8 ms·

How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

377 points by k-mcgrady 12y ago

joering2 12y ago
This story should be an inspiration for the 21-st century version of the "Little Prince" st. Expury.
- ilyaeck77 12y ago
  The Little Prince was about friendship between creatures that need each other. That's actually one of the main ideas of the book: we need each other. From my experience developing a Robin (a product not unlike Siri), I can tell you: yes, some users really adopt the machine as a pet to an extreme degree, but I don't envy these people.
tormeh 12y ago
Holy shit, we live in the future!
- iLoch 12y ago
  I was at work today and decided to buy the new Halo game that comes out in three weeks. Paid in two taps, and was notified that my Xbox at home would be turned on immediately and the game would begin to download. Sure enough I got home and all 65GB had been downloaded. I paid for a game that will be released in the future and it got to my house before I did. What?
  - ntumlin 12y ago
    It amazes me that the new Halo game is 65 GB.
    - quotient 12y ago
      As with most applications, it could be a lot smaller. But storage is so cheap and abundant that size is no longer really a constraint. Consequently, engineering for size is no longer a priority.
      - aroch 12y ago
        4 games would use up the "fair" and "more than enough" bandwidth cap my ISP set :-/ It's either OK internet with caps or vDSL that doesn't really work
        noir_lord 12y ago
        Depends where you live. I'm in the UK I pay for 100/10 I get 200/20 and I have zero bandwidth caps.
      - Houshalter 12y ago
        Is bandwidth not a concern? 65 GB could take weeks to download.
        gambiting 12y ago
        It could. But then where do you set the limit? At my parents house downloading 5GB of data would take a week. So what is the "reasonable" size? 1GB? 10GB? 50GB? Or maybe we can assume that only people with good enough bandwidth will buy a 65GB game online,and the rest will buy the disc?
        sampo 12y ago
        > 65 GB could take weeks to download. If someone lives behind a 1 Mbps home connetion, then yes, about 1 week.
        mycookie 12y ago
        It's possible for it to download compressed data and 323 used uncompressed textures/meshes/sounds/etc.
    - taternuts 12y ago
      WOW, me too... I guess it's been a long time since I regularly played games
    - jknightco 12y ago
      To be fair, the "new" Halo game is technically the first 4 games all redone for the Xbox One packaged together.
    - aaronem 12y ago
      Texture mapping has come a long, long way. It's a shame AAA game mechanics haven't kept up, but, hey, that's a hard problem. (I just bought Alien: Isolation the other day, and found it disappointing -- silly me, thinking I'd bought a game I could play as I pleased, rather than a movie which would punish me for trying to step outside the predefined narrative it wanted to relate.)
      - eru 12y ago
        Play Thief Gold or Deus Ex, if you want that.
      - spiritplumber 12y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU Obligatory.
- melling 12y ago
  We're definitely getting close. I wish Apple would take Siri to the next level. It should be easier to make corrections, for example. I bought Dragon Dictate for my Mac a couple days ago just so I could try to do a little more with voice recognition. It'll be great to be able to program mainly with voice like in this video: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html At the moment, I can simply say "open terminal, begin, rebuild, restart, push, pull, boom (combines pull, rebuild, restart). I'm just using simple shell aliases but I'll probably add shell functions.
  - MBCook 12y ago
    How do you like it? I've been very interested (dictation in Mavericks leaves a lot to be desired) but the reviews on Amazon seem to savage it pretty good as buggy and not up to the standards of the Windows version.
    - melling 12y ago
      I believe the Windows version is better. Integrates with Python so it's easier to customize, and I think it's easier to define your own "words". e.g. "Slap" could mean "new line". I got it on sale for $99. Now I've gotta get a good microphone. David Pogue's review: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/hello-computer-speak-your-text-with-dragon-dictate-80097045492.html https://www.yahoo.com/tech/hello-computer-speak-your-text-wi... And the fact that John Siracusa writes articles like these with it, convinced me that I could make it useful with a little effort. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/23/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/23/
      - MBCook 12y ago
        Thanks. I'm glad to see the David Pogue review, but it looks like it's not considered compatible with Yosemite and crashes for a lot of people. I guess I'll wait to see if they release an update later this fall.
