John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team
apple.com
apple.com
From a purely functional standpoint, they seem super awkward to me. I like buttons that click and reassure me of every input. I like to feel confident my actions won't be misinterpreted. I like that no one else near me will get weirded out or annoyed when I'm having trouble interfacing with whatever app I'm currently using. The only reason I can envision using voice controls for anything is in the car while driving, and you would only begrudgingly use them because it is overwhelmingly safer to have both hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.
Apart from not enjoying voice controls from a functional point of view, is no one else creeped out at always on mics and video cameras in their house? In this era of super crappy security, especially with consumer grade stuff, there's a not insignificant chance your stuff is currently being hacked by one or more non-government bad actors (I already assume the US government, and probably a few other governments, already have 24/7 access to every mic and camera that is connected to the web in any way).
I've been assuming voice commands will die out and that this Alexa / Siri hype (hype might not be the right word. buzz? rumblings?) was a result of Amazon and Apple pushing them from a marketing perspective. The amount of comments about Siri in a thread about a random exec being added to Apple is making me re-consider that PoV.
Yes, daily.
I use it when cooking to get instructions on how long to bake a specific vegetable and at what temp. While I'm out driving to get directions hands free. When I want to do a search but can't be bothered to type the whole thing out on my mobile keyboard. When I'm at home and want to listen to radio on my speakers. I use a Pixel 2, so when I make a call I just squeeze it and say 'call {contact}', rather than find-and-open the phone app.
Don't look at voice commands as a interface replacement for keyboards. Instead, look at voice commands as a new interface for situations where using a keyboard or touch screen is a hassle.
Of course Siri defaults to an incorrect google search on nearly every question, so this often doesn't work in practice...
That number is probably a little outdated now. But it’s definitely not targeting a niche audience.
Does the average user perform significantly less searches, and so the novelty or occasional voice search moves the needle 20%, or are they performing as many searches as me but using voice for many of them. I personally only ever found voice search useful for things that are more like questions and not research ("how old is _______" is a classic example) so I find it difficult to believe the latter. The former would be quite the revelation though because I always assumed _everyone_ googled as much as I do but it seems that might not be the case.
I would also be interested in seeing if people looking for places/directions factors into this in some way.
Virtually every other hot gadget from the last decade has been far more expensive at this stage to the point where it slowed down the adoption rate (smartwatches, certain cameras), or made it absolutely never go anywhere near what the hype train lead us to believe (VR/AR products).
At the Real Canadian Superstore you get a gift when you spend over $300. It changes weekly. Sometimes it’s a box of cereals or chocolates. Sometimes it’s houseware, a plant or a lawn chair. At thanksgiving it’s a frozen turkey. That one time it was 2kg of bacon. Last week it was an Echo Dot.
Based on popularity within the family, and compared to the alternatives, it’s far from being the perfect gift. That said, it does seem to be cheap.
Siri plus shortcuts have made many mundane tasks easier. When I get in my car to come home from work I say "Hey Siri, heading home." That causes my phone to text my wife my arrival time and starts the last podcast I had playing.
It's a simple thing, but is so much easier than texting and then thumbing through the podcast player to start where I left off. I have others like logging my water intake or weight, but it was really adding shortcuts to Siri that made these possible.
Playing music or TV shows is also much easier/nicer. "Hey Google, play The Office on Netflix".
Timers. Another simple thing that is so much easier when you can use your voice when cooking.
I just look at TV vs radio, texting versus calling, or audio books versus written content. I believe most studies indicate that people are better at visual comprehension versus auditory:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-audi...
I know scientists love working on voice and speech recognition, since it is a hard problem to solve, but it sometimes feels like its a bit of a solution in search of a problem. I'm sure there are good use cases, I'm just skeptical that they are profound enough for voice to be our primary medium for interaction.
I'm glad we're making progress, but I'll be a skeptic until I can give voice requests as naturally as I'd give them to a human. IMO there's no limit from there.
Compare trying to find a specific piece of information in a book, vs in some training DVD.
