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Steve Wozniak on Smart Watches, Motivating Engineers, Siri, and More
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- camillomiller 8y ago>Wozniak got his hands on early versions of Siri, and, he said, “I loved Siri for years. I could ask it: ‘What are the five largest lakes in California?' and get an answer. That’s hard to do any other way on the Internet. Then, Apple bought it and now, if you ask that, it gives you a list of lakeside real estate developers.” Mmm no. It gives you a list of web results, none of which has to do with real estate. Maybe Woz's Google results were influenced by his own real estate searches :) It's still ridicolous that you don't get a straight answer, though.
- matwood 8y agoI just tried that exact query and it showed a table of results from Wolfram Alpha of the "5 largest notable lakes in CA". I would consider that a correct response.
- RL_Quine 8y agoI tried the exact same query and got told to google it on my iPhone.
- dave_aiello 8y agoWhen I asked the same question, I got a series of web search results, not Wolfram Alpha results. The top result was Wikipedia's entry "List of Lakes in California" which contains a big list alphabetized by name, not sortable by surface area.
- knolan 8y agoI’ve found you can ask Siri to explicitly search Wolfram Alpha. Far from ideal.
- StephenMelon 8y agoI am getting the Wikipedia list (“I found this on the web”). Tried asking it to search Wolfram Alpha (which spellcheck corrected to WolframAlpha btw!) and it said it couldn’t find that info on WolframAlpha
- matwood 8y agoYou’ve actually hit on Siri’s biggest problem - inconsistency. Sometimes it works great and others it’s a head scratcher with the exact same query. I think it is getting better though.
- majewsky 8y ago> The top result was Wikipedia's entry "List of Lakes in California" which contains a big list alphabetized by name, not sortable by surface area. Works for me (at least for those where a surface area is maintained in the table). Do you have JS turned off?
- unstuckdev 8y agoI got the same list from Wolfram Alpha. I wonder why so many people get different results.
- sethammons 8y agoTo those who worry about AI taking over everything, I present them with Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. Some of the brightest folks are working on them. They still can't make sense of often trivial questions, let alone complex ones.
- GarrisonPrime 8y agoI don’t think he was being serious about precisely what it gives you. I think he was commenting on how these tools are meant to either turn us into commodities or sell us stuff.
- PopeDotNinja 8y agoI just asked Google Home that question, and it the largest lake it gave isn't a lake that exists. The largest lake (by surface area) is the Salton Sea, which was result #2.
- bdz 8y ago>“I loved Siri for years. I could ask it: ‘What are the five largest lakes in California?' and get an answer. That’s hard to do any other way on the Internet. What does "hard to do any other way on the Internet" mean here? I'm honestly confused because say you Google it then you get the results instantly. Unless he is talking about the definition of "large" which can be the area covered or the volume but then that's up to the question itself and not Siri.
- TomMarius 8y agoYou still need to pick up your device, unlock it, open a browser and enter your query. Simply saying it is much easier.
- adrianmsmith 8y agoTrue, but picking up your device etc. is not really “hard to do”.
- TomMarius 8y agoIt is if it's in another room. But yeah, it's not really hard, I agree - but I think Woz used that word in a different sense - as in "it takes a lot of steps that need thinking", not "it'll exhaust you".
- tomhoward 8y agoGoogle will instantly serve up an answer to a question like that these days, but it hasn't always been the case. Until a few years ago it could take multiple searches and some manual collating/filtering/calculating of results to get the answer to that question. I think that's what he means.
- DanBC 8y ago+lakes +california +(largest OR "by size") vs what are the 5 largest lakes in California The first isn't hard, but remember those few years when people would think you're a search guru because you could use + correctly, or when people sold books about how to use Google search? https://www.amazon.com/Google-Hacks-Finding-Worlds-Information/dp/0596527063 https://www.amazon.com/Google-Hacks-Finding-Worlds-Informati...
- devxpy 8y agoDoes anyone have the videotape of this?
