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Siri in practice
- X-Istence 15y agoIf you set up the phonetic first and last name, Siri will pick up on them the next time your data is shipped off to Apple (yes, your data exists in the cloud when using Siri), also, I have set nicknames for certain friends, and saying "Call <nickname>" works exactly as one would expect. This is a killer feature, I have nicknamed my dad, my step-mom, and various other people so that Siri knows to call my Dad when I ask it to. I've already gotten better at asking Siri questions, yes it may seem unnatural at first, but overall the benefit I gain from using a little less natural language is enough for me. I've had my new iPhone 4S for all of one day now, and it remains to be seen if I will continue to use Siri, but this morning when I woke up and couldn't find my glasses I was still able to find out what my boss texted me about, send him a reply and all of this using my voice. That is fantastic and I absolutely love it.
- antirez 15y agoIt is all a matter of how useful it is already. If it is already much better than using the normal touch interface in many cases, the technology will evolve a lot in some way. There will be more users willing to pay for it, more competitors, and so forth. I really hope for this to happen. On the other hand, if it is not good enough to be an improvement over the normal touch interface it will likely not be very used if not to show it to your friends for the first months. Next phone you buy you'll not care if it has or not that feature (unless somebody else or newer iPhones will be able to improve it a lot), and the technology will hardly evolve. I don't still know as I don't have an iPhone 4s, and stories I read still can't tell me if it is going to be used a lot or not. Also in the specific case of Italian, I guess the at least the recognition can be near perfect as Italian is a lot simpler than English to turn into text (probably simpler than any other language given that things are spoken exactly as they are read). But then the interpretation I guess will pose very similar problems, with the disadvantage of not being a mainstream language.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- swombat 15y agoIf it is already much better than using the normal touch interface in many cases, the technology will evolve a lot in some way. There will be more users willing to pay for it, more competitors, and so forth. I really hope for this to happen. That is the case (at least as far as I'm concerned, as a happy iPhone 4S user. The use cases are still fairly limited, but for those use cases it works very well, much better than the touch interface.
- Sakes 15y agoSiri is saving me from a lot of typing while driving.
- alexholehouse 15y agoHaving now actually used it, I've got to say it's pretty impressive, especially for location based searches ("Where's the best steak in town?" got me a load of steak restaurants, whether or not their the best is probably another matter, but I was impressed none the less). Tell it, "I love you Siri". The response made me smile.
- swombat 15y agoTo me, the main shortcomings, at the moment, as a UK customer, are the male voice (seriously... I want the nicer american female voice... it subconsciously annoys me to think of "Siri" as a British male) and, perhaps more importantly, the fact that Siri won't connect to Yell/GMaps/etc in the UK yet, so I can't emerge out of the tube and ask "How do I get to 123 Some Street?" and be presented with a map. I'm not quite sure why that doesn't work in the UK - surely, the interfaces to Google Maps and even Yell don't differ by country. Despite those, it is already very useful. I'm using the timer all the time ("Set a timer for 3 minutes", "Wake me up in 20 minutes", "Wake me up at 7am tomorrow"), and the weather ("What's the weather like tomorrow?"), and using it to set meetings ("Add event 'drinks with Enrico' at 6pm on Friday"). The real killer, imho, will be the integration with services. The voice recognition seems good enough, the "parsing what you mean" could be improved but is good enough. What makes or breaks Siri is the integration with services. The timer/reminders/calendar integration is extremely smooth and so it is great and a huge help. Bits that aren't integrated (e.g. Twitter) or less well integrated (e.g. sending SMS's), less so. All in all, a great start, and useful from day one, though, like all new Apple products, there's plenty of room for improvement. I'm waiting to see where they take it - unlike some other companies, Apple do have a reputation for relentlessly pushing forward after releasing an initial, "it doesn't do much but it does it well" device.
- Lewisham 15y agoDo you know if you can set the British English of Siri independent of the phone language? As a Brit in the US, my Android phone doesn't understand anything I say unless I say it in a so-bad-its-almost-xenophobic American accent. Same with my car. YouTube videos indicate that Siri does understand British accents, but if I have to set the phone language to full on British, that would be a bit annoying (sadly, it is now tires, color, favorite and temperatures in Farenheit for me).
- nirvana 15y agoYes. The Siri Settings screen has a language choice that is Siri specific. I'm pretty certain that Siri, like most open ended recognition systems has separate recognizers for various accents, and of course, languages. (Though Apple has apparently set Siri's responding voice using the same control, they probably should have made them separate settings.) http://techbend.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-siri-look-like-screenshot-video-apple-release/ http://techbend.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-siri-look-like-scre... You can also turn off voice feedback if the British Male voice annoys you as well.
- klinquist 15y agoIt's most valuable feature is the novelness of it - it is likely being used by over a million people right now. I assume that Apple is tracking result click-throughs to guess when Siri is providing (or actually, not providing) the right answer to your query. This should mean it'll become exponentially better over time.
- ramchip 15y agoI'd expect it to be more like a logarithmic increase than an exponential one. The asymptote is the point where you reach perfect integration or fine tuning of the algorithm, at which point extra feedback stops being useful. Or perhaps I'm just taking "exponentially" too literally...
- CamperBob 15y agoHow does exponential growth differ from logarithmic growth? An exponent is a logarithm, no...?
- xxbondsxx 15y agoWoof! Someone's been out of high school for too long :P exp(x) takes e (the constant) and raises it to the x power. Log(x) finds the power to raise the base (usually 10 but sometimes e) to produce x. They are essentially inverses of each other. Log(exp(x)) = x; Graphically they are quite different: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=exp%28x%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=exp%28x%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ln%28x%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ln%28x%29
- woof 15y agoYou called?