If I'm just learning how to cook, watching a professional demonstrate the whole thing is going to be very helpful, but if I already know how to cook in general it's easier to flick to the right section of a book and scan the page for the bit of information I need.
Or compare the difference between listening to a phone system's 7 different options vs seeing all the options available on a single screen.
The other side of this is precision. Not only do input methods like a keyboard allow you to give extremely explicit, high information, instructions with no need for interpretation, they also have extremely fast feedback loops. Imagine trying to use your voice to click on a specific part of an image, or draw a circle around it. Far, far easier to move a pointer with your hand, watch where it goes, and then click when it's in the right position.
So visual comprehension probably is better than auditory, but I think the main things that are important are random access, specific and information dense input, and low latency feedback loops on input - all things that we are far better at achieving with physical/visual methods than auditory or speech based methods.
In my experience, AirPods are the best Siri input device I own. EarPods are a distant second, and the built in mic on phone is a not very distant third. It is effectively unusable on my laptop’s built in mic.
The ambient noise basically means I can’t use Siri in noisy places, and I’m typically not inclined to. I might raise my voice a little if I’m putting in a podcast outside and it is windy.
#3 means disabling WiFi when I leave my house, until I’m in a location with a solid WiFi connection, in part because I make use of my cable WiFi. If I have no service and no WiFi then I have no Siri, not even to set a timer.
Beyond that, I find the basic feature set adequate, but not comprehensive. Siri shortcuts doubled Siri’s usefulness and I only use them for three or four apps.
That said, I appreciate Siri’s presence because it does enable me to leave my phone in my pocket a lot more than I used to, so there will occasionally be a week where I didn’t spend more than an hour or two looking at my phone’s screen the entire week (not per day, per week), with 90% of this time spent reading a book. Observing my friends’ obsessions and work habits, I appear to be the outlier in that regard.
Wait, you do what?
How can I get SIRI to do this for me? Can you explain how you got SIRI to do that?
It’s basically IFTTT for iOS, and you can assign phrases in Siri to it.
Here's an example of something that seems obviously should work: I'm driving to pick someone up. Apple maps is navigating. "Hey siri, text <person I'm picking up> my ETA."
Yeah, that doesn't work. The only thing I reliable get out of Siri is setting a timer and opening the camera.
- when I’m driving is the big one
- and for reminders.
It’s lot easier to say:
- remind me to call my mom when I get home.
- remind me to call my wife when I get in the car.
- remind me to get milk when I get to $grocery_store
Than to set up the reminder manually.
You mentioned this, but constantly in the car, but it's not even sort of begrudging. I got an early sale on the Echo Auto devices (Alexa for your car, basically), and love it. Everything I could do by dinking around with my phone, I now don't have to.
Outside of the car, voice commands for stuff like home control is natural, and almost kinda magical. Walking in with both hands full of groceries and barking "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights" is awesome. Same for setting timers while cooking, turning on music, and so forth. So long as you remember that you're dealing with what amounts to a voice command line, not the Enterprise's computer, everything flows smoothly.
Conversely, I almost never use Siri even though by way of car bluetooth it should have the same kind of functionality.. but it's so limited and inaccurate as to be functionally useless.
>is no one else creeped out at always on mics and video cameras in their house?
Not for me, because a device that is local-only listening for a wake-word is not even sort of creepy. Your explanation, intentionally or not, paints it as a device that maintains a constant connection to the mothership and gives $company a live stream of everything happening around it.
This is an incredibly annoying misconception that I've grown weary of seeing.
Yup, that's pretty much the only reason I use Siri. Though I could see VR as another possible use case, since hand controls in VR are less precise and slower than keyboard/mouse for textual input.
- Remind me to X in N minutes/hours/days
- Set an alarm for N minutes
- What’s the weather like today/tomorrow?
- Play X by Y (when driving and wanting a specific album or song to play)
- What is [insert some question of simple knowledge I’ve forgotten]?
Nothing else seems worth bothering with.
On my phone it's rare unless I'm getting in my car and having it pull up directions.