  - aaronem 12y ago
    I gather Yosemite brings Siri to OS X, which I expect will be an interesting evolution, especially once people start figuring out how to add new capabilities and integrations. I saw Rudd's demo and have been tantalized by its possibilities ever since. More than the specific technologies in use, what really fascinated me was the way he invented what could almost be described as a shorthand language optimized for efficiently driving the editor via voice, with various unique (and otherwise meaningless) phoneme combinations to represent things not easily expressed in ordinary English -- for example, "lep" instead of "left parenthesis", one syllable in place of five. That's the real win, I think; the specific dictation pipeline in use hardly matters, so long as it supports the necessary interfaces and customization capabilities. Some day I mean to find the time for a really deep dive into the subject, ideally one from which I'll surface with something I can distribute to others wishing to drive their editors the same way.
arjie 12y ago
Wow, what a piece! I am incredibly impressed with the range of responses that Siri has. I wonder just how many questions they've entered responses to. Certainly some stuff can be learned, but responding to requests to marriage is certainly written at some level by a human.
- cbhl 12y ago
  Almost certainly they special-case some inputs -- have you ever recited the Konami Code to Siri? What amazes me is sheer variety of questions that people ask Siri that s/he can now answer humorously. It wouldn't surprise me if they watch the number of queries (from actual users) that don't get an answer and/or fall back to Wolfram Alpha to see if there are any new ones that need special treatment. That said, most of the information that Siri spits out was "written at some level by a human", such as the Wikipedia articles s/he quotes (by Wikipedia authors), or the flight information for planes overhead (by airline employees).
  - saryant 12y ago
    The flight information is powered by Wolfram Alpha which appears to source it from ADS-B data via (I assume) the FAA, so that actually is entirely automated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance-broadcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - pizzeys 12y ago
      I doubt it's from the FAA. ADS-B is trivial to monitor, there's lots of private individuals/groups grabbing this info.
  - a1369209993 12y ago
    To be fair, most of the information that I spit out was "written at some level by a human", such as the Wikipedia articles I've memorized, or the Hacker News comments I rephrase.
TulliusCicero 12y ago
This piece is absolutely adorable.
- rustynails77 12y ago
  As a parent of an autistic child, I found this article very disturbing. I have spent the last several years working with my child: to engage people and to establish empathy (among other skills) - empathy with real people. My child exhibits obsession with topics and we cover this using the Internet and other resources (eg. books, magazines). However, I have worked hard so that my child can relate to others and to learn essential skills to cope with life. My young autistic child has gone from avoiding eye contact, hitting and punching and general "fuck you if I don't like the look of you" to somewhat synthetic behaviour that's been learned - it now comes across as fairly natural... but it's been a lot of work. This was achieved by focussing on real people, both with similar issues and those without. It also came through honest and open communication about autism and autistics vs Neuro Typicals (NT). Interestingly, my autistic child used siri briefly and poked holes through the AI and found it severely limiting. As a parent of an autistic child that has read text-books, worked in class, spoken at length with specialists, attended support groups and training programs, and supported my child's turn-around that fellow parents/teachers/specialists described as "amazing" etc... I am horrified at an approach that diverges from constructive social behaviour. The younger you learn to engage others, the easier it is and more readily it will stick. I'd encourage any parent of an autistic child to research this area thoroughly before going down the "Siri as BFF" path.
  - rwallace 12y ago
    The OP said interacting with Siri, far from causing her son to diverge from constructive social behavior, helped him learn it - he ended up being better able to interact with real people. I have no particular reason to believe her son's experience was atypical. Do you have any reason to believe it was?
MBCook 12y ago
Can anyone get the "Are there any flights me?" query to work? It just keeps doing a Bing search showing pages talking about the fact that Siri can do it. Wolfram Alpha can answer the question if I got to the site, so the data is definitely there.
