4 ms·

This is a minor evolution on the voice capacity I have already been using on my Android for quite some time. Because all of this relies on technology in the clo

by drats 15y ago

This is a minor evolution on the voice capacity I have already been using on my Android for quite some time. Because all of this relies on technology in the cloud Google should have no problem leapfrogging this with weather, booking of flights, news, calendar etc. Also, any future "inter-agent" stuff will be totally broken on Apple, all of their stuff like iChat is a totally walled garden. For a small subset of people who are all on Apple with their friends all on Apple in some regions of the USA it will work great though. EDIT: For the down-voters I would just say I actually had a macbook for a few years. iChat is technologically impressive but has near zero value when you can't connect with people. Apple promised to make it widely inter-operative and failed to do so when I was using it. They almost had to be forced to give back contributions to Webkit and open it up fully. They run a closed ship more or less in everything they do, the Apple way or the highway. This voice feature is a thin UI on top of cloud services and interoperability, both of which areas where Google is light-years ahead of Apple (not to mention they have their own social network). Android is already crushing them in sales and Apple virtually doesn't exist outside the West + Japan, tens of millions of upper middle class Indians and Chinese will be using Android eventually. Apple doesn't stand a chance in the long run, which is why they are already resorting to patent suits against superior tablets like the galaxy. It's not a BMW vs a budget car, because 1s and 0s are free the budget car has the luxury seats and trimmings at no extra cost. They are toast.