Where I found I use it all the time is with the Amazon Fire Stick. When I have a show I want to watch I don't have to fumble with a stupid keyboard on the TV, I just say the name and it works. Also setting timers in the kitchen when I'm cooking, it saves me from getting raw meat on all the surfaces
Hiring away Google's head of AI seems to have made a material difference in how well Siri performs in an annual head to head comparison of how well various smart speakers responded to 800 sample requests.
>Google Home continued its outperformance, answering 86% correctly and understanding all 800 questions. The HomePod correctly answered 75% and only misunderstood 3, the Echo correctly answered 73% and misunderstood 8 questions, and Cortana correctly answered 63% and misunderstood just 5 questions.
>Note that nearly every misunderstood question involved a proper noun, often the name of a local town or restaurant.
https://loupventures.com/annual-smart-speaker-iq-test/
A 22% increase in correct responses over last year's performance.
I was recently getting a dental procedure done and the Periodontist kept using Alexa while he was treating me. "Alexa, play the Eagles!" "Alexa, skip this song!" He seemed super impressed like he was really excited to show it off... I thought it was annoying. I think voice command stuff is lame. I have siri permanently disabled on my iphone and apple watch.
I've heard some people like using siri with the apple watch, but I never got into it- I would always accidentally set it off when I was weightlifting.
I have tried using speech-to-text for text messages and emails, and I usually spend more time correcting the mistakes than it saves.
Setting alarms and reminders
https://books.google.nl/books?id=uNDW_dQ_dlAC&pg=PA167&lpg=P...
Ben Shneiderman's 1993 IEEE Software article, "Beyond Intelligent Machines: Just do it!" was prompted by discussion between Mark Weiser (father of Ubiquitous Computing) and Bill Hefley, and argues that users want a sense of direct and immediate control over computers that differs from how they interact with people.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/93-03/93-03.html
[...]
WHY NOT INTELLIGENT? I am opposed to labeling computers as "intelligent" for several reasons. First, such a classification limits the imagination. We should have much greater ambition than to make a computer behave like an intelligent butler or other human agent. Computer-supported cooperative work, hypertext/hypermedia, multimedia, information visualization, and virtual reality are powerful technologies that enable human users to accomplish tasks that no human has ever done. If we describe computers in human terms, we run the risk of limiting our ambition and creativity in the design of future computer capabilities. In the same way that most of us have learned to use terminology not specific to any gender, we should now learn not to limit designers of computers with the tag "intelligent" or "smart."
Second, the qualities of predictability and control are desirable. If machines are intelligent or adaptive, they may have less of these qualities. Usability studies at the University of Maryland show that users want the feelings of mastery, competence, and understanding that come from a predictable and controllable interface. Most users seek a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, not the sense that some intelligent machine magically did their job for them.
Another reason I'm concerned about this label is that it limits or even eliminates human responsibility. I am concerned that if designers are successful in convincing the users that computers are intelligent, then the users will have a reduced sense of responsibility for failures. The tendency to blame the machine is already widespread and I think we will be on dangerous ground if we encourage this trend. As part of my work, I collect newspapers articles about computers, some of which bear the headlines "Victims of Computer Error Go Hungry," "IRS Computers Err on Refund Reports," and "Computers That 'Hear' Taking Jobs" -- all of which seem to absolve human operators by implicating the machine.
Finally, I have a basic philosophical objection to the "intelligent" label. Machines are not people, nor can they ever become so. For me, computers have no more intelligence than a wooden pencil. If you confuse the way you treat machines with the way you treat people, you may end up treating people like machines, which devalues human emotional experiences, creativity, individuality, and relationships of trust. I know that many of my colleagues are quite happy to call machines intelligent and knowledgeable, but I prefer to treat and think about machines in very different ways from the way I treat and think about people.
[...]
+ Natural-language interaction seems clumsy and slow compared to direct manipulation and information-visualization methods that use rapid, high-resolution, color displays with pointing devices. Lotus HAL is gone, Artificial Intelligence Corp.'s Intellect hangs on but is not catching on. Although there are some interesting directions for tools that support human work through natural-language processing (aiding human translators, parsing texts, and generating reports from structured databases) this is different from natural-language interaction.
