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What a blindingly ignorant rant. A couple breathless prognostications that really annoyed me: "If A.I. knows about insurance, will you ever google for it?" Uh,

What a blindingly ignorant rant. A couple breathless prognostications that really annoyed me: "If A.I. knows about insurance, will you ever google for it?" Uh, all the "A.I." is doing is googling it. So basically Siri will use speech-to-text (which I've had on my Android phone for years) and put it in the google search box for me. Then it will read the first result. Zippity-doo-da. "We will teach it how to use Excel." Can you possibly imagine trying to tell a speech recognition system to input into a spreadsheet? Quite a step backwards, if you ask me. Look, the interpretation of language into meaning and then into commands has been around for a while, and it's been constantly improving. Siri is another product in that crowded market. It's really swell that they included it in iOS; like I said, I've had it on my Droid for two-plus years and it's pretty handy. This is the worst kind of blind Apple fanboy-ism. They are a good company that makes some great products. Stop it with the hyperbole simply because you want to justify your new phone purchase to your wife before you're off-contract.

yalimgerger 15y ago
No, no and god no. Siri is not voice recognition. It is not even in the same universe as the voice control in Android. And yes of course A.I. will use one or more search engines to look information up. But Google might not necessarily be one of them and consumers will not care two cents as long A.I. gets the job done. My point it that A.I. will fly over Google's moat unless it is Google's A.I.
- baggachipz 15y ago
  Then, please, tell me what Siri is besides the combination of voice recognition and a smart search engine? Because I don't see anything else.
  - yalimgerger 15y ago
    It can work without special commands and gets context of a conversation.
    - Tichy 15y ago
      So does Google, I am pretty sure it remembers your previous searches and knows therefore that if you are searching for "Paris" you mean the city and not "Paris Hilton" (or vice versa).
  - baggachipz 15y ago
    Kind of like how I just typed "When is thanksgiving day?" and Google told me the date. It understood my question and gave me the answer. How does Siri differ?
    - Game_Ender 15y ago
      Try "will it rain tomorrow", or "should I wear a coat tomorrow"? Siri is an answer engine that tries to determine the meaning of your query and answer it. Google in recent years has started to add those capabilities to it's search interface, but it is not there yet. Siri is much more like Wolfram Alpha or IBM's Watson then a standard search engine.
      - Tichy 15y ago
        Bullshit - Siri has some special loops for recognizing questions about date, location and the weather. That's it. It really is not more advanced than "call xyz", except it not only uses the address book, but also the calendar and the weather service.
      - jonknee 15y ago
        ... Siri is a front-end to Wolfram Alpha and other data providers. It roughly identifies what you're looking for and forwards it along to the best data provider. Google has the advantage of being one of those data providers. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apples_siri_teams_up_with_wolfram_alpha.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apples_siri_teams_up_wi... > As Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus once told us, Siri really is the "mother of all mashups."
alexholehouse 15y ago
While I agree with you in principle, I feel like the conceptual use cases you're imagining implement current practices with basically a speech to text. What the author is suggesting is that it would be beyond this, skipping out the step where you determine how you do something, but instead telling Siri what you want to do. For example, with excel I'm not sure he envisaged something like "A5 is 20, A6 is 30" and so on, but more like, "Take my taxes from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet". That said, irrespective of any kind of AI revolution Siri may (or as I suspect) may not induce, I feel like predicting it's impact before we've even had the chance to test it out in any kind of capacity (OK the 4S has been on sale for two hours, but you know what I mean) is somewhat short sighted.
- baggachipz 15y ago
  Ahh, but the devil is in the details. In the given example, "Take my taxes from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet", it sounds really nice. However, consider this: Anything that you can't tell a person to do, you won't be able to tell this system to do. If you task a person with "taking your taxes and putting them into a spreadsheet", they're going to ask, "how?" "What's the purpose?" "What do you want the spreadsheet to look like?" "Do you want everything from your taxes on one sheet?" The list goes on and on. So, while the idea seems really nice, the idea that this or any A.I. implementation will be the kind of insane revolution the OP is predicting is laughable.
- Tichy 15y ago
  Except Siri doesn't do anything of the kind. It would be trivial to build "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet" into Siri (or indeed any speech recognition engine). But that would only be one more special case. The code is literally "if (recognizedText == "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet"){writeExcelSheet(parsePDFTable("taxes.pdf"))} That's nice, but it is not AI.
  - alexholehouse 15y ago
    Sure, and I'm not for one second Siri could do that, but a) I was under the impression Siri was doing some kind of semantic analysis rather than straight text recognition? b) I just meant if we suspended disbelief and Siri was this magical AI tool it would do something like that, my second point is just that because we don't know what Siri can/will do it seems ridiculous to say it's going to change the world. I totally agree with you, I'm just saying there are almost two separate discussions here, one being Siri and it's implementation, the other being the impact of AI on our lives. If Siri was the new AI, then these would be the same discussion, but as I don't think it is, it's not.
mhashim 15y ago
Yaaa....I think this flew over your head. You are saying that, for example, Wolfram Alpha is like Google. They are completely different: One gives you links that you still have to go through to reach what you need and one gives you a direct answer. Even Woz said in his interview on TC...we don't need search engines, we need answer engines. To say Siri is a search engine with voice to text is a great mistake. Voice recognition is just the outer layer that makes the experience a human experience. I don't take the words of the author as a prophecy but I see where he is going; and isn't that what science fiction authors kinda did 20-30 years ago? They dreamt; and I wish more people can dream of greater possibilities.
- baggachipz 15y ago
  And I think that my post flew over your head. Wolfram Alpha and Google are different, sure, but at the end of the day they're simply algorithms that take requests, process the data to find the best answers they know how, and return results. That's it. To call those, Siri, or anything else more than that is intellectually dishonest. Siri might be a great interface, and I bet it's really handy to be integrated into applications. I'm not hating on the concept or the product; it just annoys the hell out of me when people pretend it's something it's not. It shows a lack of understanding about how these things work. Remember the hype about the Segway? "Walking is obsolete!" some people proclaimed. It turns out people didn't end up liking it because it made them look like lazy idiots. Do you really envision having a conversation with your phone, saying things like "I feel like Italian food today"? I don't. If I feel like Italian food, I'm going to ask my handy device where I can get some. And my phone does that without the "magic" of Siri.
  - suivix 15y ago
    The biggest problem with the Segway is that you look like a total dork using it. Do people on motorcycles look like lazy idiots? You totally missed the reason why it failed.
    - nasmorn 15y ago
      Motorcycles tend to kill a nice proportion of its users so lazy is not the first association really. So it is: Too young or reckless to use a car. With segways its more like: Too lazy to get on a bicycle.
baggachipz 15y ago
I love how I'm being downvoted to oblivion when nobody is able to produce a single example of what Siri does that other products don't. That's my entire argument, that the technology already exists and is not some major revolution. I guess no place is impervious to Apple fanboyism, even HN.

