Hacker News Reader

Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

This is totally unfounded. Their market-leading bokeh camera effect is powered by a “state of the art image recognition system” including custom silicon (the “neural engine”).

Siri has gotten a lot better especially at natural language recognition.[1] The HomePod for example is exceptionally good at detecting Hey Siri commands while loud music is playing. That’s all local machine learning processing coupled with a great mic array. It’s more the breadth of services that are the issue, but that’s not machine learning.

The music recs.. well you don’t cite anything. I can say the weekly For You new music mix works good for me.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/siri-vs-alexa-vs-google-assistant/

View on HN

I keep hearing that people noticed Siri getting better, but my experience is totaly different.

For example, how can it screw up something as simple as enabling alarms: https://ibb.co/vkYpGcq (this has happened multiple times to me).

Why most of the questions are answered with a google search link? Why it keeps randomly forgetting context (example: I tell her to wake me up at 1pm, then repeat just 1:01pm, and so on to add more alarms. Most of the times, it works, but sometimes it stops understanding what I want, even though the speech recognition is right and I’m saying the request in the same format as my previous requests, just with an incremented time).

I’m not saying other Apple products can’t use AI, just that Siri seems to be very low on their priority list (and I don’t blame engineering, this is something that comes from management).

I complained a few months ago that Siri had a tough time recognizing my accent heavy speech but these days it is better.

What you're describing on the HomePod is "ASR," automatic speech recognition, which is a separate function from natural language recognition. ASR is converting spoken language to (the correct) words, basically dictation; NLR is "I have these words, now what do I do with them." This is a distinction I've learned from working at Viv Labs, which is producing its own voice assistant. (Samsung's Bixby 2.0 is basically our Viv, and it's an entirely different product than the 1.0 version, which was basically a rebranded S-Voice.)

Having said that, I think Siri is better at NLR than it's often given credit for, and Alexa is much worse than it's often given credit for; Alexa's NLR seems less akin to its competitors than that of a 1980s text adventure, i.e., "use exactly this precise phrasing or you won't be able to [get the treasure | turn on your living room lights]". Amazon's real strength is in making it so damn easy to write Alexa skills and to forge deals with hardware/appliance vendors, which goes back to your "breadth of services" observation.

I'd add that Apple News has had a much better hit rate than Google News. It consistently has added new suggested categories based on my observed preferences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com