and she responds with a very daft "I'm sorry, but you don't have a device called 'All my lights' on your account". Siri knew how to handle that just fine.
shabbyrobe 9y ago
> In the AR and VR future we won’t be typing. Oh please god no full stop imagine how hard it would be to even write a simple hello world program example ellipsis linebreak linebreak three backticks no not that delete word delete word backtick backtick backtick c linebreak void main open bracket int argc comma char asterisk argv close bracket space open curly bracket line break tab print-EFF open bracket double-quote percent d backslash n double-quote comma argc close bracket semi-colon line break backtick backtick backtick Chance of success? Zero. Time taken? Three minutes.
- m4tthumphrey 9y ago
  I found this to be very ironic based on the time it probably took you to type all this out haha!
  - shabbyrobe 9y ago
    Hehe yep but the major difference here is that I was chuckling the whole time I was typing. Can you imagine how bad chuckling would make the end result if you were speaking it? Chance of success: -1 billion.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I won't be switching any time soon, but it's certainly possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
- bryanrasmussen 9y ago
  A voice interface to programming would either necessitate different programming languages, or macros - maybe gestural or vocal - of some sort to take care of the various ordering syntax that languages like { that languages require. As well as absolutely perfect voice recognition, including adjusting to when you have a sore throat or other problems.
  - wernsey 9y ago
    I foresee a problem with maintaining code that has been written with gestures or voice. How would that work? Would your IDE play back the voice or display animations of the gestures to you. It just feels as if text is the simplest solution, but I'm open to suggestions.
fwdpropaganda 9y ago
> Amazon has 12,000 people working in Alexa. Is this true?
arkh 9y ago
> People are listening to music and setting timers, but they are also getting things done. I'd like some examples of those things getting done.
braindead_in 9y ago
Here's an automated transcript of the podcast referenced in the post, in case you want to skim through it. https://scribie.com/transcript/236de3526ba3499a9259bd9fecb9eb13c60fbfe2 https://scribie.com/transcript/236de3526ba3499a9259bd9fecb9e...
baybal2 9y ago
95% trained accuracy was already there by late eighties 97% by mid-nineties 98% late nineties, and I still remember how wonderful was the voice recognition on old black and white Ericsson phones, and sony PDAs of that era. And then, things stalled at claimed 98.5% without much improvement in marginal utility. The fact that misrecognition is there and will be there, removes much of utility from applications without a dictionary or one with no side effects. And yes, people talking to nobody feels and looks creepy. It almost begs other to come and point a finger at you saying "hey look, a computer creep is talking to his phone."
thestephen 9y ago
What makes me sad about Siri on the iPhone is that it would be such a boon if I was able to use it with actually good apps and if I didn't feel like a second-class citizen for having an iPhone outside the US. I'm forced to use the buggy Reminders app, because Siri only supports creating reminders with Reminders. Apple refuses to support anything else than Apple Music, which means I can't use Siri for music. (Yet, when the 4S was released, it only took weeks until I could control Spotify with Siri using jailbreak). I can't use Siri for navigation either in any form ("Hey Siri, when does the next train leave from here?"), because Apple has never provided public transit or good navigation in Sweden, nor announced a timeline on what year that might happen – and of course, Google Maps can't use Siri. And even if it could, Siri does not gracefully support foreign words such as addresses. I could easily love Siri if Apple would stop gimping it by tying it to other subpar products.
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  > Apple refuses to support anything else than Apple Music I was pretty appalled when I installed the first version of OS X with Siri and then the first thing I did was ask it to play a song from my iTunes Matched iTunes library and it had no idea what I was talking about because the artist (Kanye) wasn't on Apple Music. My iPhone 4S I was using at the time could do this feat just fine but the so called latest and greatest can't manage it because Apple wants to force Apple Music on me. I disabled Siri a few moments after this.
- dbbk 9y ago
  > I'm forced to use the buggy Reminders app, because Siri only supports creating reminders with Reminders. Siri has third-party reminders support now, I use it with Things.
  - thestephen 9y ago
    That is good to know, and I've considered switching to Things for a while. This makes it easier. Thank you!
ken 9y ago
I disagree with the initial premise, i.e., that: > "We think in a voice in our head. Anyone trying to type has to first put it in a voice in their head before typing. You’re transcribing your inner voice onto the keyboard. When you speak it’s quicker." Anyone who has heard me speak probably realizes I don't think in voice. I can type as fast as I can talk because words->bits (or words->sounds) isn't the bottleneck. Thoughts->words is. Feynman [pdf: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf] noted this, too. Some thinking can't easily be done in words. Some people don't naturally think in words. There's a TV show about an autistic young doctor which, for all its flaws, tries to show how a person can have great insight even when they can't articulate well. I hope it might help inform the public understanding of other mechanisms of thought. Spoken language is wonderful as an art form or as a tool but I find it troubling when people with one mode of thinking can present theirs as the only kind, and then use it to push their agenda on others. I suspect this is behind the "open floor plan" office fad, too.
- Someone 9y ago
  Yes, it seems as bad to me as the similar ”We think in a voice in our head. Anyone trying to read has to speak out what is written.”, which was considered true until the invention of “silent reading” (https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/S...) However, there may be some half truth in that statement: to type as fast as text spoken at top speed you must use stenotype. I’m not sure that means speaking, in general, _is_ faster than typing, though, as a) it involves the extra handicap of having to process the spoken sound, and b) typing may be faster in the common/average/mean case.
- cassianoleal 9y ago
  I truly agree with this. I still remember the first time I heard of that idea of thinking in words. It was from my Portuguese teacher (I'm Brazilian) on 6th or 7th grade in school. I was blown away by that idea so I started observing my own thoughts. In very few occasions I had words come to my mind that described what I was thinking. Most of the time, thoughts were very abstract and indescribable, or simple sensorial information (shades of colours whose name I didn't know, smells that I couldn't name or describe even if I wanted, sounds, etc). Regardless, there seems to be people who think everybody thinks the same way, and the most vocal ones seem to be the ones who consider thoughts to be 100% language-based.
jxdxbx 9y ago
"Voice first" seems like a misguided philosophy pushed by people who think that we're due for some sort of "revolution." Voice is important but mostly for narrow use cases (in the car, music control in the house) or for shortcuts ("Siri, open accessibility settings"). Though I can imagine some kinds of routine, tedious computer tasks that could be automated with voice and AI someday--"Computer, convert all the files in this folder to jpegs and then put today's date at the start of their filenames, then move them to Dropbox and share them with my wife"--stuff like that. But it seems like for all that to happen we need something approaching general AI. Most voice assistants just move you along predetermined paths.
- cooper12 9y ago
  One place where voice might prove very useful is to get a generation of illiterate people onto the internet. This article by WSJ talks about uneducated porters in India who rely on voice to search, including a job ad app that can be used by voice: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-end-of-typing-the-internets-next-billion-users-will-use-video-and-voice-1502116070 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-end-of-typing-the-internets...
  - unobtaniumstool 9y ago
    Exactly. "The technology isn't there yet" and "I wouldn't be comfortable using voice control" are said from a place of privilege. There are people out there benefiting from it right now, despite some people's very first-world hangups about it.