- CamperBob 15y agoSure, but that's just a matter of how the terminology is used. Setting aside natural logs for a moment, consider that log10(1000) is 3, where 3 is simultaneously the "exponent" to which 10 must be raised to equal 1000, and the "logarithm," in the sense that it's the result of the log10 function, as might be found by looking in a table of logarithms.
- Groxx 15y agoFor things like names, has anyone tried using the "Phonetic First/Last Name" field in their address book? I suspect it's there for reasons like this.
- kalleboo 15y agoThe phonetic field is for Japanese names (at least, that's what Android phones do), where it's impossible to intelligently sort by the kanji name, so you have to enter a kana name as well.
- X-Istence 15y agoSet a nickname, that works from my testing.
- Someone 15y agoI cannot check this, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard#vCard_extensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard#vCard_extensions seems to indicate that is for alternative Japanese spellings, not for truely phonetic entries. If it is for phonetic entries, I would expect that one would have to use the international phonetic alphabet for entries there.
- kjhealy 15y agoI did try it, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. I might need to test it out more, though.
- woj 15y agoI noticed the new address book has entries for phonetic first/last names (use the Add Field). I assume those are used by Siri (just like the Related People fields) and would solve your name problem.
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- chugger 15y agoSiri is a game changer. Wait for siri-enabled apps in the future.
- chugger 15y ago"I want to watch Hot Tub Time Machine on Netflix" "Send 3 dozen roses to my wife tomorrow" "I want two large pizza delivered to my house"
- nirvana 15y agoWe've been down this road before with both the Newton and the Palm Pilot. The Palm couldn't properly recognize text at all, and so its users learned a custom form of hieroglyphics in order to use it. The newton had some trouble with particular letters in particular handwriting --where really the letter isn't properly formed at all, but humans are able to get it with more context than the recognizer. A slight change, like better writing, resolved the issue. So, users will adjust to Siri some. At the same time, whenever Apple introduces a new technology, it is always lacking in some area. Apple limits the breadth and polishes what it does ship to as high a degree as they possibly can... and then extends it over time. Siri doesn't work in all languages or all places right now. Apple's always extending, and unless the initial version is so useless that it has no adoption, over time Siri will get better and we'll adjust. The real question is, whether Siri is useful enough now to use regularly... or if it will be a passing fad, soon forgotten.
- chugger 15y agoI just tried this. "I want you to call me Gorgeous" and from that point on Siri calls me Gorgeous! haha "Ok Gorgeous what do you want to do!" :D
- wrs 15y agoThe hype around Siri as a "personal assistant" and the carefully-crafted ads that show it working in an ideal context remind me a lot of the hype around Newton, which caused a backlash when it turned out to be just a computer after all. The problem is deeper than recognizing what you said or wrote. Newton's "intelligent assistant" had the same sorts of trouble with meaning, like having to use literal text from your data ("When is Dentist?" vs. "When is my dental appointment?") Apparently while computers are better at determining what words you said than they were in 1992, there hasn't been a ton of improvement in understanding what you said, even at this apparently simple level.
- ugh 15y agoHm, if there is a backslash it hasn’t started yet. I have seen nothing but an outpouring of love for Siri around the web. I don’t even think the examples in the ads are very carefully crafted. They are all pretty simple, stuff that nearly always works and where there is not much potential for confusion. Creating reminders, calendar entries, checking the weather or writing text messages is something Siri seems to get right nearly all of the time. Only when people start to push beyond that will they see the limits and because of all of the fun you can have with Siri I don’t think it matters much.
- Tycho 15y agoOne thing I'll say for Siri: a few months ago I had an idea for a dictaphone device with a calendar function and voice recognition. As we know voice recognition is notoriously unreliable, but I figured it could be heavily optimized for the lingual subset necessary for setting appointments/reminders. I think that would be extremely useful to people with bad memories (eg. many elderly people), or lots to keep track of. Everyone I mentioned this to thought it was a great idea. Looks like Siri does precisely that.
- mikeryan 15y agoMy biggest issue is that my wife's name is "April" every time I say something like "call April" or "text April" it try's to set a reminder for April 1st.
- mattparcher 15y agoIf you haven’t done so already, I wonder if specifying "my wife is [so and so]," as you can for any relationship, would help Siri understand your query?
- snprbob86 15y agoYou can say "April is my Wife" and hopefully that will record the relationship. If that doesn't work, go to your contacts and edit your own contact info and add her as your spouse. Then you can say "call my wife" & that should work.
- zerostar07 15y agotoday i learned that windows seven can do speech recognition. I wrote this comment with it but it took me five minutes.
- paul9290 15y agoI've been using Siri as a utility and for entertainment for the past 48 hours. It's incredibly useful especially when driving. I've plugged my iphone into my car stereo and have been using Siri to get directions, recommendations, play music and to compose messages. I'm able to get work done now while driving and Im doing so safely. The success rate that she understands me (im not speaking into a ear/mic piece rather it's speaker phone like) is about 80%. The only thing I have found to be a learning curve and source of frustration is composing messages. You really need to think of exactly what you want to say before speaking it. Also, you need to speak proper punctuation at the end of each sentence, like "Do you want to get food <question mark>" "We can meet at Applebees <period>". This learning curve may turn some people off, though maybe others won't face a similar challenge? Either way I have found Siri to be enjoyably useful!
- foobarbazetc 15y agoUnfortunately, the English (Australia) recognition is infuriatingly bad. It works okay (75%) for built in commands, but anything to do with transcription (messages etc) is about 50/50. And that's really not good enough for a shipping product.
- alastairpat 15y agoJust curious - does it recognise 'full stop' instead of 'period'? It's very unfortunate that it doesn't transcribe Australian English that well - do you have a particularly broad accent, if you don't mind me asking?