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John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team
- talko 8y agoShortcomings due to Apple's focus on privacy? Or shortcomings because they thought they knew what users would want to use Siri for, never expecting a) a competitor would release a product that b) went so far beyond in capabilities that Siri was designed to do... and now Apple is scrambling (still) to catch up.
- mjlee 8y agoHopefully this is a signal that Apple is going to take steps to improve Siri. If Apple can find a way to get the best of both worlds from data privacy and machine learning then it will have been well worth the wait.
- baxtr 8y agoI am really annoyed by Siri these days. I was so excited when they introduced it in 2011 (?). But I feel like there was almost no progress since then. It’s so painful to use Siri even for the simplest of tasks
- rufugee 8y agoTotally agree. On my first iOS device (XR) since the first Android device arrived. The speech recognition on Android is FAR better....it would get it right 99% of the time. Siri is so bad I've considered starting a Twitter feed of "sh Siri thinks I said..." Oddly, even speech to text with GBoard on the iPhone is noticeably worse than on Android as well.
- threatofrain 8y agoAfter so many years Siri still doesn’t do “take me to the nearest McDonald’s” like Google Assistant can. And whenever Siri isn’t “confident” it just launches Safari, but it’s often not even the best starting point, and Siri sometimes gives up silently without feedback. Also for a bit of fun, ask Siri for the population of Buffalo NY. I noticed because Siri also tells you that Buffalo is big, and then goes on to say...
- pen2l 8y agoThe worst part for me is it opens it in Safari and not Chrome. (As well that it opens directions with not-Google Maps)
- giobox 8y agoIsn’t it still the case that “third party” browsers on iOS are just wrappers around Safari/WebKit anyway? For the longest time Chrome on iOS was just using WebKit/safari’s UIWebView then later WKWebView for rendering webpages, much like many other iOS apps that display web content. For various reasons the App Store rules have always banned third party browser rendering engines, I haven’t heard any change in this policy recently? The only real advantage of Chrome on iOS was ancillary features like Google account bookmark/history sync etc if you are all in on Chrome elsewhere, which isn’t all that useful in the context of a link provided by Siri, for me at any rate. The feature that lets apps using WKWebView access your password/auto fill data only works with Safari on iOS as well, which is all the reason I need not to bother with the WebKit-wrapper rivals anyway. The maps issue is significantly more annoying to me.
- scarface74 8y agoI just tried “take me to the nearest McDonalds” and it replied “which local business, tap the one you want” with a list from nearest to farthest and when I click on it, it gives me directions to the one I choose. As far as the second question - yeah that one was weird. It said that the population was 69 but the text summary that it displayed was 269,000. It’s the only city that displayed that bug.
- wuliwong 8y agoi use siri to turn off and on hue lights (sometimes) and sometimes to set reminders. I do feel that since I dont have Siri on an "always on" speaker, it becomes less useful. I dislike the idea of having an "always on" speaker, so I'm not sure what to do. :)
- giobox 8y agoHow old is your iPhone? I don’t recall the first model to introduce it, but all iPhones now I believe have supported an “always on” hey Siri mode for a while, even if phone is in standby.
- saagarjha 8y agoIf it makes you feel better, the “always on” recordings never leave your device. They’re not even that great at recognizing anything other than “this sounds like a ‘hey Siri’”.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoFor a fun experiment, yell RED FIRE TRUCK into your phone then immediately activate Siri manually. With Hey Siri turned on, you will reliably get all three words. With it off, you will usually get Chuck or Truck, or sometimes FIRETRUCK depending on timing. This seems to be for people who start talking before the Siri prompt is fully active like “Set <button> Timer for 5 minutes”. But shows that Apple is typically pre-recording if not also pre-processing.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
- plufz 8y agoI don’t use Siri enough to have a personal opinion but read this article. Someone who tested 800 questions (on a HomePod not iPhone) and earlier this year got 52% correct responses and now got 74% right. From that it looks like it’s improving quite rapidly. See comparison Siri Alexa google and Cortana: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/20/siri-on-homepod-vs-alexa-google-cortana/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/20/siri-on-homepod-vs-alex...