+ Speech I/O in talking cars and vending machines has not flourished. Voice recognition is fine for handicapped users and special situations, but doesn't seem to be viable for widespread use in office, home, or school settings. Our recent studies suggest that speech I/O has a greater interference with short term and working memory than hand-eye coordination for menu selection by mouse. Voice store and forward, phone-based information retrieval, and voice annotation have great potential but these are not intelligent applications.
[...]
The second is command. I don't want to put Siri in front of every sentences. It is unnatural. If I have a maid, that is not how the conversation would go if I need to get something done. The amount of work ( turning something on or off, or text, or music ) is relatively small compared to the amount of commands I have to give. Or in other words, Giving a command to Siri, ( 4 - 6 words ) is more troublesome than pressing 3 - 4 buttons.
I speak with an accent so it was always hit and miss for me - although it had gotten better in recent years.
I’m also too lazy to talk ...
I'd say we need 10-20 more years for voice assistants to be smoothly integrated with our daily lives. Until then big tech companies have just started the race (collecting data, enhancing experience) to be the best voice interface in the future.
From my point of view, users of our generation are just experimental subjects for currently unfunctional & uncommon but buzzed products like voice assistants and VR.
A friend of my partner uses voice commands for everything on her iPhone. She is almost blind on one eye, and has terrible eye sight with the other eye (albino trait).
Xerox PARC is a great example - PARC invented everything, but very little of it was immediately commercially applicable - Good management, is what turns "people producing great things", to "people producing great things regular people can use"
They are just as significant as individuals in the team.
I don't know why you would say he's "not a DL/ML guy per se" -- he's a programmer, not an MBA type. You consider MetaWeb and TellMe inadequate?
The guy this post is about just came from Google, where he lead on the stuff you're praising. He can push these efforts in the right direction, and help make other strategic hires..
Isn't this exactly what you want?
More people can work on more/different things in the same period of time, thereby increasing total work done. (Parallel vs sequential and all that..)
If you take 9 people and give them each one part it will take ~9 months to complete.
If you take one person it will take ~81 months as they need to finish each part before they can go onto the next one.
^ Sticking to the analogy when it comes to integrating into business; competing products, and which one actually maintains adoption.
9 babies in 9 months is basically what Google has done with its messaging apps.
Something to describe arguing about the issue at hand completely through the metaphor and not directly referring to the issue at hand.
See this wikipedia article that discusses it in the context of logic.
Just wanted to clarify an irrelevant point to this discussion - Length of the pregnancy isn't 9 months.
Let me know when you find sophisticated collaboration technologies working beyond a team of say, 5-10.
My problem is not with Giannandrea's new position, it's with the lack of urgency on Apple's part. My patience has been wearing thin as of late.
Apple has an institutional memory of almost dying, so they can be a very 'cheap' company under the hood when they can get away with it. It reflects in their pay.
I.e. {'Pay' AND 'Publishing' > 'Pay'} not {Apple 'Pay' < Other 'Pay'}
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2016/12/6/13858354/app...
Names are there. Check the arxiv link.
Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training by Ashish Shrivastava, Tomas Pfister, Oncel Tuzel, Joshua Susskind, Wenda Wang, & Russell Webb.
Apple is a 40 year old company, and they're still raking in the dough from their original product category.
And you also have to make a bet that Apple won't come to dominate that area as well (even if they aren't first to it). AR glasses have some promise to be a new general purpose computing platform, but even then I'm skeptical that it will be able to mount a serious challenge to the smartphone.
They've only happened every decade so far: 1960 (IC), 1970 (DARPA), 1980 (PC), 1990 (GUI), 2000 (Internet), 2010 (smartphone).
Why not? The PC (and I’d include things like the Apple ][ and C64) was a legitimate success before GUIs took off. The GUI was a separate step, also hugely important.
And ~1980 and ~1990 are reasonable dates for when personal computers and Windows took off, give or take a few years.
No, it just devastated the market for native PC applications.
That’s 3 computing paradigm shifts in 60 years.
Text-based computing -> GUIs was a shift. Broadly speaking, there is no market today for consumer-facing computers where text is the only input capability.
