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Ixoth

ixoth.com

242 pointskevinburke43 comments

You know what's cool about Siri? Apple now has a vested interest in improving natural language processing artificial intelligence as fast as it can. I don't think there's ever been a commercial interest in that type of technology at this scale before. And they probably have more cash to throw at this kind of stuff than any other company on the planet. I will be extremely interested to see where this develops in the coming years. You can imagine upcoming WWDC events unveiling amazing new Siri developments.

Services like Ixoth may end up being able to develop into much more useful products in the future, once they don't have to rely on hacks like SMS responses.

I was thinking the other day how an Android equivalent of Siri could include some mechanism for mapping spoken queries to Intents. If someone could find a user friendly way to execute on this, any app could expose itself to voice commands from a centralized interface much the way it can expose data for search, etc.

This could be implemented as a third party app on Android by using the built in speech recognition, then doing something similar to Ixoth in order to map text queries to Intents. I don't know enough about iPhone development to say whether such a thing is possible there, but if not its hard to imagine such a thing hasn't been considered as a future Siri feature.

This blog post touches that subject: How to Integrate Siri with your App? - http://blog.roveb.com/post/11855331044/how-to-integrate-siri...

So I can hook up any web service that has a SMS offering to your service and have it interface with Siri?

Yesterday I wrote a blog post re: checking my bank balance using Siri (http://ryanspahn.com/siri-checks-bank-balance.html), as well as other services(Foursquare - though they need to simplify the process & steps).

After writing this post I thought there should be one service that interfaces with Siri(thru SMS) and all my favorite web services. If I'm not mistaken, I think you just created it?

That's pretty much it. We're just going to expose an API, you can do the rest, so you could use their normal APIs (if they have one)

I'm getting a phishing warning using Chromium trying to go to your site, you might want to get that looked at :-)

I am sorry that this article is not accessible anymore??? Google has blacklisted each URL name change(changed it six times) of this article I've created???

The article is written solely in HTML/CSS and only has two scripts within it (Intense Debate's script for their comment system & Google Analytics). All instances of this article have checked out fine when tested for malware or bad actors using the Google Chrome extension & Google Webmaster Tools. I have no ill intent. I love the Internet from desiging/coding sites to creating ideas on the web like http://sleep.fm to participating in my local start-up community.

It's very strange why this keeps getting blacklisted, as I am just trying to share a thought/idea I had with interested parties. If you are interested in reading the article i have it posted on my site @ ryanspahn.com

Re: your service I am glad others are thinking the same way. I will be using your service. Good luck!

Dang it, you just sold me an iPhone.

As far as I saw, the only Iphone specific detail was the ability to speak the message instead of typing it.

Or did I overlook something?

You can send SMS and email directly from the Siri panel, also Siri has been added to the system-wide keyboard and you can use dictation even in third-party apps.

Android already does more or less both of these things.

You can dictate to Android phones as well, just push the mic button on the standard keyboard.

http://ifttt.com/channels/sms

Could be a nice interface for working with services that exist as ifttt already has interfaces with a lot of services.

Neat stuff, qrush!

Some feedback: the order in which you introduce the concepts on the page seems backwards. You're starting with the "how" and ending with the "why."

I know this is just an MVP and you're focused on the tech types, but I, for one, had to read the page more than once to really 'get it.'

My humble suggestion:

1. Set the context with the Siri screenshot, which iPhone 4S users will recognize. ("Okay, I get this. We're sending a text with Siri.") 2. Next, demonstrate the value with the SMS-and-response screenshot. Hook the imagination. ("Wow, that's cool! How can I do that?") 3. Context established, hook in place, continue with the how-to screenshots, technical details, email signup.

Kudos again for the neat project. You may have just sold me a 4S, too!

Thanks nz, I too was trying to "get it", and I wanted to see if others would too. Definitely could use some clarification and I'll continue to refine the concept...once I get it in the hands of some more folks.

I'm missing something ... where is the intelligence in how your message gets translated to the hook?

As far as I can see the whole 'tell me the top story' bit it fluff ... isn't it just matching 'hacker news' against the SMS?

What happens when I want multiple actions for Hacker News? What if two people want to register different hooks for Hacker News?

Hasn't this stripped all the Siri style 'AI' out of the equation beyond the actual sending of the SMS?

Hooks will be defined per user, it just a simple match right now. MVP, right? :) Obviously there's a lot to figure out still, hence the beta.

Looks awesome (albeit, simple to make using twilio).

If this does get traction, one can imagine opening up a whole marketplace of endpoints that can expose all kinds of interesting Ixoth functionality.

What I'm really looking forward to is when Apple opens up API support for Suri. Suri with a whole ecosystem of apps would be mind blowing.

exactly, as with the AppStore in 2.0, Siri will really get off when 3rd party support is finally there

Neat. "ixoth" is a pretty unique name, pronunciation-wise. Anybody know if there have been studies done exploring the sound-space of voice recognition? E.g. if you could map typical sounds of (english) speech to some sort of dimensional space, which areas are dense and which are sparse?

