The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
There are some reliability problems, but I think the main problem is that Siri still lives firmly in the AI uncanny valley. Which is exacerbated by the way that Apple presents Siri, i.e. as AI.
With a clearly defined set of commands, you can be confident about what's going to work and what isn't. And if you try something that isn't a command, you relegate the failure to "oh, that's not a command." But with Siri, because it's presented as an anthropomorphized, intelligent agent, it makes the failure feel a lot more brittle and frustrating.
For example, "What's my next appointment?" works, but "When's my dentist appointment?" doesn't. Why not? Well, I know why not, and you probably know. It's because it's really, really, really not AI, and unless we make some kind of breakthrough on strong AI, it's not going to be for a long time. But my wife doesn't know that. All she knows is that Siri is cool when it works, but is actually pretty stupid a lot of the time. Which means she's not reliable, which is important because Siri is most useful when it must be most reliable, like when you're in a rush.
Apple will certainly continue to add commands and make Siri smarter and smarter, but this will necessarily be incremental, and that failure will always feel brittle to lay users.
[edit: btw, John Siracusa talks a bit about this on the most recent Hypercritical: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/39-quasimodo-backpack]
• That Apple has a really solid plan for this feature, and we're only seeing the very beginning of it now — the phase where we are introduced to the interface, before they blow the lid off and open it up to every imaginable use-case.
• That it will be significantly improved before most people ever buy a supporting device, so the handful of customers being burned by the somewhat-lacking version 1 product are vastly outnumbered by the people who get their first taste of the mature, fully-realized vision.
While it's easy to add more voice actions, making advances on the underlying technologies will require additional decades of hard computer science research. Apple, having no R&D division, will not likely even contribute to this.
Unless your main complaint is a lack of canned question types that it can answer, you won't likely see the fast improvements you are expecting in the next few years.
Many people are speculating about how wonderful Siri will be in the (near) future; I'd submit that the evidence suggests that it has pretty much come out of the gate with all the power it's going to have for the foreseeable future. Natural language querying seems to have been stuck at the same plateau for a long time, just like voice recognition technology has been.
Just making sure the weak AI is clear about its interpretation through explicit confirmation ("Sir, I understand that you would like to launch the missiles at Russia in 15 minutes, am I correct?" "No. Siri, please book lunch with my sisters at the Russian restaurant on the 15th.") would probably make up for a lot.
And yes, I know that all of the smart are not in my pocket, but rather in the cloud.
I'm sure you're right about the other deficiencies. "Almost perfect" is very strong, after all. Still, it's really excellent, and in my experience is much better than it was just a few years ago.
With Siri, however, I'm not interested in it being a person, but something that can help set reminders, timers, appointments, and dictate text messages while I drive. That's huge for me. Rather than breadth, if Apple focuses on depth then the problem is more tractable because you have more context with which to reduce complexity.
Apple's R&D is applied, so it will have a product focus and get to market quicker. If they can make Siri really good at a specific number of tasks then people will understand what it is good for, rather than be disappointed, and it will improve faster.
Everybody with an itch to scratch and time on their hand would help to incrementally improve Siri for 1000's of specialist applications.
Apple sold more iPhone4s than all previous iPhones combined. I expect that iPhone4S will sell even more. Releasing Siri as a beta to such a large customer base is not the same as releasing the "somewhat-lacking version 1" iPhone, and then iterating it forward.
I can verify that my iPhone 4S is polling the proximity sensor continuously, activating Siri whenever the phone is brought to the ear, while my 3GS only appears to poll the proximity sensor during phone calls.
[Edit] After further testing, it does seem to be a combination of gyroscope and proximity sensor, as you do need to perform the motion of bringing the phone to a position with its front facing somewhere between sideways and upwards and its bottom somewhere between straight down and sideways on its edge while covering the upper portion of the device to activate Siri. It does not work if you're laying down horizontally on your back or on your side, nor when you bring it to a straight vertical for example. It seems to have a fairly narrow tolerance for the angle to which the phone must be brought in order to activate Siri, that being the angle at which you naturally hold a phone to make a call while sitting or standing straight up. [/Edit]
Push the power button to turn on the screen. Hold the phone to your ear. Wait for the be-beep sound, played quietly through the ears-only speaker. Speak. Keep the phone against your ear. Siri will respond through the ears-only speaker.