- intopieces 8y ago>From that it looks like it’s improving quite rapidly. I fear the challenge will be one of perception. Speech is really a make-or-break first impression kind of technology, since speech is so personal. I'm afraid that Siri will need to become twice as better as the competition to regain the trust of users that it won't completely fail them, or even to just get them to retry it. I wonder if, in the future, there will be some sort of marketing push called "Siri 2.0" or maybe even regular "releases" (even though I'm sure it's not updated on that kind of cadence). Since the technology is all invisible, there's no way to tell that something has changed, unlike a traditional OS, which changes its appearance even slightly.
- baxtr 8y agoMaybe. I don’t have any comparison. And I haven’t used Siri for a long time. But I started again 1-2 weeks ago and I’m super annoyed because it’s such a pain.
- LgWoodenBadger 8y agoI would suggest trying Shortcuts, because Shortcuts are so phenominally easy to create, share, and modify that it blows my mind. It took me all of 3 minutes to create a Shortcut that lets me message my wife with my ETA at my house when I say "hey siri coming home" (or use the Siri activation in my car) and then "yes" when she asks for confirmation to send it. Takes my current location, finds the route to my house, grabs the time, and plops it into a custom message that I typed up that's sent to my wife's iPhone.
- saagarjha 8y agoShortcuts is not quite the same as Siri.
- rhinoceraptor 8y agoEspecially because the ecosystem that Siri can use is so nice, with homekit devices and shortcuts.
- codegoblins 8y agoHonestly voice control is a gimmick to me, I much prefer Apple to make exactly zero compromises on privacy and have Siri languish.
- winwares 8y agoI remain unimpressed with everyones "siri". Siri does what I need correctly 95% of the time. I want it to do way more, but no one else service does way more. These technologies are also surprisingly underutilized except for making funny youtube videos. Amazons devices probably get used more than anything else because there is no other interface. "AI" is more than siri. The photos recognition in Photos (kind of a dumb name for internet searching on fixes or features, right?) is very impressive and when it came out was far ahead. The creation of memories videos is a certain kind of algorithm logic that is impressive. Speech recognition is poor on almost every device. It will get better over time as we apply more brute force solutions and refinements.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y agoHis role: senior vice president of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
- paganel 8y agoWiki link on the guy for the lazy, as I had no idea who he was: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Giannandrea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Giannandrea
- landr0id 8y agoPretty short page but solid background.
- m0zg 8y agoIt's just unbelievable to me that the company sitting on a quarter trillion dollars is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that hoard to hire the best of the best in order to fix the very thing that will kill their cash cow in the next 5 years. I'm on iOS myself (and have been faithful since the first iPhone), but $30 Google Home puck feels like it's from the future. Understands me perfectly, comes up with decent answers, doesn't require rigid commands, etc. Whereas Siri is so bad I use it only to set alarms and timers. Not even setting of reminders is reliable.
- dboreham 8y agoUm...you know JG was formerly at Google doing all that magic you love and is now at Apple, right?
- m0zg 8y agoJG was _managing people_ doing the magic. There's a difference. By himself, he can't really do much. He's not even a ML/DL guy per se.
- geofft 8y agoMagic is about management. The most talented ICs can't do much unless management supports them in it. (And I say this as an IC.)
- m0zg 8y agoNot in research.
- Aloha 8y agoEven in Research. Xerox PARC is a great example - PARC invented everything, but very little of it was immediately commercially applicable - Good management, is what turns "people producing great things", to "people producing great things regular people can use"
- freewizard 8y agoSVP is probably a very important position in corporate AAPL, however, I will feel more excited for Apple if someone like Chris Lattner would join/return as chief AI/ML engineer.
- woolvalley 8y agoChris latner is probably at google because google pays him better.
- awa 8y agoI wonder at what point the pay becomes just a number. I am hoping people at Chris’s position are where they are because of the role, organization and the opportunity and not just because of money
- freyir 8y agoHis experience seems to be entirely focused on compilers. He's a talented engineer and leader, and his decision to join Google Brain indicates interest in AI, but wouldn't the chief AI/ML engineer have some demonstrable expertise in that particular field?
- julien_c 8y agoJeff Dean didn't have a demonstrable expertise in AI before heading Google AI.
- iainmerrick 8y agoYes he did -- He co-authored an influential deep learning paper in 2012: https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub40565 https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub40565 I think his contribution at that time was mainly clever ways to drastically scale up existing neural net techniques, but just scaling things up 100x or 1000x seems to be a large part of the magic of deep learning.