I don't get it - is that because I don't have an iPhone or understand how Siri works or because I'm stupid?

yes.

So assume you have an iPhone 4S. Siri, the new voice activated assistant, can do all kinds of cool stuff, but it's sandboxed to the Apple-created uses. There is currently no public API... sort of.

Siri can send SMS messages, and SMS looks remarkably like a messaging queue. Given that, you have a basic messaging queue hook within Siri. So if your receiving endpoint happens to be an application, rather than another mobile phone, you need only to parse the input and take action.

This will not reach widespread adoption, however. The integration is too loose, IMO.

I love this but it would be really cool if there was already a sample set of commands, eg look up the value of a stock, top news item, price of an item on amazon. That would allow non technical people to use it and still allow technical people to develop their own.

My focus right now is tech folks, it's going to be an API. Maybe eventually I'll extract common actions performed, but I'd really just like it to be a general API service.

This is fantastic. It is still a work-around, which won't fit well with the UX, but it's a novel take! Really looking forward to some interesting webhooks.

How do you pronounce Ixoth?

>>How do you pronounce Ixoth?

  From the referenced page: It's pronounced "Icks-auth"

"Tell Ixoth to see the top story on Hacker News. It's pronounced "Icks-auth", and Siri picks up easily once our SMS number is added as a contact."

It's probably best if you read the article before asking a question that's answered within it.

Truthfully, it's a really bad name for a piece of software you're supposed to reference verbally.

Luckily, you can name it anything you want in your address book.

"Watson, please order me the usual from Grub Hub"

Presumably this was a design choice: "Ixoth" doesn't really sound like anything else, which means Siri is unlikely to confuse it with another name or command.

Yep, this exactly. I purchased the domain originally because I was going to write a roguelike game, but then I got an iPhone 4S :)

The name comes from a monster in Nethack, for the curious: http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Ixoth

This is so cool.

Really sweet hack

What really bothers me about Siri, is how Apple makes it tied to specific hardware. Technologically, there should be no reason why Siri-style actions are not available to every PC, and every smartphone.

Native platforms have been, and still are (thanks to Apple's success), the major roadblock to innovation.

Siri's servers were falling over just handling the people who had 4S devices in their hands, imagine unleashing all iPhone 4 and iPad 2 owners on their servers as well at the same time...

So far Apple has not come out and said that Siri will not be available on older devices (such as the iPhone 4 and iPad 2). I honestly believe that Siri is very much still considered a beta product by Apple and they are attempting to figure out how to make it scale on the backend.

Wouldn't it be a blow to 4S buyers if they release it for older versions of the iPhone?

I bought the iPhone 4S, upgraded from an iPhone 3G and I would be more than happy for more users to get Siri because it is absolutely fantastic. I would love to get it on my iPad 2 as well for example. If more people have Siri and use it, it will most likely improve faster, we will hopefully get API's to program against, and it will get better and better at understanding or processing commands.

I don't see how it would be a blow for iPhone 4S owners ... they got early access. The iPhone 4S pretty much stands on its own, the dual-core processor definitely helps, and the increased speed in graphics makes games and apps look absolutely fantastic.

Well, the selling point is definitely Siri, the only commercial Apple made for iPhone 4S is all about it. That's why I think it could be a blow.

No more than it's a blow to me when the movie I paid $10 in theaters for winds up in Redbox for $1. If your enjoyment of a device is predicated on its features not being available to others, you're in for a world of disappointment.

How did you read that on my words? That's not even a good comparison. A better comparison was when the original iPhone got its price reduced by $200. It was a blow and Apple acted accordingly. If Siri were to be available tomorrow for iOS 5 devices when most people didn't even get their iPhone 4S I would expect it to be a blow to a good part of the early buyers.

When Microsoft put speech recognition in XP, were you complaining? When Nuance made Dragon dictate? When Kurzweil made Voicepad Pro? When Google made the Android only Voice offering? Were you complaining they had hardware requirements or were platform or OS specific? But now Apple buy and release it in a way people like, easily a decade after this kind of technology was first commercially and suddenly that's why nobody else has innovated?

And your complaint isn't even accurate aside from that - DARPA funded SRI for military purposes, SRI finished their military contract and reformed to a commercial company and Apple bought them (I.e. innovation happenings) and in an interview with the company founder he said they had to struggle to get it to run on the 3GS and implied it would be much better on better hardware. Speculation is that it does voice recognition on the client (I.e. There are plausible technical reasons why not every smartphone could run the current implementation).

Having to differentiate their native platform drives innovation, its having to support the lowest common denominator and backwards compatibility which stifles it, and patents which roadblock it.

My Macbook Pro should be powerful enough to run the Siri software. But Apple doesn't let me use it because they only put it on a particular, expensive, smartphone.

Your comparison isn't valid.

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