- dubfan 12y ago
  It didn't work for me either. Pretty much the whole of the city I live in is under a flight path, so it's definitely not a lack of data. On a related note, Siri has regressed for me since iOS 8. It won't shuffle my music by genre anymore, always telling me "I'm having a bit of trouble".
- LeoPanthera 12y ago
  It used to work, but right now it's not, for some reason. If you start any query with "Wolfram" it will send the rest to Wolfram Alpha verbatim, but "wolfram flights overhead" isn't working either. It works directly on WA though: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=flights+overhead http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=flights+overhead
- denzil_correa 12y ago
  Same here. I tried it multiple times too. I also want Siri to answer the question "What stars can I see tonight?"
ed 12y ago
I've never used Android's voice recognition – does it have similar scripted responses?
- ilyaeck77 12y ago
  No, but Robin does.
- timbt 12y ago
  Google Now has a select few easter eggs, but nowhere near what Siri seems to have.
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  No. The Google voice recognition stuff does not have a personality or try to be a character. This was an explicit design decision, I believe, made early on. They are going for a "you are asking Google and the answer is spoken with the voice of Google", presumably, people are more tolerant of mistakes the less human-like a machine tries to be.
intopieces 12y ago
I enjoyed this piece, but the middle section about the author and "Should I call Richard" seemed entirely out of place. It did not match the tone of the story and did not sound genuine.
aroman 12y ago
Fascinatingly, I tried asking Siri "Siri, will you mary me?" and her response was: "I sure have received a lot of marriage proposals recently!" For the first time, I was genuinely impressed with Siri's pseudo-intelligence/wit. (Can we assume someone on the Siri team at Apple read this article?)
- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  Very minor spoiler alert re: the film Her ... anyone who's watched that film will instantly recognise a reference there, intentional or not.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  That "marry me" special case was in the news just after it was launched, it's not pseudo-intelligance at all, just the wit of Apple employees.
jhanschoo 12y ago
This article reminded me of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where the protagonist receives a book that became her closest companion and mentor in her life.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  I, for one, accept our teenager overlords.
_asciiker_ 12y ago
+1 for friendly AI (even with its narrowness)
robert_tweed 12y ago
This is a great article that highlights some things people have been thinking about for a while (starting with Isaac Asimov), but haven't been much of an immediate concern until now: namely the nature of artificial intelligence and our relationship with it. We could consider the emergence of a friendship like this a milestone, a bit like when chess AI got good enough to beat a typical club player, but wasn't quite ready to beat Kasparov. We're probably only a few years away (OK, maybe 10+, but it's not 50+) from the Kasparov point, where an AI like Siri can beat the turing test for any living human. There are all sorts of questions like whether, to be considered alive and imbued with the inalienable rights that should come with sentience, is self-awareness necessary, or is the anthropomorphic perception of nearby humans more important? Should an AI have similar rights by proxy as a pet dog? One especially important question is what does it mean for an AI to die? If Siri developed a fault, and fixing that fault would cause a change in personality so that it was no longer recognisable to Gus as his BFF, should that act be called "roboticide"? Such questions are particularly relevant when AI/ML systems (deep recurrent nets, for example) are so complex that we don't really understand them fully, so we have no way to surgically correct specific faults; all we can do is revert to an earlier state and re-train. That may be loss of life, for certain definitions of "life". As an occasional game developer, I tend to think about these issues in other contexts too, such as our relationship with virtual characters in games. It's already very easy to get highly immersed in single-player virtual worlds, like any of the Elder Scrolls games. Most would not be fooled into thinking that an NPC is "alive", but it's certainly possible to develop emotional reactions to certain characters that we perhaps like because they say nice things about us, or dislike because we find then annoying, etc. There are two kinds of character interaction a person can have in a game: NPCs and human avatars. As we start to build virtual worlds (partly spurred by the Oculus Rift and partly just because of the Internet), this could affect not only our relationship with NPCs, but with other humans too. I don't know whether this will a net positive or negative thing, but we're certainly going to learn a lot about human psychology as we head towards the point where, in VR, nobody knows you're a human.