The most profitable company in the PC era also has the most profitable PC unit today. The Internet runs on top of the GUI layer. The smartphone is (in much of the world) an "also" not an "instead."
(One could argue that the original MSFT goal of being on every desktop was centered on work. By that metric, most smartphone usage falls into a separate category of consumer computing that largely is distinct from business computing, where desktops & laptops still rule.)
A grandparent(-ish) post compares the iPhone to the Google Home. Much like the iPhone did not replace my laptop (which did not replace the server in the datacenter), voice-driven devices will not replace mobile phones. All Excel (ahem) at different use cases.
We're replacing the keyboard and GUI to one that is far more ubiquitous and backgrounded, and computing experiences are based on all data that is available and economical to process rather than having things be the more traditional user giving an input and then getting an output.
I was AMAZED that a show that recent had a lot of office workers with desks with no computer.
In 20 years, I don't think it's crazy to think the next generation will look back at our time and think... I can't believe you sat there staring at a rectangle and pushing buttons all day.
I'm not betting on it, but it seems plausible to me that in 20 years Hololens / Google Glasses combined with voice recognition and some type of gesture control could be good enough and desirable for most people.
On the mobile side, imagine the hellscape of privacy intrusion that would result if people all used voice to message each other (instead of text/email/etc).
GUIs are sticking around because they are the best available option for many use cases. Portable GUIs are likewise going to stick around for a long time. Fashionable nerds may decide to stop calling these "PCs" or "mobile phones" at some point, but the form factors will prove resilient.
I'm not sure how long it will take, but it honestly seems inevitable.
Maybe it won't be glasses, but it will almost certainly be something we wear instead of a thing that we carry around forever.
It's notable that a combination of Apple Watch + Airpods can fulfill most of these needs, with the exception of being a high quality camera and a few other things that require a larger screen. But that just shows you that if anyone is going to disrupt Apple, it's going to be Apple.
And that comes down to the culture and mindset of the company. Which given that they have Apple University and have an executive team which very much encapsulates the “Apple Way” isn’t going to change.
Yes there are plenty of failed companies but very few aggressively defend their culture like Apple does. And culture rot for me is such a big part of failure.
I'm sure someone asked a similar question about personal computers in the early 80's. They didn't go away when smartphones became prevalent, they became computational work-horses and in the same way an AR system will never be able to pack the computing punch and battery life of a smartphone.
But similar to how a smart-phone complements a PC, AR tech will simplify how we interact with specific parts of the world around us like navigation, notifications, and merge with existing tech like wireless earphones with noise cancellation and conversation/audio-enhancement to provide minimum necessary utility.
More features will bleed down the chain from PC to phone to AR, but with size comes certain advantages and disadvantages, and a large object can always hold more juice and computational power.
I think the biggest disruption will come from global low latency wireless internet - suddenly computational power can be uncoupled from the device and AR would be able to offload the power-hungry CPU/GPU's and large batteries needed for fluid and powerful interaction. But I'm not sure Elon Musk's satellite internet project will be that disruptor - so it might be another long wait until that next big thing happens.
The PC can be dated back 1975. But even in 2000, only 51% of US households had a personal computer. Not even 20 years later, it sure looks like the PC is going the way of the calculator and typewriter.
The first modern smartphone can be dated back to 1996, but it wasn't until 2013 that 50% of US adults had one.
Two year later, in late 2015, mobile web traffic had already overtaken desktop.
By 2033, I would be surprised if we don't have something challenging the smartphone. And the technology is probably around already.
These technologies seem to have about a 40-50 year life cycle. The first half of the life-cycle is the stage it takes to get to 50% saturation. Then the next third of the stage they dominate. The final third of the stage, they phase out to a niche market.
Sure, the smartphone is the bees knees today. But, really, is it? You've got to carry it with you everywhere you go. What if you just had a contact you kept over your eye at all times? What if you just had something you kept tucked behind your ear at all times?