joebadmo 15y ago
WHAT?? You mean Google copied Apple already? What next, notifications? [Ha-ha, just some good-natured ribbing, folks, please go easy with the downvotes.]
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
brador 15y ago
They really needed an iPhone 5 here. Every non-tech I know was waiting for it, now they're just confused. Would have been nice to make a big bang to break in the new guy. For Siri, how many of us will actually use it day to day in the office or commute? Personally, I was hoping for a new ipad 3 with retina. Would have been a nice gift for the kids pre-christmas. As it is, I'll be sticking with my iPhone 4 and ipad 1.
- guywithabike 15y ago
  What would an iPhone 5 be, though? Same new innards, different case? The iPhone 4 is a sharp looking piece of hardware. It's not like they need to throw it away just because a few tech nerds want different cases.
  - joebadmo 15y ago
    It's a matter of signaling/conspicuous consumption. People with brand new iPhones have no way of distinguishing themselves from people with the old model. It's also another way that Apple drives upgrades in the high end: by making the old model look old and dated. And it's a pretty old model. I agree with you that's a beautiful piece of hardware, and I think it looks better than any of the other models, and better than any of the 'teardrop' mockups. But it's already been in the market for, what, 16 months? If they don't have another refresh until next year, that's a pretty long time to have one chassis.
    - Terretta 15y ago
      > It's a matter of signaling/conspicuous consumption... it's already been in the market for, what, 16 months? Counterpoint: Movado Museum Watch[1]. Latest fashion goes out of style. Great design becomes timeless[2] because it's not "simply an adjective to place in front of a product’s name to somehow artificially enhance its value."[3] 1. http://www.amazon.com/Movado-606085-Museum-Black-Leather/dp/B001JJCPHW http://www.amazon.com/Movado-606085-Museum-Black-Leather/dp/... 2. http://garry.posterous.com/dieter-rams-his-first-braun-design-an-10-prin http://garry.posterous.com/dieter-rams-his-first-braun-desig... 3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8555503/Dieter-Rams-Apple-has-achieved-something-I-never-did.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8555503/Dieter-R...
      - joebadmo 15y ago
        I don't think it works that way with tech products, because an outdated smartphone is considerably less functional than a cutting-edge one. I.e. there's a functional aspect to the desire that goes beyond fashion, or maybe fuses the two. Or are you implying that it will ever be fashionable to use an technologically outdated phone because the design is nice? (I could see it in some tiny contrarian subset of the population, but not as a general phenomenon.)
brandonb 15y ago
The really unique thing about Siri is the flexible natural language processing. You can say "Meet with Doug for dinner today", and it'll parse out the person/date/subject, realize you didn't specify a time, and ask you "OK, what time would you like to meet him at?" It's just a much more forgiving interface, which makes it more approachable for the average user. It's actually a very hard technical problem to create software that not only parses the user's intention, but can intelligently prompt for follow-ups. Google has many of the individual pieces of technology, but making it all fit together, with a good interface, is still hard work that takes time. That's probably why it took Apple 1.5 years to go from the Siri acquisition to the announcement today.
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  Have you used Android voice recognition? It's pretty good in terms of recognition. It isn't so proactive as "Go to my calendar and make me money!" but it's quite an adequate little application.
  - bgramer 15y ago
    It isn't just voice recognition. It's also natural language processing. Apple just leapfrogged Google.
    - tensor 15y ago
      Google's service also does some natural language processing. You can ask it to "navigate to <restaurant>" and it will look up the restaurant address near you and start up google navigation to that address. In other cases, google's search engine does the NLP. You can ask "What is the time in Paris, France?" or "What is the weather in New York?" and it will give you the answer at the top with search results below. They are similar services, but Apple seems to have a greater variety of intents that it recognizes.
- dave1619 15y ago
  I agree. I think what Apple is releasing in Siri could be bigger than most of us realize. I have several android phones and don't use the voice recognition much because 1 out of every 4 or 5 tries it returns things I didn't mean. That's frustrating. The average user quits after a 20% failure rate. Siri on the iPhone 4s needs to be at 5% or less failure rate, meaning one of every 20 requests returns an error. But then again, if it returns an error at least the user can clarify and continue the conversation. I think Apple just leapfrogged Google in natural language processing and taking it to the masses.
jad 15y ago
> They are toast. Apple earns about 50% of the profit in mobile handsets, a share that is trending upwards.
- sek 15y ago
  They managed to make a mobile phone a status symbol, but that is more a branding achievement than a technical one. Today i saw a garbage collector (really) with an iPhone, and both of my parents have one. The status symbol fades when everyone has one. This number is just relevant for apples wallet, but what matters in the long term are market share and being technical superior. Nokia and RIM had also very neat numbers some years ago.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 15y ago
    "The status symbol fades when everyone has one." Exactly. Apple has not been a status symbol or part of the counter culture for YEARS.
    - Volpe 15y ago
      Yet their revenue and profit has been increasing... So even if you were correct, it clearly doesn't matter.
  - Kadrith 15y ago