78 points by charlysl 9y ago

Notably, unlike Xerox, which developed the Alto and its technologies in-house and let them rot, Apple launched Siri through acquisition of a fully functioning application which was already distributed through the App Store. It's more like Flickr. There are some weird sweeping statements in this piece that I don't think represent reality, but I do agree that it seems Apple held Siri back from what it should have been, as a platform with a third party API, because it was afraid it would bypass Apple's control of the overall iOS platform somehow. Fatal mistake, and they lost a huge number of Siri's team by letting it rot the way they have.

alwillis 9y ago
Fatal mistake, and they lost a huge number of Siri's team by letting it rot the way they have. It’s not fatal—lets not be melodramatic here. I suspect they know they screwed up and have taken steps to correct. Remember that Siri on iOS, the watch, macOS and AppleTV were all different; they're working on a unified Siri across platforms so that the things Siri knows how to do aren’t in silos. We’re already starting to see the results of this: the new “read me the news” works on iOS 11.2.5 and also on HomePod: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/23/apple-releases-ios-11-2-5/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/23/apple-releases-ios-11-2...
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  It's not a good sign that they've lost so much of the original talent on the project. The WSJ had a very public exposé on the topic over the summer: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original-now-struggles-to-be-heard-above-the-crowd-1496849095 https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original-no... I don't know of any good redemption narratives for tech products that lose their founding teams after acquisition and exist in the headless/nebulous state that Siri appears to be in now — outside of the Macintosh itself, but it had to hire back its founder and spinoff product.