- thret 12y ago
  "Should an AI have similar rights by proxy as a pet dog?" I think so, when valued in the same way by a human. This is no different to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8465088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8465088
JaredPeters 12y ago
Siri does have a very friendly sounding voice. I've been using the Siri voice library (not the AI) in a classroom robot that help kids with autism engage with their therapy.
- craigching 12y ago
  Is there any public information on what you're doing? I have a son who is not necessarily ASD (we don't know exactly what he is dealing with yet), but he has some similar symptoms to ASD and he loves robots (we have three LEGO WeDo sets and we regularly build WeDo robots). I would love to hear or read more on how you're using robots with ASD children!
- btown 12y ago
  Huh, this is the first I'm hearing of the Siri text-to-speech library/samples being made available to developers. Do you have a link or reference to what you're using?
Steko 12y ago
I think Siri is pretty useful as a conversation partner for foreign language. I had tried out the British and Scottish voices for kicks, settled on Aussie for quite awhile and then while playing with my wife's Japanese Siri realized it was actually excellent language practice.
cwilson 12y ago
If you enjoyed this read you should watch the movie "Her" by Spike Jonze, as mentioned in the article. It hits quite heavily on the same theme (though more focused on romantic relationships with AI) and offers a pretty realistic glimpse of what this technology might look like in the next 20 years. Really enjoyed the movie. On the same note, I was talking to someone a few days ago who was telling me about how many of her girlfriends use Tinder to essentially have virtual boyfriends. She explained that in many cases they meet guys via Tinder, move to text-messaging, and the relationship never progresses to in-person meetings. They simply love having someone on the other end of their phones to talk to. The knowledge that someone is there at almost all times seems to be comforting and addicting. Kinda crazy, but again this kind of thing is only going to become more and more common due to the fact that technology is in everyone's pocket from a young age now. The question I ended the conversation with was something along the lines of, "Do you think they care that it's an actual human on the other end? Would they be ok with really convincing AI?" Food for thought.
amtab 12y ago
One really interesting idea related to the passing of the Turing test and formation of relationships between humans and AIs: Our relationships with other humans have become increasingly digital, progressing from face to face communication to letters to the telephone to text / facebook / other social messages. Each step in this progression lowers the bar drastically for AI to start fulfilling peoples' social needs. We can now maintain or even establish a relationship with another human solely using text-based messaging, and I believe that soon we will reach the point where AIs can get 90% of the way there. I don't know when it will happen but I wouldn't bet against it.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  This has been true since forever. In the 1960s, the chatbot ELIZA got people to talk to it for hours. To the point it's creator was deeply disturbed and began to advocate against AI. As time goes on, the AI effect kicks in. People get used to AIs and it takes more and more to impress or fooled by them. Once we get real human level AI, I expect people will treat them like they do in bad sci fi movies (for the probably short period of time they are our equals.) Just like people treat slaves and lower classes in other societies, not something you would form a relationship with. But really we are nowhere near that point. Chatbots have gotten really advanced, but they are still basically chatbots.
colinbartlett 12y ago
This has some relevance to a product I've been working on for a little while: https://www.getpuzzlepiece.com https://www.getpuzzlepiece.com. It's an Android tablet and apps specifically for kids with Autism. (Coming soon to iOS.)
mcv 12y ago
There's something in my eye, and it's leaking.
melling 12y ago
Btw, I noticed that Yosemite has slightly enhanced its dictation tool for use with Automater. Might come in handy. http://www.macworld.com/article/2834532/ok-mac-using-automators-dictation-commands-new-in-yosemite.html#tk.rss_all http://www.macworld.com/article/2834532/ok-mac-using-automat...