    I have an Android phone, ATRIX specifically, yet I recommend an iPhone to any non-technical person I know looking for a phone. The main reason I do this is consistency. Android has come a long way, but iPhone still has a more consistent interface to include the applications. If they have questions any other iPhone owner is a potential support person. If they get some Android phone they either contact me, need to find someone else with the same phone or someone who is willing to learn the UI shell of a given vendor and where things are on that device. None of this has anything to do with status symbols. The last person I recommended an iPhone to was a retired police officer who wanted something to get information on but did not want to deal maintenance like a regular computer. After talking to him about the different approaches, including how iPhones prohibit you from doing things that are possible on Android, he was confused why he should care about not being able to do those things. He didn't want to validate permissions of applications when installing them, he just wanted them to not screw up his phone. He was more than happy to give up some freedoms that he may never have used in order for someone else to try and protect him from malicious apps or to have everything "just work." I can't see that ever going out of style with people that could care less about underlying technology.
jcampbell1 15y ago
I don't understand your point. Siri is going to fail because Apple is a walled-garden? That makes sense for iMessage, but none for Siri. Are you saying it is going to fail because it doesn't support all languages? Your edit ends with "They are toast". Seems like obvious flamebait, and is only going to attract more downvotes.
olivercameron 15y ago
Oh please, Apple isn't toast. Michael Dell said something similar, and look how that turned out. What good is market share when you are making no money because of it? Apple has it right, they're making way more money than all the other handset companies and are constantly voted #1 in handset satisfaction. What's so wrong with that? When Android return[1] rates[2] drop below 10%, then we'll talk. 1. http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/26/androids-dirty-secret-shipping-numbers-are-strong-but-returns-are-30-40/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/26/androids-dirty-secret-shipp... 2. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20030211-37.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20030211-37.html
- TallTalesOrTrue 15y ago
  How about windows phone then? Better UI than android more capabilities than iPhone. Comparable low return rates. Its another thing that People don't know about it because of Microsoft's poor image and marketing.
  - barista 15y ago
    No matter how well it is implemented, talking to your phone in public or even when somebody else around just sounds too geekily awkward.
    - mortenjorck 15y ago
      Haven't people been talking to phones in public since the StarTac? Siri's big selling point is that you talk to it in the same cadence as you would a human on the other end.
      - barista 15y ago
        Actually I don't think people have been talking to their phones (voice command) as much even though the feature has been available for the longest time. One reason could be that the feature was very poorly implemented. What these features lack is the context that we so readily assume when talking to a person. The reason at least I don't use voice commands is because I feel stupid doing it if the phone does not understand me in the first attempt. I haven't used Siri myself. I use windows phone and it has damn good voice menu system. But I still don't feel comfortable enough to use it.
siglesias 15y ago
Toast. I'm kind of shocked that the tenor of your remarks is to instantly pit Apple against Google and that the HN community has decided that it is the most insightful. Apple continues to achieve a level of quality in their products that most of us aspire to as entrepreneurs, and the tech world is better for it. The impulse to belittle them in light of an impressive achievement baffles me. Android and Siri. Android does well, yes, but Google's financial success has not yet been shown to be correlated with Android shipments (look at the stock performance over the last two years for evidence). In some interesting instances competitors (Baidu and Amazon) have gutted Android to be used against them. Every query that is performed on Siri is routed to services that are NOT search, which is where Google makes its money. Why Google would invest money in implementing mobile services that route computing away from the web is beyond me. It isn't in their interest. Joe Hewitt made this observation before too. So while yes, Google might be technically capable of adding voice assistant, it isn't clear how that leads to increased profits for them. Feature parity is the wrong way to think about the Apple Google relationship.
- barista 15y ago
  Agree. It beats me why Google has continued to pour so much money in Android with apparently no business plan to recover that. Apple has a completely different business model that lets them recover their investments. But with Androind being free, I don't understand why Google has any motive to do investments. Their shareholders and directors are going to ask this question at some point of time. It scares me that Google is looking more like the "New Microsoft" scared of everything that everyone does and trying to get their hands at everything.
  - mcantelon 15y ago
    >Apple continues to achieve a level of quality in their products that most of us aspire to as entrepreneurs, and the tech world is better for it. The impulse to belittle them in light of an impressive achievement baffles me. Many have a problem with what Apple because it's trying to normalizing sharecropping in the software development world. I have to give them a 30% cut if I want to sell software for their hardware. I have to pay them $99/year just to put applications I've written on my own hardware (effectively subscribing to use my own hardware). If I write an application they want to compete with they have the power to make my application unavailable on their device. If I write an application they somehow find distasteful or politically controversial they can make it disappear. Microsoft is following Apple's lead. Why would I want to support either of them instead of an alternative like Android?
micampe 15y ago
iChat is XMPP.
- semanticist 15y ago
  To expand on this: XMPP is the opposite of a walled-garden. I've used iChat with Google Talk, I've used it with an internal Jabber server, and the 'normal' iChat is AOL IM. Even the Bonjour chat is open - just XMPP with ZeroConf discovery. To say that iChat is 'totally walled garden' betrays a deep lack of understanding of the software being discussed.

