Siri for everyone, with Pioneer's Zypr API | Hacker News Reader

Siri for everyone, with Pioneer's Zypr API

arstechnica.com

53 pointsllambda17 comments

Direct link to product site. (working as of Monday 11/7 2:00p CST): http://www.zypr.net/

if they can't keep up a demo website, there is no reason any developer should trust pioneer to invest their time in testing / using zypr...

haha, I saw the site was down and thought... "my app will not use an api from a company that cannot keep a static site up"

This is why I don't get the fuss everyone is making about Siri in relation to being an "{x}-killer". While the tech is impressive, it's going to be reproduced very easily- Google could dedicate a tiny amount of their resources to it and have a Siri competitor on Android within a couple of months.

While this is true, first to mainstream market mindshare is important - also, allot of people love their iphones, and siri isn't just a search tool, it integrates with the local phone services like geo fence reminders and app API's. And we know how big that app store is.

I agree with your later points, but Apple themselves have demonstrated over and over that "first to mainstream market mindshare" is not important. Just because they're first on the market with Siri doesn't mean that the leader of this niche will still be Siri in two years.

And they're really not first on the market anyhow; look at the existing Android application or the first Siri iPhone app. I think Pioneer's Zypr website is pretty clear that they're relying on developers to use their API and create apps to use it for integration. This is just another open-model answer to Apple's typically closed-model approach.

By market mindshare, I mean first to make an impact and delight the user.

I didn't say first to market.

I guess one reason people see siri as a threat to google is that if voice based interfaces take off, no matter who does it, there is less scope for advertisements - which are more annoying when spoken out loud. It's still too soon to say, of course, maybe voice apps will always be a smaller share or google could possibly find another business model.

Whilst I do agree it changes things, this type of interface doesn't necessarily rule out advertising.

At the end of the day, someone needs to pay the bills. With Siri, you're arguably paying the bill when you give your money to Apple.

A future free 'Siri', from Google or elsewhere, might have to rely on advertising money. A lot of Siri's functionality is search - there's no reason why Siri couldn't serve up sponsored results when you make a search just as we're used to with more traditional search engines.

Yes, as long as one still needs to look at the screen there is still scope for ads. On-screen ads, if they are small enough, aren't annoying and sometimes they are useful too. There will be some interesting dynamics regarding how ad money is distributed among all the api backends.

But if voice response is used a lot, then ads(in the audio) will be sufficiently annoying for many people to switch to paying the equivalent small amount every month for ad-free services (which will have to be be distributed to the backend providers using micropayments). If this kind of service works out, then the mechanism exists for getting rid of the on-screen ads too, whether or not people actually use it. I wonder how much a the ad-value for a typical user is every month. A very rough calculation 30 billion in google's revenue/(say 200 million users * 12 months) gives 12.5 dollars/month. I think this should be an upper bound on the average, and that there will be a large variance - users who consume drugs will have larger value for advertisers, for instance.

That's one of the things that we're exploring over at Zazu (voice-enabled hyper-contextual advertising) -- we've stumbled upon some really interesting things that happen when you combine voice, context, and advertising; one of which is that our users have 8x more interactions with advertisements than they would any other mobile advertising platform.

Do they enjoy having 8x more interactions with advertisements? Or it is inescapable?

We'd hope so. We're not trying to advertise to you -- only tell you about something that we think you'd like.

There is an API freely available on .NET (assuming you have a Microsoft Windows OS) for voice recognition and text to speech. There are even multiple language kits.

If you are interested I wrote an article about it a few weeks ago: http://blog.databigbang.com/voice-recognition-content-extrac...

I built a Zypr clone for software development -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214934

Does anybody know how deep their natural language processing is? i.e. Will it understand when I ask 'List all of my Twitter followers how also follow John Doe?'

But does it work? Siri's main advantage is that it does most of the time. We've had speech recognition for a long time, but it just wasn't reliable.

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