377 points by k-mcgrady 12y ago

joering2 12y ago

This story should be an inspiration for the 21-st century version of the "Little Prince" st. Expury.

ilyaeck77 12y ago
The Little Prince was about friendship between creatures that need each other. That's actually one of the main ideas of the book: we need each other. From my experience developing a Robin (a product not unlike Siri), I can tell you: yes, some users really adopt the machine as a pet to an extreme degree, but I don't envy these people.

tormeh 12y ago

Holy shit, we live in the future!

iLoch 12y ago
I was at work today and decided to buy the new Halo game that comes out in three weeks. Paid in two taps, and was notified that my Xbox at home would be turned on immediately and the game would begin to download. Sure enough I got home and all 65GB had been downloaded. I paid for a game that will be released in the future and it got to my house before I did. What?
- ntumlin 12y ago
  It amazes me that the new Halo game is 65 GB.
  - quotient 12y ago
    As with most applications, it could be a lot smaller. But storage is so cheap and abundant that size is no longer really a constraint. Consequently, engineering for size is no longer a priority.
    - aroch 12y ago
      4 games would use up the "fair" and "more than enough" bandwidth cap my ISP set :-/ It's either OK internet with caps or vDSL that doesn't really work
      - noir_lord 12y ago
        Depends where you live. I'm in the UK I pay for 100/10 I get 200/20 and I have zero bandwidth caps.
    - Houshalter 12y ago
      Is bandwidth not a concern? 65 GB could take weeks to download.
      - gambiting 12y ago
        It could. But then where do you set the limit? At my parents house downloading 5GB of data would take a week. So what is the "reasonable" size? 1GB? 10GB? 50GB? Or maybe we can assume that only people with good enough bandwidth will buy a 65GB game online,and the rest will buy the disc?
      - sampo 12y ago
        > 65 GB could take weeks to download. If someone lives behind a 1 Mbps home connetion, then yes, about 1 week.
      - mycookie 12y ago
        It's possible for it to download compressed data and 323 used uncompressed textures/meshes/sounds/etc.
  - taternuts 12y ago
    WOW, me too... I guess it's been a long time since I regularly played games
  - jknightco 12y ago
    To be fair, the "new" Halo game is technically the first 4 games all redone for the Xbox One packaged together.
  - aaronem 12y ago
    Texture mapping has come a long, long way. It's a shame AAA game mechanics haven't kept up, but, hey, that's a hard problem. (I just bought Alien: Isolation the other day, and found it disappointing -- silly me, thinking I'd bought a game I could play as I pleased, rather than a movie which would punish me for trying to step outside the predefined narrative it wanted to relate.)
    - eru 12y ago
      Play Thief Gold or Deus Ex, if you want that.
    - spiritplumber 12y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU Obligatory.
melling 12y ago
We're definitely getting close. I wish Apple would take Siri to the next level. It should be easier to make corrections, for example. I bought Dragon Dictate for my Mac a couple days ago just so I could try to do a little more with voice recognition. It'll be great to be able to program mainly with voice like in this video: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html At the moment, I can simply say "open terminal, begin, rebuild, restart, push, pull, boom (combines pull, rebuild, restart). I'm just using simple shell aliases but I'll probably add shell functions.
- MBCook 12y ago
  How do you like it? I've been very interested (dictation in Mavericks leaves a lot to be desired) but the reviews on Amazon seem to savage it pretty good as buggy and not up to the standards of the Windows version.
  - melling 12y ago
    I believe the Windows version is better. Integrates with Python so it's easier to customize, and I think it's easier to define your own "words". e.g. "Slap" could mean "new line". I got it on sale for $99. Now I've gotta get a good microphone. David Pogue's review: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/hello-computer-speak-your-text-with-dragon-dictate-80097045492.html https://www.yahoo.com/tech/hello-computer-speak-your-text-wi... And the fact that John Siracusa writes articles like these with it, convinced me that I could make it useful with a little effort. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/23/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/23/
    - MBCook 12y ago
      Thanks. I'm glad to see the David Pogue review, but it looks like it's not considered compatible with Yosemite and crashes for a lot of people. I guess I'll wait to see if they release an update later this fall.
- aaronem 12y ago
  I gather Yosemite brings Siri to OS X, which I expect will be an interesting evolution, especially once people start figuring out how to add new capabilities and integrations. I saw Rudd's demo and have been tantalized by its possibilities ever since. More than the specific technologies in use, what really fascinated me was the way he invented what could almost be described as a shorthand language optimized for efficiently driving the editor via voice, with various unique (and otherwise meaningless) phoneme combinations to represent things not easily expressed in ordinary English -- for example, "lep" instead of "left parenthesis", one syllable in place of five. That's the real win, I think; the specific dictation pipeline in use hardly matters, so long as it supports the necessary interfaces and customization capabilities. Some day I mean to find the time for a really deep dive into the subject, ideally one from which I'll surface with something I can distribute to others wishing to drive their editors the same way.