charlysl 9y ago

This is about much more than just voice control, if I got it right much of its added value could be realized by just typing, or more generally, by conversational text generated in any other way, of which online voice2text is one instance. Also interesting that just like structuring everything around Windows hurt Microsoft, Apple seems to be falling into this with the iPhone.

idreyn 9y ago

> Over 60% of text iMessages are composed using voice This seems dubious and I'd love to see a source for this claim.

manmal 9y ago
Yes, I simply don’t buy that either. I try comparatively hard to use Siri, and I don’t think I write more than 5% via Siri. It doesn’t work that well even while driving.
- foz 9y ago
  I would guess that this statistic is about using the voice button on the keyboard, rather then commanding Siri "send a message to...". I've watched people that do this constantly, and perhaps they send more messages overall as a result of the behavior.
kadal 9y ago
From a single datapoint, senior citizens prefer speaking into the phone instead of typing out long messages.
- blowski 9y ago
  Anecdatally, it seems to be quite common in Brazil.
raverbashing 9y ago
Composed or merely sent as a voice message?
alwillis 9y ago
100% of iMessages are composed by voice on the Apple Watch, which may be weighting this figure somewhat.
- ramzyo 9y ago
  Err, huh? I use the scribble feature (not voice) on the Apple Watch to compose iMessages all the time.

mrarjen 9y ago

I'd still like to see someone make a "HER" type of OS even just as a prototype/demo piece touching new functionalities. Currently Siri indeed doesn't offer much, but even Google and Alexa aren't yet at the level that I'm likely to use it for much more than set a timer or put on some music in the long run...

ladberg 9y ago
It's not that people aren't trying to do that, it's just insanely hard. That is the end goal for all virtual assistants, but it's still years (I would even say decades) away.

headmelted 9y ago

Apple didn't fumble a five-year lead in voice control, they've just not closed Google's 15 year lead in AI. The article kind of touches on this topic but misses the point - Google is using data about you to inform it's AI. One could argue that the author not realizing the extent to which it does so is more likely a sign they've become very good at it.

unobtaniumstool 9y ago
Right well Google is preternaturally good at that shit. I want to know Apple's excuse for failing to outperform Amazon.
- headmelted 9y ago
  Yeah fair enough. I'd be interested in knowing that myself.

manmal 9y ago

The author makes it seem that everybody is eager to use voice assistants to replace their Android or iOS screen interactions. But I don’t know anybody who would dictate their private messages on the subway, or even at home - they are called private for a reason. And just imagine requesting „tell me the current value of a bitcoin“ while at work - I don’t think this would go well. There would be a lot of noise pollution everywhere, with people constantly murmuring to themselves, alternated with an unresponsive silence while listening to the device‘s answer. It would seem like everybody is on the phone, all the time. Also, for me, digesting information via text is way easier, because I can jump back and forth to support short term memory - good luck with that with a voice assistant. The iPhone (and friends) disrupted the PC because they made reading and writing mobile. Voice assistants are not iterating on this paradigm, but they are rather iterating on phone calls. I‘m skeptical that this is suitable to replace the iPhone I‘m writing this on.

lobster_johnson 9y ago
Before the Internet, you had to talk to people to do all the things we now do with apps and web browsers and texts and so on. A lot of time was spent on the phone. So the world has gotten quieter, but it's not like it was that quiet to begin with.
- manmal 9y ago
  We had those phones on the wall though, confined to a dedicated location, and not in our ears.
modernerd 9y ago
This is the future that Her presents[1]. There's a scene on the subway where everyone's chatting away to their AI, and you can see how it could be normalised. [1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  Sure, but we're nowhere near that at the moment.