by drats 15y ago

joebadmo 15y ago

WHAT?? You mean Google copied Apple already? What next, notifications? [Ha-ha, just some good-natured ribbing, folks, please go easy with the downvotes.]

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

brador 15y ago

They really needed an iPhone 5 here. Every non-tech I know was waiting for it, now they're just confused. Would have been nice to make a big bang to break in the new guy. For Siri, how many of us will actually use it day to day in the office or commute? Personally, I was hoping for a new ipad 3 with retina. Would have been a nice gift for the kids pre-christmas. As it is, I'll be sticking with my iPhone 4 and ipad 1.

guywithabike 15y ago
What would an iPhone 5 be, though? Same new innards, different case? The iPhone 4 is a sharp looking piece of hardware. It's not like they need to throw it away just because a few tech nerds want different cases.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  It's a matter of signaling/conspicuous consumption. People with brand new iPhones have no way of distinguishing themselves from people with the old model. It's also another way that Apple drives upgrades in the high end: by making the old model look old and dated. And it's a pretty old model. I agree with you that's a beautiful piece of hardware, and I think it looks better than any of the other models, and better than any of the 'teardrop' mockups. But it's already been in the market for, what, 16 months? If they don't have another refresh until next year, that's a pretty long time to have one chassis.
  - Terretta 15y ago
    > It's a matter of signaling/conspicuous consumption... it's already been in the market for, what, 16 months? Counterpoint: Movado Museum Watch[1]. Latest fashion goes out of style. Great design becomes timeless[2] because it's not "simply an adjective to place in front of a product’s name to somehow artificially enhance its value."[3] 1. http://www.amazon.com/Movado-606085-Museum-Black-Leather/dp/B001JJCPHW http://www.amazon.com/Movado-606085-Museum-Black-Leather/dp/... 2. http://garry.posterous.com/dieter-rams-his-first-braun-design-an-10-prin http://garry.posterous.com/dieter-rams-his-first-braun-desig... 3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8555503/Dieter-Rams-Apple-has-achieved-something-I-never-did.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8555503/Dieter-R...
    - joebadmo 15y ago
      I don't think it works that way with tech products, because an outdated smartphone is considerably less functional than a cutting-edge one. I.e. there's a functional aspect to the desire that goes beyond fashion, or maybe fuses the two. Or are you implying that it will ever be fashionable to use an technologically outdated phone because the design is nice? (I could see it in some tiny contrarian subset of the population, but not as a general phenomenon.)

brandonb 15y ago

The really unique thing about Siri is the flexible natural language processing. You can say "Meet with Doug for dinner today", and it'll parse out the person/date/subject, realize you didn't specify a time, and ask you "OK, what time would you like to meet him at?" It's just a much more forgiving interface, which makes it more approachable for the average user. It's actually a very hard technical problem to create software that not only parses the user's intention, but can intelligently prompt for follow-ups. Google has many of the individual pieces of technology, but making it all fit together, with a good interface, is still hard work that takes time. That's probably why it took Apple 1.5 years to go from the Siri acquisition to the announcement today.

cookiecaper 15y ago
Have you used Android voice recognition? It's pretty good in terms of recognition. It isn't so proactive as "Go to my calendar and make me money!" but it's quite an adequate little application.
- bgramer 15y ago
  It isn't just voice recognition. It's also natural language processing. Apple just leapfrogged Google.
  - tensor 15y ago
    Google's service also does some natural language processing. You can ask it to "navigate to <restaurant>" and it will look up the restaurant address near you and start up google navigation to that address. In other cases, google's search engine does the NLP. You can ask "What is the time in Paris, France?" or "What is the weather in New York?" and it will give you the answer at the top with search results below. They are similar services, but Apple seems to have a greater variety of intents that it recognizes.
dave1619 15y ago
I agree. I think what Apple is releasing in Siri could be bigger than most of us realize. I have several android phones and don't use the voice recognition much because 1 out of every 4 or 5 tries it returns things I didn't mean. That's frustrating. The average user quits after a 20% failure rate. Siri on the iPhone 4s needs to be at 5% or less failure rate, meaning one of every 20 requests returns an error. But then again, if it returns an error at least the user can clarify and continue the conversation. I think Apple just leapfrogged Google in natural language processing and taking it to the masses.

jad 15y ago

> They are toast. Apple earns about 50% of the profit in mobile handsets, a share that is trending upwards.

sek 15y ago
They managed to make a mobile phone a status symbol, but that is more a branding achievement than a technical one. Today i saw a garbage collector (really) with an iPhone, and both of my parents have one. The status symbol fades when everyone has one. This number is just relevant for apples wallet, but what matters in the long term are market share and being technical superior. Nokia and RIM had also very neat numbers some years ago.
- 2muchcoffeeman 15y ago
  "The status symbol fades when everyone has one." Exactly. Apple has not been a status symbol or part of the counter culture for YEARS.
  - Volpe 15y ago
    Yet their revenue and profit has been increasing... So even if you were correct, it clearly doesn't matter.
- Kadrith 15y ago
  I have an Android phone, ATRIX specifically, yet I recommend an iPhone to any non-technical person I know looking for a phone. The main reason I do this is consistency. Android has come a long way, but iPhone still has a more consistent interface to include the applications. If they have questions any other iPhone owner is a potential support person. If they get some Android phone they either contact me, need to find someone else with the same phone or someone who is willing to learn the UI shell of a given vendor and where things are on that device. None of this has anything to do with status symbols. The last person I recommended an iPhone to was a retired police officer who wanted something to get information on but did not want to deal maintenance like a regular computer. After talking to him about the different approaches, including how iPhones prohibit you from doing things that are possible on Android, he was confused why he should care about not being able to do those things. He didn't want to validate permissions of applications when installing them, he just wanted them to not screw up his phone. He was more than happy to give up some freedoms that he may never have used in order for someone else to try and protect him from malicious apps or to have everything "just work." I can't see that ever going out of style with people that could care less about underlying technology.