- knolan 8y agoSiri shares a lot of problems with Apple Maps wherein it simply gives up on a request shrugs and returns any answer rather than admitt failure. For example sometimes searching Apple Maps for an address like 123 Mountain View in a development where there are similar addresses like Mountain Drive or Mountain Glade it’ll often ignore what you typed (or correctly heard in the case of Siri) and give you the wrong location such as Mountain Wood. This is especially frustrating when it happens to be your home location. For a compounded example I tried to use geofenced reminders on iOS. I had set my home and work addresses in Contacts but edited their location manually on the map because the postal address Apple offers isn’t correct and is useless when using the very useful autocomplete feature in safari. Searching for Home/Work on Apple maps goes to the incorrect location and jumps to the edited location. So when the Reminders App checks for the input location (Hey Siri remind me to do bla when I get home) it only goes to the incorrect location and sometimes another random Mountain location and never checks for the edit. This is not the attention to detail Apple is supposedly known for.
- rangibaby 8y ago> This is not the attention to detail Apple is supposedly known for. It is the kind of annoying amusing malfunction Apple apps are known for. Autocorrect was another big offender for years. The funniest for me was when my iPhone insisted on changing “there” into “they’re” when “there” was correct
- StephenMelon 8y agoApple autocorrect has gotten worse over the past few years. The worst part is that it often changes words that were correctly typed to something wrong without the user noticing. There are also obvious mistakes with location that just shouldn’t happen. If I am in Glasgow and ask Siri “how far to Loch Lomond?” it should be obvious that I mean Loch Lomond in Scotland and not Loch Lomond VA. It’s interesting to note Woz’s current enthusiasm for the watch because he was very down on it when it launched.
- saagarjha 8y ago
- paganel 8y agoI just searched my home address from where I’m typing this comment, a street name of about 10 letters followed by a 2-digit street number in an European capital city of 2 million people. Google Maps gave me the correct street name after typing 5 of those 10 street name letters and after I also inputed the street number the first result in the suggested list was the correct one. Apple Maps didn’t display the correct address at any point of me inputting the address’s letters and digits, and after I finished writing them down all and clicking the search button it redirected me to an address with the same name located 100 kilometers away. Apple Maps still has a very long way to go.
- digitalengineer 8y agoMight it be Google Maps has the added feature of all your search history, your (real time) location and all those other privacy-sensitive data?
- paganel 8y agoOne Saturday morning Apple Maps displayed a message on my locked phone’s display saying something like: “You’re XXX meters away from [coffee place]”, where [coffee place] is the location where I usually drink my coffees (especially during the weekend) and where I have never checked-in at or searched online. Meaning Apple is as privacy intrusive as Google and FB, but apparently they’rs still lagging in location search.
- jedieaston 8y agoYou can disable that in the privacy settings on your iPhone though, and that data never leaves your iPhone according to Apple. Google doesn't make the same promise.
- amelius 8y agoStuff like this should always be opt-in, never opt-out.
- vbezhenar 8y agoI never found use for Siri other than setting a timer in kitchen with dirty hands. It couldn't even turn on a flashlight.
- gok 8y agoSiri can control the flashlight as of iOS 12
- briandear 8y agoAnd with Shortcuts, Siri can control pretty much anything you want.
- gbear605 8y agoI use it for setting reminders (with the default Reminders app; I use it for everything), sending text messages, calling people, and playing music.
- avip 8y agoSiri can set an alarm for me, add reminder and narrate all my WhatsApp messages. And there goes 85% of my phone usage.
- bonestamp2 8y agoI also use it for adding calendar events, much easier to say than type a title, set the date and time and set the duration.
- gnicholas 8y agoIt’s also good for setting location-based reminders (remind me when I leave here bring UPS package). And it used to be the case that some types of repeating calendar entries could only be inputted via Siri (make an appointment for every Thursday at noon called lunch with Steve).
- kitsunesoba 8y agoWorks pretty well for HomeKit control for me. It’s also decent for random math inquiries (e.g. “how many days until X?”)
- known 8y ago"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
- Terretta 8y ago> Sunday, 29 June 1975, has gone down in computing history as the day on which Steve Wozniak first showed Steve Jobs a working prototype of the Apple 1, and as the first time that someone typed a character on the keyboard of a personal computer and it appeared on a screen. ... Said Wozniak, “You know I’m a prankster — I actually made up that date and just kept repeating it.” The actual event, as he can best recall, happened weeks or months later. I don't get it. How is citing a decades-old date weeks before the real date a "prank"?