arjie 12y ago

Wow, what a piece! I am incredibly impressed with the range of responses that Siri has. I wonder just how many questions they've entered responses to. Certainly some stuff can be learned, but responding to requests to marriage is certainly written at some level by a human.

cbhl 12y ago
Almost certainly they special-case some inputs -- have you ever recited the Konami Code to Siri? What amazes me is sheer variety of questions that people ask Siri that s/he can now answer humorously. It wouldn't surprise me if they watch the number of queries (from actual users) that don't get an answer and/or fall back to Wolfram Alpha to see if there are any new ones that need special treatment. That said, most of the information that Siri spits out was "written at some level by a human", such as the Wikipedia articles s/he quotes (by Wikipedia authors), or the flight information for planes overhead (by airline employees).
- saryant 12y ago
  The flight information is powered by Wolfram Alpha which appears to source it from ADS-B data via (I assume) the FAA, so that actually is entirely automated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance-broadcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - pizzeys 12y ago
    I doubt it's from the FAA. ADS-B is trivial to monitor, there's lots of private individuals/groups grabbing this info.
- a1369209993 12y ago
  To be fair, most of the information that I spit out was "written at some level by a human", such as the Wikipedia articles I've memorized, or the Hacker News comments I rephrase.

TulliusCicero 12y ago

This piece is absolutely adorable.

rustynails77 12y ago
As a parent of an autistic child, I found this article very disturbing. I have spent the last several years working with my child: to engage people and to establish empathy (among other skills) - empathy with real people. My child exhibits obsession with topics and we cover this using the Internet and other resources (eg. books, magazines). However, I have worked hard so that my child can relate to others and to learn essential skills to cope with life. My young autistic child has gone from avoiding eye contact, hitting and punching and general "fuck you if I don't like the look of you" to somewhat synthetic behaviour that's been learned - it now comes across as fairly natural... but it's been a lot of work. This was achieved by focussing on real people, both with similar issues and those without. It also came through honest and open communication about autism and autistics vs Neuro Typicals (NT). Interestingly, my autistic child used siri briefly and poked holes through the AI and found it severely limiting. As a parent of an autistic child that has read text-books, worked in class, spoken at length with specialists, attended support groups and training programs, and supported my child's turn-around that fellow parents/teachers/specialists described as "amazing" etc... I am horrified at an approach that diverges from constructive social behaviour. The younger you learn to engage others, the easier it is and more readily it will stick. I'd encourage any parent of an autistic child to research this area thoroughly before going down the "Siri as BFF" path.
- rwallace 12y ago
  The OP said interacting with Siri, far from causing her son to diverge from constructive social behavior, helped him learn it - he ended up being better able to interact with real people. I have no particular reason to believe her son's experience was atypical. Do you have any reason to believe it was?

