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Comment by Sargos | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I think this will be a tough market to compete in for Apple. I think it's generally accepted that Siri is the worst of the assistants out there right now and that underlying technology will drive this entire new product. I really think Apple is going to need to decide between privacy and AI research as they are struggling to keep up and having a product like this will only make that gap more pronounced.

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Exactly. I use Siri on my iPhone, also tried Google assitant app recently, having an echo at home too. Siri is way worse than the other two in terms of speech recognition and features. I felt Apple is better off to completely buy Google as the back end and simply focus on the hardware, where is their strength.

I think this is less a Siri device and more a home-TV device.

My understanding is that this device includes a screen. Right now I could use a 17" 16:9 iPad with a stand and maybe an optional detachable keyboard, as I find I'm using my 12" iPad Pro more and more for TV/movie viewing. I could use something like that for a bedroom nightstand.

I don't think Siri will be the focus of this product. I hope not, at least, because it definitely isn't the top assistant. Apple's strength is it's device media capabilities, and they should exploit that instead.

Bloomberg said that the device won't have a screen, and will instead focus on having a better speaker.

That's interesting. I've always thought echo was much much worse at speech recognition. It also does ridiculous things, like my toddler asked it what bread is, and echo proceeded to tell us about Bread, the rock band... Granted, Siri tends to just open up a web search.

Although their (commendable, IMO) limits on data collection may be a handicap, I think the extremely narrow Siri API is a bigger problem. At first I thought Apple was behind Amazon in terms of opening up the possibilities of using voice commands for more than a few simple things. But so much time has gone by and Siri is still so limited that I'm beginning to wonder if they have any intention of catching up.

Privacy versus AI research is a false dichotomy. Apple has been very candid about how they are able to maintain privacy while using data responsibly.

It's in the interest of Google, Facebook and others to get us to believe we have to give up our privacy, that it's the cost of advancement. But it's baloney. It lets them be lazy and continue to use us (the users) as the product for their real customer; advertisers. But it's just not true.

? what do privacy and AI research have to do with each other ? Many many people will buy a Siri speaker. It's an ecosystem.

Privacy in the sense that you can train better AI systems when you have more data. Apple has many self-imposed and restrictive policies around collecting data and what type of data they collect, so they inherently have a disadvantage when it comes to building better AI systems.

Ok, but all of that data is on your phone and devices. You could theoretically train there.

Most of your data (ex. search history) is not reliably stored on your phone, and even if it was it would be much better to train on the server side instead of making your phone do all of the work. Also, they probably train using data from everyone, not just one user.

OK, but apple can store your data encrypted on their servers or on your phone and still train data models... Privacy can be preserved.

The problem may not be the Siri software, it may be the iPhone hardware. I believe the Echo has a pretty sophisticated microphone setup that is light-years better than an iPhone's. Apple is generally pretty good at hardware, so they could catch up quickly there.

The last 1/3 of your comment contradicts the first 1/3 :)

Not only that, but his middle sentence is comparing apples to oranges.

That was in fact the point. Siri might work in a speaker orange a lot better than it works in an iPhone apple. ;-)

One describes Apple in general, while the other points to a specific exceptional case.

Not really. The HW design trade-offs would be very different, leading to hardware optimized for different purposes.

The iPhone is a phone, with all the space and power limitations inherent in that form factor. A standalone speaker is something else entirely.

True, but I speak directly into my phone, which I assume is a big advantage for the phone?

Seems like it would be. I never use Siri speaking directly into the phone, because if I have the phone in hand, I just do whatever I need to do and skip Siri. The only time I try it is when the phone is out of reach, or in the car.

Siri works much better on my watch than on my phone. I refuse to even use it(her?) on my phone.

Interesting. I wonder if it also works a lot better on an iPhone 7 than a 6.

Same here! I use Siri on my watch all the time. Turned off hey Siri on my phone because it would activate both

The problem is Siri's software. Both the speech recognition as well as the intent recognition are way better on Google phones.

How does NLP have anything to do with microphones?

Siri's problem isn't speech to text -- try the dictation button on the iOS keyboard sometime. It's perfect.

Siri's problem is that it's very limited.

A fair point. I never use the dictation, but I often try to use Siri when the phone is out of reach. My Echo understands me when I speak at a conversational level from across the room with the faucet running. If the dictation is spot on and Siri is still bad when speaking directly into the phone, then yeah, that seems pretty damning.

NLP quality is dependent on ASR quality (automated speech recognition, transforming audio into words) because you can't generally get meaning without words.

ASR quality is dependent on audio quality (plus, of course, a bunch of big-data-driven training) because it's harder to get the words right if you can't hear the sound.

Audio quality is dependent on microphone(s) quality and signal processing (higher signal-to-noise ratio).

And getting that to happen at far-field distances of 10-20 feet in noisy environments is not easy.

So... bottom line: the better the microphones, the higher the ceiling is on NLP performance.

Source: worked on Echo / Alexa for almost 3 years.

Does it really make sense splitting ASR and NLP up into distinct concepts? While I understand in the past they have solved different problems, it's my understanding that to get accurate ASR, grammar files or corpus can be provided to improve the recognition. I've also seen things like Siri autocorrect what is being transcribed as the sequence of words evolves.

Another example is how as an Alexa skill maker, you have to provide utterance / intent mappings. Is that just used to accurately classify intent / entities? Or is it also used to identify which skill to pass a user utterance to as a part of the alexa skill service because there could be very little variation between skill names or inquiries amazon is supposed to actually fulfill when a person is talking ??

> Does it really make sense splitting ASR and NLP up into distinct concepts? While I understand in the past they have solved different problems, it's my understanding that to get accurate ASR, grammar files or corpus can be provided to improve the recognition.

Yes, you are right, in that there are ways to blend the two (use data from one to improve the other). However, in the end of the day, the better the system can determine which words were spoken (using whatever technology), the better it can determine the meaning and the intent, and then decide what to do about it...

> Another example is how as an Alexa skill maker, you have to provide utterance / intent mappings. Is that just used to accurately classify intent / entities? Or is it also used to identify which skill to pass a user utterance to as a part of the alexa skill service

It is primarily used for the former (classify utterance / intent mappings for bootstrapping). Over time, with ML, the goal would be to help understand which "skills" apply to which intents. Unfortunately, today, that's not the case (in Alexa) and that's why the skill-specific keywords or names are still needed. From the user's point of view, it would be preferable to be able to say "Alexa, I need a ride to the airport" and have Alexa figure out whether Uber, Lyft, or the light rail service with a station two blocks from your house is the "best" option for you right now, based on price, availability, and your explicit and implicit preferences. Of course, the system would also have to allow you to specifically request a Lyft, if that's what you want.

(And, of course, it should ultimately be proactive and just offer to get you to the airport when it sees a flight in your calendar, of from having scanned the flight purchase confirmation in your email...)

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