lobster_johnson 9y ago

I'm probably living in a bubble, but I don't understand the current focus on all of these voice-operated AI things. For one, I don't see anyone using them. I've never seen anyone use Siri on a phone, with one exception: I have a friend who uses voice transcription to write emails and text messages. (Not sure if that counts as Siri.) I don't know anyone who uses speakers such as Amazon Echo or Google Home, or mentions wanting them. I've used Siri on my phone a few times to try out silly things like asking about the weather or converting units, but it's seems so obviously bad that I've never tried going "Siri first". It's on my Apple TV, but I've not used it. Are people actually using this stuff as much as this article (and all the current focus on AI-powered speakers etc.) implies? I'd love true AI -- a personal assistant that actually understood me, knew my tastes, remembered my choices and so on -- but that doesn't exist. So we get an uncanny valley where speaking to a device comes with uncertainty about whether the device will actually be able to service the request (see the numerous annoyed threads on Reddit about Siri not understanding incredibly basic things), requiring the user to carry around with them a mental model of the receiver's inadequacies. And we get that problem where many tasks that would be super useful to have done by an assistant is actually too difficult for a current AI. For example, booking a trip. I've never booked a flight that didn't involve pouring over pages of results, weighing the various compromises (optimizing for price vs departure time vs airport distance vs layovers vs airline crappiness etc.) and of course filling in a whole lot of information about myself. Let alone booking holidays (I spend many days on research for such a task). Bus and train tickets -- maybe, if it's a simple route with few variables. Dinner reservations and movie tickets, sure. Home automation, well. Once a home is fully outfitted with all lights, doors etc. being connected to a home automation system -- maybe. None of this is automated in my apartment, and I've never seen a home that is set up like this. There's also the inherent limited utility that comes with an AI being unintelligent. For example, my Apple TV. I rarely know what I want to watch. To only rarely would I be able to say "Siri, play The Grand Budapest Hotel". Usually it would have to be something like "Siri, list me some sci-fi movies". But then I would still have to navigate the results. If it could respond to "Siri, show me French movies with an IMDb score of 7.0 or higher, or with a four-star review from Roger Ebert, that came out after 1990", well, now I'm interested. But somehow I doubt that those sort of multi-dimensional cross-referencing mechanics are currently available. Edit: With the comments saying how good Google Assistant is compared to Siri, I tried it out. My first queries failed ("What is the weather in Washington State like in March") because it thought I was finished speaking and cut me off at "What is the weather", and showed me today's weather in my city. After a few attempts I got results, but then it returned Fahrenheit units (my phone is set to use metric/international units), and then it continued giving me Fahrenheit after I changed it, because apparently climate information is a "web search" returning text, not data: https://imgur.com/gallery/LI8Sc https://imgur.com/gallery/LI8Sc. Not so impressive. Meanwhile, Siri on the phone doesn't understand the query at all, ignoring the "in March" part and giving me today's weather, no matter how I phrase the question. I can see a future where AI voice control is incredible, but it requires an enormous advance, and it seems like even the best AI of today just comes with frustration and failure. That's surely why companies like Apple and Google are working on this, but it doesn't explain, to me, why the current voice AI is being pushed so hard.

sparkpeasy 9y ago

What do people actually use voice for besides playing music, smart home, transcribing and "widget" stuff like timers and weather? Are there lots of people out there actually using it for productivity like scheduling, communicating, researching, comparing? To me it seems like until voice AI gets smart enough to respond to a query like "Alexa, how will our Q4 projected net profits change if I switch widget vendors from AlphaCorp to BetaCorp?" an interactive screen will be needed.

yourapostasy 9y ago
Companies see the Cambrian explosions of growth (and equities appreciation) that follow successful UI shifts and want to reproduce that with voice UI. You could do a hell of a lot by establishing a framework for third parties to use such that they don’t stomp upon each other and the system-reserved words/phrases, as well as homophone rejection/discrimination, then brute-forcing lots of recognized cases. Right now, I’m seeing second-system effects in voice UI efforts by everyone (possibly excepting the dedicated voice recognition outfits like Nuance), by trying to apply a general machine learning approach to all of it and eschewing brute-force as not pure/clean enough.
- jxdxbx 9y ago
  Well, Alexa seems to be going the brute force route--using third-party skills is just like using a spoken command line utility. The problem is, while this approach is simple and it works, very few skills are useful.

mnm1 9y ago

I'd love to see such technologies developed more, but the focus needs to be on accuracy and speed. No current systems I've tried excel in those areas when used by people with accents. I've seen others code by voice, but for me, the voice recognition systems are about fifty percent accurate most of the time, aka useless.

skgoa 9y ago

Eh, this seems to be missing one important detail. At least it's massively important to me as a potential buyer of an AI home assistant. That detail is that HomePod doesn't spy on me. It does not upload audio recordings of my home and it even shows a visual indication when it is listening at all. Doing speech recognision on the device is way harder, so it's not a surprise to see them being later to market than others. However this makes Apple's product the only viable one on the market for me.