How often do you REALLY need that screen? Remember, when the iPhone came out -- most people were thinking -- who's going to buy a smartphone without a freaking keyboard? Within literally 2 years, Blackberry's stock had dropped like 70%. Within 5 years, it was on the brink of bankruptcy.
And before that, when the first Palm came out in 1996 -- how many people do you think REALLY envisioned the smartphones we have today dominating web traffic and starting to encroach on the work station?
How? The improvements to the iPhone are less compelling every year, while the prices are going up. The company recently stopped reporting iPhone sales numbers.
> Apple is a 40 year old company, and they're still raking in the dough from their original product category.
Are they, though? Aren't Mac sales insignificant compared to iPhone sales? Haven't the latest Macbooks suffered from significant feature regressions?
[citation needed]
> Haven't the latest Macbooks suffered from significant feature regressions?
No.
Unreliable keyboards and security chips that frequently crash the computer are feature regressions.
And there is no systemic issues with the security chips. We have entire floors of developers using MacBook Pros and no one has had “frequent crashes” from the T2 chip.
Well, let me rephrase that: sure, I get that dongles are annoying, and there are capital-I Issues with USB-C that need to be worked out. But the alternative to dongles is "never change hardware connectors." Unless you make the leap to USB-C by replacing every single peripheral and cable you own, you will probably need an adapter. And you may say that now is not the right time, and you might be right, but again: unless the entire market shifts virtually overnight, there is going to be a period where using a new connector is annoying, and is going to require dongles.
tl;dr: I'm happy to be a homesteader in Dongletown, baby.
So no, both were significant improvements from my perspective.
You're saying that having two successful products is only good when they have equal sales figures?
I don't know of a single company on the planet that would turn its nose up at a product doing $25 BILLION in sales.
iPhone sales are down, which is why Apple stock is down about 30% from its highs.
I'm not sure which you mean The Apple II product line, or desktop computing in general?
Either way, pretty sure neither would be considered their cash cow.
We've been going 16 years at this point, and we have bets out to 2150: http://longbets.org/11/
Is it? Is the $30 puck better than the Home assistant or does it just suck that much more in French than it does in English? (Not being snarky, genuinely asking)
It doesn't understand followup commands, the Hue integration is rotten bad, and the commands definitely have to be rigid. Things like "What were my meetings on the 12th of December" aren't understood.
Also having to say "OK google" and not being able to change that is so bad. At least "Hey Siri" is natural.
Absolutely it is. In general, my Siri usage is limited to opening Google Assistant, that's how bad it is. Also, "Hey Google" works as a command on most devices.
At least I know it's not listening to me all the time.
Do you really though?
Google admits its new smart speaker was eavesdropping on users https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/11/technology/google-home-mini...
And while Google responded quickly:
Google just permanently killed the feature that made some Home Minis eavesdrop https://www.the-ambient.com/news/google-home-mini-spy-proble...
who is to say what the next update brings?
The software fix pushed out simply disables the "push-to-talk" feature entirely.
Unless you think Google has some kind of motive to listen to completely randomly-triggered recording (and they don't; the data would be garbage from almost any standpoint I can imagine), your post is incredibly misleading at best and malicious fearmongering at worst.
Their current B people do hire the best of the best ... of B people. It like my current BigCo (we are straight C people) feels no talent shortage even right now in the Bay Area while also supposedly hiring only the best people - there is no shortage of C people. We enjoy our work/life balance while of course we can't even dream of producing anything even just slightly resembling Siri.
Apple could probably become as good as Google at its own game, but it would take a lot of effort and I don't think Tim Cook et al have the vision to move in that direction like Microsoft did.
I feel Apple will become more and more irrelevant as years pass. With a bandwidth singularity end user hardware will be irrelevant in 10-20 years from now and other companies like Google and Microsoft are slowly catching up in making great end user experiences.
Even their Maps are late, 7 years later since the first apology of Apple Maps they still aren't anywhere close to Google Map.
Oddly, even speech to text with GBoard on the iPhone is noticeably worse than on Android as well.
Also for a bit of fun, ask Siri for the population of Buffalo NY. I noticed because Siri also tells you that Buffalo is big, and then goes on to say...