yalimgerger 15y ago

No, no and god no. Siri is not voice recognition. It is not even in the same universe as the voice control in Android. And yes of course A.I. will use one or more search engines to look information up. But Google might not necessarily be one of them and consumers will not care two cents as long A.I. gets the job done. My point it that A.I. will fly over Google's moat unless it is Google's A.I.

baggachipz 15y ago
Then, please, tell me what Siri is besides the combination of voice recognition and a smart search engine? Because I don't see anything else.
- yalimgerger 15y ago
  It can work without special commands and gets context of a conversation.
  - Tichy 15y ago
    So does Google, I am pretty sure it remembers your previous searches and knows therefore that if you are searching for "Paris" you mean the city and not "Paris Hilton" (or vice versa).
- baggachipz 15y ago
  Kind of like how I just typed "When is thanksgiving day?" and Google told me the date. It understood my question and gave me the answer. How does Siri differ?
  - Game_Ender 15y ago
    Try "will it rain tomorrow", or "should I wear a coat tomorrow"? Siri is an answer engine that tries to determine the meaning of your query and answer it. Google in recent years has started to add those capabilities to it's search interface, but it is not there yet. Siri is much more like Wolfram Alpha or IBM's Watson then a standard search engine.
    - Tichy 15y ago
      Bullshit - Siri has some special loops for recognizing questions about date, location and the weather. That's it. It really is not more advanced than "call xyz", except it not only uses the address book, but also the calendar and the weather service.
    - jonknee 15y ago
      ... Siri is a front-end to Wolfram Alpha and other data providers. It roughly identifies what you're looking for and forwards it along to the best data provider. Google has the advantage of being one of those data providers. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apples_siri_teams_up_with_wolfram_alpha.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apples_siri_teams_up_wi... > As Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus once told us, Siri really is the "mother of all mashups."