dustinmoris 9y ago

> When Apple bought Siri it had a solid 5 year lead in voice control. Ehm what? Siri was initially released in 2011, I think Google Assistant in 2016.. so yeah.. there's 5 years difference between Siri and a product called "Google assistant", but before that Google had "Google Now" which was also controlled by voice, and MANY years before that Google pioneered with Google Voice Search and other apps which could be controlled by voice. So let's get the facts right... Apple didn't have a 5 year lead, Apple was so far behind that they were forced to buy another product in order to even have a chance to catch up! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Voice_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Voice_Search

gambiting 9y ago

>>Apple is also fumbling the future—the Voice First future. Voice First simply means our primary mode of interacting with computers in the future will be with our voice. Oh god please no. Interacting with computers using voice is probably the second worst way of doing it, just after using motion gestures. There are some good uses for it(although I think even voice controls for lights is pushing it, it's more pain that it's worth), but having it as a primary mode of operation? No thanks.

hishnash 9y ago

i do see a lot of people believing the Alexas system is much better but int he end alaxa is just build up on regex. that is ok-ish for simple languages like English were the words themselves dont change. but in many other languages, the words in sentences change depending on their relationship to each other. eg simple information in English like "the cat is sitting on the bench" is encoding with the order of the words whereas in other languages the information the `cat` is `sitting` on the bench rather than the bench `sitting on the cat` is encoded in how the word `cat` and `sitting` and `bench` (and maybe `on`) change. This change can be rather complex based on lots and lots of factors such as gender of the `cat` and `bench` the type of verb eg `sitting` and the preposition `on` (some languages don't even bother with this since it's added to the verb). apple's approach is much more upfront work since they do all this natural language logic in every language they support. But for developers who use Sirikit is is much better.

madeofpalk 9y ago
I'm sure it's fixed now, but a few months ago right in the middle of the whole "Siri is a completely failure, Alexa is much better" I asked Alexa to "turn all my lights off" and she responds with a very daft "I'm sorry, but you don't have a device called 'All my lights' on your account". Siri knew how to handle that just fine.

shabbyrobe 9y ago

> In the AR and VR future we won’t be typing. Oh please god no full stop imagine how hard it would be to even write a simple hello world program example ellipsis linebreak linebreak three backticks no not that delete word delete word backtick backtick backtick c linebreak void main open bracket int argc comma char asterisk argv close bracket space open curly bracket line break tab print-EFF open bracket double-quote percent d backslash n double-quote comma argc close bracket semi-colon line break backtick backtick backtick Chance of success? Zero. Time taken? Three minutes.

m4tthumphrey 9y ago
I found this to be very ironic based on the time it probably took you to type all this out haha!
- shabbyrobe 9y ago
  Hehe yep but the major difference here is that I was chuckling the whole time I was typing. Can you imagine how bad chuckling would make the end result if you were speaking it? Chance of success: -1 billion.
icebraining 9y ago
I won't be switching any time soon, but it's certainly possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
bryanrasmussen 9y ago
A voice interface to programming would either necessitate different programming languages, or macros - maybe gestural or vocal - of some sort to take care of the various ordering syntax that languages like { that languages require. As well as absolutely perfect voice recognition, including adjusting to when you have a sore throat or other problems.
- wernsey 9y ago
  I foresee a problem with maintaining code that has been written with gestures or voice. How would that work? Would your IDE play back the voice or display animations of the gestures to you. It just feels as if text is the simplest solution, but I'm open to suggestions.

fwdpropaganda 9y ago

> Amazon has 12,000 people working in Alexa. Is this true?

arkh 9y ago

> People are listening to music and setting timers, but they are also getting things done. I'd like some examples of those things getting done.

braindead_in 9y ago

Here's an automated transcript of the podcast referenced in the post, in case you want to skim through it. https://scribie.com/transcript/236de3526ba3499a9259bd9fecb9eb13c60fbfe2 https://scribie.com/transcript/236de3526ba3499a9259bd9fecb9e...

baybal2 9y ago

95% trained accuracy was already there by late eighties 97% by mid-nineties 98% late nineties, and I still remember how wonderful was the voice recognition on old black and white Ericsson phones, and sony PDAs of that era. And then, things stalled at claimed 98.5% without much improvement in marginal utility. The fact that misrecognition is there and will be there, removes much of utility from applications without a dictionary or one with no side effects. And yes, people talking to nobody feels and looks creepy. It almost begs other to come and point a finger at you saying "hey look, a computer creep is talking to his phone."