- abcdcba 8y agoI think the "prank" is that now whenever someone cites that day he knows it's the wrong day. I find it kind of funny the cult of Mac has that day wrong.
- vxNsr 8y agoUgh, I hate "pranks" like that. I once met an Englishman, who assured me he was from South Africa, after talking with him for like 10 minutes, he starts cracking up... when I asked why he said "Because I'm actually English!!" ... hilarious.
- robocat 8y agoThis is a cultural thing. If you must spend time with British people (or some of the ex-colonies) you need to learn how to recognise (and protect yourself from) sarcasm and "jokes" (what you might see as lies and cruelty). When I was 21 in the US we played a mean game of seeing what we could make Americans believe - and we came up with some truly bizarre stuff. I think that English people do this as a proxy test of intelligence - it is a continuous competition. Maybe an English person can correct me?
- fredleblanc 8y agoI still see Siri in the “maybe someday” category. I don’t have Siri turned on, but my wife does. I hear her talking to it to mostly look up measurement conversions and such. An anecdote of my favorite Siri incident. One night a couple weeks ago, we had an abundance of dragonflies in our yard. I said that they were there because they are bugs and it was the right time of day for that. She thought dragonflies ate something else, so she asked Siri, “what do dragonflies eat?” Siri told us that we should consult a local zoologist before attempting to care for wild animals.
- ryanSrich 8y agoSiri is by far the worst voice assisted tech on the market, by a wide margin. Alexa is probably the best, she rarely can’t answer basic questions like the one you posed. Siri 9 out of 10 times cannot perform a task or answer a question when asked.
- Klathmon 8y agoHave you spent a lot of time with a Google Home? I've personally found when compared to Alex it tends to do a better job at "question" style things, when it doesn't randomly not understand something it just minutes ago understood just fine.
- gordon_freeman 8y agoI'd say Google Assistant on Google Home is best. I own both Echo and Home and found Home to be the best at recognizing the questions and answering to my satisfaction. For example, I ask: "How much time it will take to go to Fifth & Mission Parking Garage by Car" and Home says "in current traffic, it will take you X mins." whereas Alexa concedes defeat by saying she does not know the answer to that. It seems to me that 5-10 years in future, Google will have a terrific Assitant that understands quite complex questions and will be way more helpful with the answers.
- vlunkr 8y agoIt’s strange how inconsistent everyone’s experiences are with digital assistants. In my opinion they are all fine for basic things like unit conversions etc. and terrible with everything else.
- projectramo 8y agoI don’t know why I care so much about tech celebrity opinions but I do. I dont care about pop culture celebrities but I eat up Steve Jobs reminisce pieces and Wozniak opinions like candy even if the particular article is banal.
- jplayer01 8y agoWell, Jobs and Wozniak actually made an observable effect on the tech world, which by extension affects everybody through tech's ubiquity in modern life. Kanye makes decent music. I know who I'm going to listen to or read about.
- forkLding 8y agoTbh Jobs is more of a Michael Jackson, he started a wave. Both perfectionists and somewhat assholes in personal lives.
- sriram_sun 8y agoFTA: “I bought the first Samsung Gear watch. That’s the only tech product I’ve bought in all these decades that I sent back after one day. I couldn’t get anything out of it except the time.” Pure Woz! He says this at a Samsung event!
- mandeepj 8y agoPure PR disaster :-). I'll surprised if I ever see Woz again at any of the other Samsung events after this
- eloisant 8y agoI don't know, their latest smartwatch is so different than the first one that they might not care.
- jplayer01 8y agoTo be fair, it could be the first watch was garbage but he thinks the current one is much better.
- wallflower 8y agoSteve Wozniak's story of making the Apple ][ floppy disk is an absolute must read, if you have not yet enjoyed it. https://paleotronic.com/2018/05/19/steve-wozniak-talks-disk/ https://paleotronic.com/2018/05/19/steve-wozniak-talks-disk/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17101830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17101830 The story was included with many other Woz tales in jl's book "Founders at Work" http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
- bobbyy 8y agoLong but definitely interesting read.
- yitchelle 8y agoThe only thing we have used Siri for is for identification of song that we have heard over the radio, and also for the amusement of my kids on how to spell swear words.