alexholehouse 15y ago

While I agree with you in principle, I feel like the conceptual use cases you're imagining implement current practices with basically a speech to text. What the author is suggesting is that it would be beyond this, skipping out the step where you determine how you do something, but instead telling Siri what you want to do. For example, with excel I'm not sure he envisaged something like "A5 is 20, A6 is 30" and so on, but more like, "Take my taxes from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet". That said, irrespective of any kind of AI revolution Siri may (or as I suspect) may not induce, I feel like predicting it's impact before we've even had the chance to test it out in any kind of capacity (OK the 4S has been on sale for two hours, but you know what I mean) is somewhat short sighted.

baggachipz 15y ago
Ahh, but the devil is in the details. In the given example, "Take my taxes from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet", it sounds really nice. However, consider this: Anything that you can't tell a person to do, you won't be able to tell this system to do. If you task a person with "taking your taxes and putting them into a spreadsheet", they're going to ask, "how?" "What's the purpose?" "What do you want the spreadsheet to look like?" "Do you want everything from your taxes on one sheet?" The list goes on and on. So, while the idea seems really nice, the idea that this or any A.I. implementation will be the kind of insane revolution the OP is predicting is laughable.
Tichy 15y ago
Except Siri doesn't do anything of the kind. It would be trivial to build "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet" into Siri (or indeed any speech recognition engine). But that would only be one more special case. The code is literally "if (recognizedText == "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet"){writeExcelSheet(parsePDFTable("taxes.pdf"))} That's nice, but it is not AI.
- alexholehouse 15y ago
  Sure, and I'm not for one second Siri could do that, but a) I was under the impression Siri was doing some kind of semantic analysis rather than straight text recognition? b) I just meant if we suspended disbelief and Siri was this magical AI tool it would do something like that, my second point is just that because we don't know what Siri can/will do it seems ridiculous to say it's going to change the world. I totally agree with you, I'm just saying there are almost two separate discussions here, one being Siri and it's implementation, the other being the impact of AI on our lives. If Siri was the new AI, then these would be the same discussion, but as I don't think it is, it's not.

mhashim 15y ago

Yaaa....I think this flew over your head. You are saying that, for example, Wolfram Alpha is like Google. They are completely different: One gives you links that you still have to go through to reach what you need and one gives you a direct answer. Even Woz said in his interview on TC...we don't need search engines, we need answer engines. To say Siri is a search engine with voice to text is a great mistake. Voice recognition is just the outer layer that makes the experience a human experience. I don't take the words of the author as a prophecy but I see where he is going; and isn't that what science fiction authors kinda did 20-30 years ago? They dreamt; and I wish more people can dream of greater possibilities.

baggachipz 15y ago
And I think that my post flew over your head. Wolfram Alpha and Google are different, sure, but at the end of the day they're simply algorithms that take requests, process the data to find the best answers they know how, and return results. That's it. To call those, Siri, or anything else more than that is intellectually dishonest. Siri might be a great interface, and I bet it's really handy to be integrated into applications. I'm not hating on the concept or the product; it just annoys the hell out of me when people pretend it's something it's not. It shows a lack of understanding about how these things work. Remember the hype about the Segway? "Walking is obsolete!" some people proclaimed. It turns out people didn't end up liking it because it made them look like lazy idiots. Do you really envision having a conversation with your phone, saying things like "I feel like Italian food today"? I don't. If I feel like Italian food, I'm going to ask my handy device where I can get some. And my phone does that without the "magic" of Siri.
- suivix 15y ago
  The biggest problem with the Segway is that you look like a total dork using it. Do people on motorcycles look like lazy idiots? You totally missed the reason why it failed.
  - nasmorn 15y ago
    Motorcycles tend to kill a nice proportion of its users so lazy is not the first association really. So it is: Too young or reckless to use a car. With segways its more like: Too lazy to get on a bicycle.

baggachipz 15y ago

I love how I'm being downvoted to oblivion when nobody is able to produce a single example of what Siri does that other products don't. That's my entire argument, that the technology already exists and is not some major revolution. I guess no place is impervious to Apple fanboyism, even HN.