thestephen 9y ago

What makes me sad about Siri on the iPhone is that it would be such a boon if I was able to use it with actually good apps and if I didn't feel like a second-class citizen for having an iPhone outside the US. I'm forced to use the buggy Reminders app, because Siri only supports creating reminders with Reminders. Apple refuses to support anything else than Apple Music, which means I can't use Siri for music. (Yet, when the 4S was released, it only took weeks until I could control Spotify with Siri using jailbreak). I can't use Siri for navigation either in any form ("Hey Siri, when does the next train leave from here?"), because Apple has never provided public transit or good navigation in Sweden, nor announced a timeline on what year that might happen – and of course, Google Maps can't use Siri. And even if it could, Siri does not gracefully support foreign words such as addresses. I could easily love Siri if Apple would stop gimping it by tying it to other subpar products.

whywhywhywhy 9y ago
> Apple refuses to support anything else than Apple Music I was pretty appalled when I installed the first version of OS X with Siri and then the first thing I did was ask it to play a song from my iTunes Matched iTunes library and it had no idea what I was talking about because the artist (Kanye) wasn't on Apple Music. My iPhone 4S I was using at the time could do this feat just fine but the so called latest and greatest can't manage it because Apple wants to force Apple Music on me. I disabled Siri a few moments after this.
dbbk 9y ago
> I'm forced to use the buggy Reminders app, because Siri only supports creating reminders with Reminders. Siri has third-party reminders support now, I use it with Things.
- thestephen 9y ago
  That is good to know, and I've considered switching to Things for a while. This makes it easier. Thank you!

ken 9y ago

I disagree with the initial premise, i.e., that: > "We think in a voice in our head. Anyone trying to type has to first put it in a voice in their head before typing. You’re transcribing your inner voice onto the keyboard. When you speak it’s quicker." Anyone who has heard me speak probably realizes I don't think in voice. I can type as fast as I can talk because words->bits (or words->sounds) isn't the bottleneck. Thoughts->words is. Feynman [pdf: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf] noted this, too. Some thinking can't easily be done in words. Some people don't naturally think in words. There's a TV show about an autistic young doctor which, for all its flaws, tries to show how a person can have great insight even when they can't articulate well. I hope it might help inform the public understanding of other mechanisms of thought. Spoken language is wonderful as an art form or as a tool but I find it troubling when people with one mode of thinking can present theirs as the only kind, and then use it to push their agenda on others. I suspect this is behind the "open floor plan" office fad, too.

Someone 9y ago
Yes, it seems as bad to me as the similar ”We think in a voice in our head. Anyone trying to read has to speak out what is written.”, which was considered true until the invention of “silent reading” (https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/S...) However, there may be some half truth in that statement: to type as fast as text spoken at top speed you must use stenotype. I’m not sure that means speaking, in general, _is_ faster than typing, though, as a) it involves the extra handicap of having to process the spoken sound, and b) typing may be faster in the common/average/mean case.
cassianoleal 9y ago
I truly agree with this. I still remember the first time I heard of that idea of thinking in words. It was from my Portuguese teacher (I'm Brazilian) on 6th or 7th grade in school. I was blown away by that idea so I started observing my own thoughts. In very few occasions I had words come to my mind that described what I was thinking. Most of the time, thoughts were very abstract and indescribable, or simple sensorial information (shades of colours whose name I didn't know, smells that I couldn't name or describe even if I wanted, sounds, etc). Regardless, there seems to be people who think everybody thinks the same way, and the most vocal ones seem to be the ones who consider thoughts to be 100% language-based.

jxdxbx 9y ago

"Voice first" seems like a misguided philosophy pushed by people who think that we're due for some sort of "revolution." Voice is important but mostly for narrow use cases (in the car, music control in the house) or for shortcuts ("Siri, open accessibility settings"). Though I can imagine some kinds of routine, tedious computer tasks that could be automated with voice and AI someday--"Computer, convert all the files in this folder to jpegs and then put today's date at the start of their filenames, then move them to Dropbox and share them with my wife"--stuff like that. But it seems like for all that to happen we need something approaching general AI. Most voice assistants just move you along predetermined paths.

cooper12 9y ago
One place where voice might prove very useful is to get a generation of illiterate people onto the internet. This article by WSJ talks about uneducated porters in India who rely on voice to search, including a job ad app that can be used by voice: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-end-of-typing-the-internets-next-billion-users-will-use-video-and-voice-1502116070 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-end-of-typing-the-internets...
- unobtaniumstool 9y ago
  Exactly. "The technology isn't there yet" and "I wouldn't be comfortable using voice control" are said from a place of privilege. There are people out there benefiting from it right now, despite some people's very first-world hangups about it.