jcampbell1 15y ago

I don't understand your point. Siri is going to fail because Apple is a walled-garden? That makes sense for iMessage, but none for Siri. Are you saying it is going to fail because it doesn't support all languages? Your edit ends with "They are toast". Seems like obvious flamebait, and is only going to attract more downvotes.

olivercameron 15y ago

Oh please, Apple isn't toast. Michael Dell said something similar, and look how that turned out. What good is market share when you are making no money because of it? Apple has it right, they're making way more money than all the other handset companies and are constantly voted #1 in handset satisfaction. What's so wrong with that? When Android return[1] rates[2] drop below 10%, then we'll talk. 1. http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/26/androids-dirty-secret-shipping-numbers-are-strong-but-returns-are-30-40/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/26/androids-dirty-secret-shipp... 2. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20030211-37.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20030211-37.html

TallTalesOrTrue 15y ago
How about windows phone then? Better UI than android more capabilities than iPhone. Comparable low return rates. Its another thing that People don't know about it because of Microsoft's poor image and marketing.
- barista 15y ago
  No matter how well it is implemented, talking to your phone in public or even when somebody else around just sounds too geekily awkward.
  - mortenjorck 15y ago
    Haven't people been talking to phones in public since the StarTac? Siri's big selling point is that you talk to it in the same cadence as you would a human on the other end.
    - barista 15y ago
      Actually I don't think people have been talking to their phones (voice command) as much even though the feature has been available for the longest time. One reason could be that the feature was very poorly implemented. What these features lack is the context that we so readily assume when talking to a person. The reason at least I don't use voice commands is because I feel stupid doing it if the phone does not understand me in the first attempt. I haven't used Siri myself. I use windows phone and it has damn good voice menu system. But I still don't feel comfortable enough to use it.

siglesias 15y ago

Toast. I'm kind of shocked that the tenor of your remarks is to instantly pit Apple against Google and that the HN community has decided that it is the most insightful. Apple continues to achieve a level of quality in their products that most of us aspire to as entrepreneurs, and the tech world is better for it. The impulse to belittle them in light of an impressive achievement baffles me. Android and Siri. Android does well, yes, but Google's financial success has not yet been shown to be correlated with Android shipments (look at the stock performance over the last two years for evidence). In some interesting instances competitors (Baidu and Amazon) have gutted Android to be used against them. Every query that is performed on Siri is routed to services that are NOT search, which is where Google makes its money. Why Google would invest money in implementing mobile services that route computing away from the web is beyond me. It isn't in their interest. Joe Hewitt made this observation before too. So while yes, Google might be technically capable of adding voice assistant, it isn't clear how that leads to increased profits for them. Feature parity is the wrong way to think about the Apple Google relationship.

barista 15y ago
Agree. It beats me why Google has continued to pour so much money in Android with apparently no business plan to recover that. Apple has a completely different business model that lets them recover their investments. But with Androind being free, I don't understand why Google has any motive to do investments. Their shareholders and directors are going to ask this question at some point of time. It scares me that Google is looking more like the "New Microsoft" scared of everything that everyone does and trying to get their hands at everything.
- mcantelon 15y ago
  >Apple continues to achieve a level of quality in their products that most of us aspire to as entrepreneurs, and the tech world is better for it. The impulse to belittle them in light of an impressive achievement baffles me. Many have a problem with what Apple because it's trying to normalizing sharecropping in the software development world. I have to give them a 30% cut if I want to sell software for their hardware. I have to pay them $99/year just to put applications I've written on my own hardware (effectively subscribing to use my own hardware). If I write an application they want to compete with they have the power to make my application unavailable on their device. If I write an application they somehow find distasteful or politically controversial they can make it disappear. Microsoft is following Apple's lead. Why would I want to support either of them instead of an alternative like Android?

micampe 15y ago

iChat is XMPP.

semanticist 15y ago
To expand on this: XMPP is the opposite of a walled-garden. I've used iChat with Google Talk, I've used it with an internal Jabber server, and the 'normal' iChat is AOL IM. Even the Bonjour chat is open - just XMPP with ZeroConf discovery. To say that iChat is 'totally walled garden' betrays a deep lack of understanding of the software being discussed.