MBCook 12y ago

Can anyone get the "Are there any flights me?" query to work? It just keeps doing a Bing search showing pages talking about the fact that Siri can do it. Wolfram Alpha can answer the question if I got to the site, so the data is definitely there.

dubfan 12y ago
It didn't work for me either. Pretty much the whole of the city I live in is under a flight path, so it's definitely not a lack of data. On a related note, Siri has regressed for me since iOS 8. It won't shuffle my music by genre anymore, always telling me "I'm having a bit of trouble".
LeoPanthera 12y ago
It used to work, but right now it's not, for some reason. If you start any query with "Wolfram" it will send the rest to Wolfram Alpha verbatim, but "wolfram flights overhead" isn't working either. It works directly on WA though: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=flights+overhead http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=flights+overhead
denzil_correa 12y ago
Same here. I tried it multiple times too. I also want Siri to answer the question "What stars can I see tonight?"

ed 12y ago

I've never used Android's voice recognition – does it have similar scripted responses?

ilyaeck77 12y ago
No, but Robin does.
timbt 12y ago
Google Now has a select few easter eggs, but nowhere near what Siri seems to have.
mike_hearn 12y ago
No. The Google voice recognition stuff does not have a personality or try to be a character. This was an explicit design decision, I believe, made early on. They are going for a "you are asking Google and the answer is spoken with the voice of Google", presumably, people are more tolerant of mistakes the less human-like a machine tries to be.

intopieces 12y ago

I enjoyed this piece, but the middle section about the author and "Should I call Richard" seemed entirely out of place. It did not match the tone of the story and did not sound genuine.

aroman 12y ago

Fascinatingly, I tried asking Siri "Siri, will you mary me?" and her response was: "I sure have received a lot of marriage proposals recently!" For the first time, I was genuinely impressed with Siri's pseudo-intelligence/wit. (Can we assume someone on the Siri team at Apple read this article?)

oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
Very minor spoiler alert re: the film Her ... anyone who's watched that film will instantly recognise a reference there, intentional or not.
JetSpiegel 12y ago
That "marry me" special case was in the news just after it was launched, it's not pseudo-intelligance at all, just the wit of Apple employees.

jhanschoo 12y ago

This article reminded me of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where the protagonist receives a book that became her closest companion and mentor in her life.

JetSpiegel 12y ago
I, for one, accept our teenager overlords.

_asciiker_ 12y ago

+1 for friendly AI (even with its narrowness)

robert_tweed 12y ago

This is a great article that highlights some things people have been thinking about for a while (starting with Isaac Asimov), but haven't been much of an immediate concern until now: namely the nature of artificial intelligence and our relationship with it. We could consider the emergence of a friendship like this a milestone, a bit like when chess AI got good enough to beat a typical club player, but wasn't quite ready to beat Kasparov. We're probably only a few years away (OK, maybe 10+, but it's not 50+) from the Kasparov point, where an AI like Siri can beat the turing test for any living human. There are all sorts of questions like whether, to be considered alive and imbued with the inalienable rights that should come with sentience, is self-awareness necessary, or is the anthropomorphic perception of nearby humans more important? Should an AI have similar rights by proxy as a pet dog? One especially important question is what does it mean for an AI to die? If Siri developed a fault, and fixing that fault would cause a change in personality so that it was no longer recognisable to Gus as his BFF, should that act be called "roboticide"? Such questions are particularly relevant when AI/ML systems (deep recurrent nets, for example) are so complex that we don't really understand them fully, so we have no way to surgically correct specific faults; all we can do is revert to an earlier state and re-train. That may be loss of life, for certain definitions of "life". As an occasional game developer, I tend to think about these issues in other contexts too, such as our relationship with virtual characters in games. It's already very easy to get highly immersed in single-player virtual worlds, like any of the Elder Scrolls games. Most would not be fooled into thinking that an NPC is "alive", but it's certainly possible to develop emotional reactions to certain characters that we perhaps like because they say nice things about us, or dislike because we find then annoying, etc. There are two kinds of character interaction a person can have in a game: NPCs and human avatars. As we start to build virtual worlds (partly spurred by the Oculus Rift and partly just because of the Internet), this could affect not only our relationship with NPCs, but with other humans too. I don't know whether this will a net positive or negative thing, but we're certainly going to learn a lot about human psychology as we head towards the point where, in VR, nobody knows you're a human.