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- aphroz 8y agoApple is not an innovative company.They are a marketing company. What do marketing teams do when they have a lot of money ? They start removing stuff, remove the wires, remove the inputs/outputs and kill the company. Good bye Apple, even this guy can't save you. I won't miss you.
- iainmerrick 8y agoWhy does everybody else copy them, then? If it’s just clever marketing, you have to wonder why marketing is working so well compared to the innovation that other companies are presumably doing.
- huebomont 8y agoYou can't just will this to happen by saying it. The reality is very different. Either their brainwashing works so well that tons of consumers AND other companies buy into it and follow along, or maybe they're onto something.
- briandear 8y agoAre we trotting out that old trope again? Two words for you: Apple Watch. Nobody is even close to what they did with Watch and what they are doing with health. Look at the camera and photos app: on device ML. Look at the tech behind Memories for instance. They’re doing this without sending your photos to some privacy-invading server. Look at FaceId. Sure Samsung had facial recognition — but it could be fooled with a printed photo. Look at what Apple has done with AR. Their computational photography stuff is also incredible. But sure let’s lament the loss of a SCSI port and call it a marketing decision.
- aphroz 8y agoYes, I couldn't resist. I am sorry, but I have maybe seen 2-3 people wearing an Apple watch and never heard about Memories. Apple watch (and Siri) might be a thing in the US but definitely not in Europe or Asia. I feel like Apple have only 2 successful products: Iphone and Macbook. Their biggest success however is creating a cult and closing personal computer hardware (remember IBM/compatible).
- skizm 8y agoLots of comments about improving Siri here. This is interesting to me for several reasons I won't address, but I will ask this: Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything? From a purely functional standpoint, they seem super awkward to me. I like buttons that click and reassure me of every input. I like to feel confident my actions won't be misinterpreted. I like that no one else near me will get weirded out or annoyed when I'm having trouble interfacing with whatever app I'm currently using. The only reason I can envision using voice controls for anything is in the car while driving, and you would only begrudgingly use them because it is overwhelmingly safer to have both hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road. Apart from not enjoying voice controls from a functional point of view, is no one else creeped out at always on mics and video cameras in their house? In this era of super crappy security, especially with consumer grade stuff, there's a not insignificant chance your stuff is currently being hacked by one or more non-government bad actors (I already assume the US government, and probably a few other governments, already have 24/7 access to every mic and camera that is connected to the web in any way). I've been assuming voice commands will die out and that this Alexa / Siri hype (hype might not be the right word. buzz? rumblings?) was a result of Amazon and Apple pushing them from a marketing perspective. The amount of comments about Siri in a thread about a random exec being added to Apple is making me re-consider that PoV.
- Fnoord 8y ago> Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything? A friend of my partner uses voice commands for everything on her iPhone. She is almost blind on one eye, and has terrible eye sight with the other eye (albino trait).
- euos 8y agoVoice commands are the future . “Turn off kids bedroom” “remind me about ... later today”, “call wife”, “set timer for 3 minutes” - it is so much faster then fumbling through the UI
- huebomont 8y agoThey're very useful for very limited things - "Set a timer for 30 minutes" or "Wake me up at 8am" is easier than doing that yourself. Even dictating a short text in a pinch is nice. Think "in the kitchen" with wet or dirty hands.
- rglover 8y agoFor all the folks lamenting Siri: that was likely just the prototype. I'd bet good money that Apple is working on something far better than a personal assistant for the home—that's just how they got their feet wet while staying competitive. Siri is going to be a robot in your home one day—not just a bubble on the credenza. In order for that to happen, their best talent needs to be focused on that.
- fuckthecops 8y agoReading the dumb things people in this thread go to the effort of making a voice controls for simply for the sake of using voice controls perfectly summarizes how useless voice control tech is. You're literally saving seconds of effort in order to open up yourself to an infinite amount of attack vectors. You deserve to be pwned.
- fuckthecops 8y agoAlso the "Apple is gonna make voice control mainstream!" arguement in 2017+1 is hilarious. Apple has failed every new tech endeavor since the iPhone. The tablet, the smart watch, the touch bar, the ear pods, forcing usb3- everything has been a failure.
- ClassyJacket 8y agoWas this sarcasm? Their tablet, watches and Airpods are all very well received and successful. I have the Watch and AirPods and they're great. As for USB, I assume you mean USB-C, what would you prefer? Another proprietary connector?
- jeffrallen 8y agoJG is a smart and nice guy. Congrats.
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