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I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into the net. Apple is good at a lot of things

I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into the net. Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI. Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous compute happens - which is likely in Azure.

chipotle_coyote 4y ago
Siri isn't a language model, AFAIK. I'm sure it's using machine learning on the back end, but it's doing something very different. The thing is, a voice assistant needs to actually perform Natural Language Understanding -- it has to understand the intent of what's being said to it. That's actually a very different AI problem than what LLMs are doing at this point. Samsung's Bixby -- yes, the one everyone turns off -- can handle a "conversation" like this: (This is run using the "Space Resorts" sample capsule, a fictitious hotel booking system) --- User: Show me hotels near Mars Bixby: I found these space resorts on Mars. (Shows two, “Martian Oasis” and “Space Y”) User: [taps Martian Oasis] make a reservation for Christmas week Bixby: Which habitat pod would you like? (Shows two) User: Honeymoon Bixby: Are you sure you want to book this trip? (Shows the hotel, “Number of astronauts: 2”, and the dates for Christmas week) User: change the astronauts to 4 Bixby: (Shows the sam confirmation screen, with the number changed) User: Yes Bixby: I hope you have a great time at Martian Oasis. (Shows booking info) --- Now, in some ways this is no great shakes, but I don't think "all [Apple] needs to do is integrate some OpenAI APIs," because they don't have an API for NLU and deriving intent. GPT4 et. al. aren't currently designed for this kind of problem space. You could use them to make Siri (and Bixby and Alexa) better at answering general questions, but you can't use them to make the voice assistant do something, just respond to something. Bixby 2 (the current version) is, incidentally, what came out of Viv, the voice AI startup that the Siri folks made after they left Apple.

chipotle_coyote 4y ago

Siri isn't a language model, AFAIK. I'm sure it's using machine learning on the back end, but it's doing something very different. The thing is, a voice assistant needs to actually perform Natural Language Understanding -- it has to understand the intent of what's being said to it. That's actually a very different AI problem than what LLMs are doing at this point. Samsung's Bixby -- yes, the one everyone turns off -- can handle a "conversation" like this: (This is run using the "Space Resorts" sample capsule, a fictitious hotel booking system) --- User: Show me hotels near Mars Bixby: I found these space resorts on Mars. (Shows two, “Martian Oasis” and “Space Y”) User: [taps Martian Oasis] make a reservation for Christmas week Bixby: Which habitat pod would you like? (Shows two) User: Honeymoon Bixby: Are you sure you want to book this trip? (Shows the hotel, “Number of astronauts: 2”, and the dates for Christmas week) User: change the astronauts to 4 Bixby: (Shows the sam confirmation screen, with the number changed) User: Yes Bixby: I hope you have a great time at Martian Oasis. (Shows booking info) --- Now, in some ways this is no great shakes, but I don't think "all [Apple] needs to do is integrate some OpenAI APIs," because they don't have an API for NLU and deriving intent. GPT4 et. al. aren't currently designed for this kind of problem space. You could use them to make Siri (and Bixby and Alexa) better at answering general questions, but you can't use them to make the voice assistant do something, just respond to something. Bixby 2 (the current version) is, incidentally, what came out of Viv, the voice AI startup that the Siri folks made after they left Apple.