thret 12y ago
"Should an AI have similar rights by proxy as a pet dog?" I think so, when valued in the same way by a human. This is no different to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8465088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8465088

JaredPeters 12y ago

Siri does have a very friendly sounding voice. I've been using the Siri voice library (not the AI) in a classroom robot that help kids with autism engage with their therapy.

craigching 12y ago
Is there any public information on what you're doing? I have a son who is not necessarily ASD (we don't know exactly what he is dealing with yet), but he has some similar symptoms to ASD and he loves robots (we have three LEGO WeDo sets and we regularly build WeDo robots). I would love to hear or read more on how you're using robots with ASD children!
btown 12y ago
Huh, this is the first I'm hearing of the Siri text-to-speech library/samples being made available to developers. Do you have a link or reference to what you're using?

Steko 12y ago

I think Siri is pretty useful as a conversation partner for foreign language. I had tried out the British and Scottish voices for kicks, settled on Aussie for quite awhile and then while playing with my wife's Japanese Siri realized it was actually excellent language practice.

cwilson 12y ago

If you enjoyed this read you should watch the movie "Her" by Spike Jonze, as mentioned in the article. It hits quite heavily on the same theme (though more focused on romantic relationships with AI) and offers a pretty realistic glimpse of what this technology might look like in the next 20 years. Really enjoyed the movie. On the same note, I was talking to someone a few days ago who was telling me about how many of her girlfriends use Tinder to essentially have virtual boyfriends. She explained that in many cases they meet guys via Tinder, move to text-messaging, and the relationship never progresses to in-person meetings. They simply love having someone on the other end of their phones to talk to. The knowledge that someone is there at almost all times seems to be comforting and addicting. Kinda crazy, but again this kind of thing is only going to become more and more common due to the fact that technology is in everyone's pocket from a young age now. The question I ended the conversation with was something along the lines of, "Do you think they care that it's an actual human on the other end? Would they be ok with really convincing AI?" Food for thought.

amtab 12y ago

One really interesting idea related to the passing of the Turing test and formation of relationships between humans and AIs: Our relationships with other humans have become increasingly digital, progressing from face to face communication to letters to the telephone to text / facebook / other social messages. Each step in this progression lowers the bar drastically for AI to start fulfilling peoples' social needs. We can now maintain or even establish a relationship with another human solely using text-based messaging, and I believe that soon we will reach the point where AIs can get 90% of the way there. I don't know when it will happen but I wouldn't bet against it.

Houshalter 12y ago
This has been true since forever. In the 1960s, the chatbot ELIZA got people to talk to it for hours. To the point it's creator was deeply disturbed and began to advocate against AI. As time goes on, the AI effect kicks in. People get used to AIs and it takes more and more to impress or fooled by them. Once we get real human level AI, I expect people will treat them like they do in bad sci fi movies (for the probably short period of time they are our equals.) Just like people treat slaves and lower classes in other societies, not something you would form a relationship with. But really we are nowhere near that point. Chatbots have gotten really advanced, but they are still basically chatbots.

colinbartlett 12y ago

This has some relevance to a product I've been working on for a little while: https://www.getpuzzlepiece.com https://www.getpuzzlepiece.com. It's an Android tablet and apps specifically for kids with Autism. (Coming soon to iOS.)

mcv 12y ago

There's something in my eye, and it's leaking.

melling 12y ago

Btw, I noticed that Yosemite has slightly enhanced its dictation tool for use with Automater. Might come in handy. http://www.macworld.com/article/2834532/ok-mac-using-automators-dictation-commands-new-in-yosemite.html#tk.rss_all http://www.macworld.com/article/2834532/ok-mac-using-automat...