For the longest time Chrome on iOS was just using WebKit/safari’s UIWebView then later WKWebView for rendering webpages, much like many other iOS apps that display web content. For various reasons the App Store rules have always banned third party browser rendering engines, I haven’t heard any change in this policy recently?
The only real advantage of Chrome on iOS was ancillary features like Google account bookmark/history sync etc if you are all in on Chrome elsewhere, which isn’t all that useful in the context of a link provided by Siri, for me at any rate. The feature that lets apps using WKWebView access your password/auto fill data only works with Safari on iOS as well, which is all the reason I need not to bother with the WebKit-wrapper rivals anyway.
The maps issue is significantly more annoying to me.
As far as the second question - yeah that one was weird. It said that the population was 69 but the text summary that it displayed was 269,000. It’s the only city that displayed that bug.
In my case, there were 9 McDonalds within a 10 mile radius.
In cases where there was only one location nearby, it took me right to it.
It's very hard for us to discuss Siri's internal state; by contrast it's easier to discuss Google's observable performance, which is to semantically differentiate between these two requests.
You can just ask Google, "Nearby McDonalds" and you'll get a list. "Go to the nearest McDonalds" and you get navigation.
“McDonalds” - gives me a list.
“Take me to the closest McDonalds” - brings up maps and starts navigating to the closest McDonalds.
After further experimentation. Siri doesn’t understand Nearest but does understand “closest” to mean that I don’t want a list.
My biggest frustration with my car's built-in navigation is that when I ask it for the "nearest" item, more than 50% of the time it tells me to make a U-turn because it picked the mathematically nearest item, rather than picking the conventionally nearest item.
There are all sorts of ways to handle this request, but Siri's is the laziest, and in doing so asks more of the user's attention. If you just say "McDonalds" to either voice assistant, you also get a list. From that perspective, it's as if Siri ignores any information that might be gleaned from the rest of your sentence.
Siri learns from us but we also learn from Siri, and we might find that some words don't matter. You mind as well just say "McDonalds" if Siri is going to ignore the rest.
Reminds me of some of the chatbots that I use to make. No matter how hard I tried to test them, they always worked as expected. The minute someone else used it, it fell apart. Subconsciously, I knew what would work and what wouldn’t.
Nice
With Hey Siri turned on, you will reliably get all three words. With it off, you will usually get Chuck or Truck, or sometimes FIRETRUCK depending on timing.
This seems to be for people who start talking before the Siri prompt is fully active like “Set <button> Timer for 5 minutes”.
But shows that Apple is typically pre-recording if not also pre-processing.
See comparison Siri Alexa google and Cortana: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/20/siri-on-homepod-vs-alex...
I fear the challenge will be one of perception. Speech is really a make-or-break first impression kind of technology, since speech is so personal. I'm afraid that Siri will need to become twice as better as the competition to regain the trust of users that it won't completely fail them, or even to just get them to retry it.
I wonder if, in the future, there will be some sort of marketing push called "Siri 2.0" or maybe even regular "releases" (even though I'm sure it's not updated on that kind of cadence). Since the technology is all invisible, there's no way to tell that something has changed, unlike a traditional OS, which changes its appearance even slightly.
It took me all of 3 minutes to create a Shortcut that lets me message my wife with my ETA at my house when I say "hey siri coming home" (or use the Siri activation in my car) and then "yes" when she asks for confirmation to send it. Takes my current location, finds the route to my house, grabs the time, and plops it into a custom message that I typed up that's sent to my wife's iPhone.
Siri is nowhere near the competition.
I think his contribution at that time was mainly clever ways to drastically scale up existing neural net techniques, but just scaling things up 100x or 1000x seems to be a large part of the magic of deep learning.
And TBH, it was him, who knows general computing from circuits to planet scale distributed systems, really enabled the AI as it today, at least inside Google.
To be clear, I'm not claiming he's not capable of the role at some point. I don't know one way or the other. But his transition from compilers to AI seems fairly recent.
If it’s just clever marketing, you have to wonder why marketing is working so well compared to the innovation that other companies are presumably doing.