Analyst: Siri more than just speech recognition

It's not "just" playing catch up. It's partly playing catchup, and partly expanding on it. And to be fair, the credit should go to the Siri team more so than to Apple as a whole. They innovated and Apple bought them and added polish.

So why are some Android users less than impressed at the gushing over Siri? Because we've been able to do many of the things you see in the video demonstrations for a long time now. Some examples:

"Navigate to <local restaurant name>"

"Text <person> <some message>"

"What is the weather in New York?"

"What is the time in Paris?"

Siri integrates more features in a polished way and also adds context to the queries. By context, I mean that the interpretation of the next request can depend on the previous requests.

While little has been released on the actual technical constructs of these systems, I would imagine that they work somewhat similar to this:

1 Translate voice to list of text interpretations. 2 Guess an intent based on each text interpretation, combining the translation and interpretation score. Pick the action of highest score.

The intents need to be hand coded. Siri likely modifies the second step by allowing intent inference to be based on the last command or couple of commands in addition to the current request. That is the innovation, and I use the word innovation lightly as I'm sure the idea has been thought of in academic circles.

A lot of people seem to think "you can throw anything at it" and I seriously doubt that is true. The library of intents might be large enough to fool some people, though. It isn't revolutionary, it's a well executed incremental improvement on what we already have. It's worth mentioning that there are also other applications such as Vlingo that try to expand the capabilities already present on current day systems.

None-the-less, Apple's excellent marketing team seems to have convinced people that this is revolutionary and that Apple should be credited with yet another huge world changing innovation. The media needs it's heros and there can't be heros unless the valuable contributions of the many people whose work led to this point are forgotten, marginalized, or simply reattributed.

I would not consider this a "catch up", no one knows who develop this tech first. Google probably heard about Apple's plan and is able to bake it into Android first. Look at Google TV. Google get it into the market first, but it was a half cooked product.

Think of them as datapoints in a large survey. If you run the Teacher's Union Pension Fund with $10B, you can't just trust your internal team or one or two large advisors. You want to get as much information as possible about all the sectors of the economy, locally and globally. So instead of hiring 1000 people to do the research for you, you pay 10-20 different companies to access their newsletters, briefs, and suggestions, each of which is written by an analyst. If 75% of analysts say "Buy APPL" while 5% say "Sell APPL", rest being neutral, you can get an idea of what the general market sentiment is.

To put it simply, instead of asking Gruber what he thinks of Apple management, you ask HN, Slashdot, and Ars readers. Certainly none of us has connections like Gruber but it is "safer" in the sense that it is easier to justify to a board/shareholders why you lost money on Apple.

>you can throw anything at her

The word 'her' surprised me - 'it', surely?

But I guess this just goes to show, once again, how easily anthropomorphisation comes to people; if the experience is good enough that customers start thinking about the software as 'her' rather than 'it', maybe Apple will have a hit on their hands.

I'm actually only concerned about the speech-to-text accuracy. It's the foundation on top of which all this AI stuff is built. If it's not better than Google's, the AI fancy pants stuff is just going to be another layer of complexity that will screw things up.

I don’t think it’d be fast enough. Even in damn-near-perfect signal conditions I have a RTT over 100 ms when I’m on AT&T 3G. That and how lame would it be if Siri ceased functioning entirely (not just the maps/other network-requiring bits) when you had no coverage?