Now, if Apple could buy IBM...
Just like FaceTime and Garageband and iMovie before it, Siri will help Apple to sell more devices.
And I didn't even need to write dozens of paragraphs to explain that.
Apple isn't good at services; iCloud may be the most satisfactory result after a long list of so-so and downright terrible attempts. There's no technology here that either Google or Microsoft couldn't do better.
They really didn't do AI until a few weeks ago either. And they didn't do music until they did music. Would you really be shocked if one of the headlines tomorrow morning was that Duck Duck Go was acquired by Apple?
I'm not trying to be a contrarian, either. I use an Android phone, but only because the iPhone isn't offered on my carrier of choice. I love Apple. But I don't see how Siri ("Finally") gives them occasion to undermine Google.
My complaint with the quotes and blog post is somewhat different. They both seem to claim Siri will revolutionize search. But Siri isn't about search at all, it's about taking spoken words and turning them into an appropriate text based search query. It still relies on databases and search engines to do the actual searching. At most, it can add a bit of extra context to the query that you might not be able to infer from the text alone. It also represents a unified interface to several domain specific databases. If anything, Siri is a complementing interface to existing search technologies. Buying a bunch of databases won't let Apple solve the problem of search.
It's Google's interest to make the best, easiest way for you to get your personal data in and out of their system.
Genuine question - wasn't there, myself.
The fact that Siri is UI and not a feature is exactly why Microsoft and Google and many other service providers should worry about it - it commoditizes the back-end and creates a new interaction point around which Apple, and currently only Apple, is creating business value. Both Microsoft and Google have technology cards to play in this area, but neither has deployed a new user-interface in the way that Apple recently has. I would expect them to each go after a solid play in this area, in the same way that Microsoft responded to the Wii with Kinect - with a strong competitive urgency. Whether or not they are successful in their response is something we'll know in time.
I disagree that this is imply "voice input". Siri takes a step beyond simple data input and manipulation and provides a new interface to several system functions and services in a cohesive and purposeful fashion.
If, as you contend, that Google is well positioned to respond to Siri, then they probably will - I'm not sure you actually read my original comment - I had pretty clearly indicated that both Microsoft and Google have assets that they can deploy in response to Siri.
This is why it is so hard to do hardware and software together. There are few examples of long term success in hardware/software and Apple is certainly not one of them (except in the '00s). IBM is one. But, if one area of the business takes off, the pressure to drop the other is immense (see Thinkpad and HP's current flail-ures). As XCode users will recall, there are also issues with adding significant value to past purchasers: if you paid $100 for a product that had $20 of awesome value added later by an upgrade, the company who took your $100 of cash should only be able to recognize $80 of revenue now.
I think that implicit in Gruber's argument is the idea that just buying Apple's devices isn't radically more expensive than the competitors. I've heard this attributed to Tim Cook, that lots of Apple devices are now roughly price-equivalent with other brands, but with so many other features.
BS, iCloud has paid upgrades, and I imagine those paid upgrades make the rest of the model break even or better, just like DropBox. It's not ad-model vs. devices-model, it's freemium product tacked onto device sales, further enhancing margins.
Glib, but wrong.
Sure, iTunes Match or syncing several devices directly to iCloud might induce a heavy user to pay for more, but iCloud remains a bona-fide free service for the vast majority of its customers.
Anyhow, since if you have a 4S you're going to play with Siri, I've found that it's really quite useful even when not in a hands-free situation like driving. I've found it very useful for setting reminders faster than I would be able to manually, which I found quite surprising. I'm looking forward to finding more things like that in the future.
Remind me to... (like you said) Wake me up at/in... Call [name in my contacts] Call [place not in my contacts]. Siri looks up business for you. Note [something I want to make a note of]
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
-When you use web search on iphone which ad network do you see ads from?
You do not buy an iphone to avoid seeing search texts as you still see them