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Comment by mayanksinghal | Hacker News Reader

As is pointed out in another comment here, Google has been working on Voice recognition for a long time now and had voice commands prior to Siri. It was not conversational like Siri, that was mentioned int the article as well - but to have a conversational AI is not something new either (there are probably hundreds of these).

Secondly, voice recognition and conversational AI is not a new product that was invented by Apple. You seem to overestimate the importance of Siri in terms of the originality it brings. It indeed seems awesome to have and interact with, I have not done that yet. I have an Android, and I am not even waiting for something similar because I find it unnecessary to have one and it might be intrusive to use in presence of others. So probably for the few who are like me, it is not a killer feature - not even close.

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I was aware that Apple didn't invent Siri. They brought the company which made it then tidied it up. The point still is that Apple recognised its use in one of their products, they took the punt and made it happen.

I am also an Android user. This feature isn't something I need.

Like I said in my original post, it probably isn't how it seems. The fact remains though that Apple saw an opportunity with voice commands on its mobile platform. Google may have been working on voice technology before hand but was it for Android?

Google is doing great on other things. Chrome, Chromebooks (maybe released a few years too early but they took a risk on it) and driverless cars.

With Android, I have yet to see it really innovate by itself. I should say that I do not follow Android development. I am just an Android user who casually looks at an iPhone from time to time to compare the two.

They didn't merely tidy it up, they added hardware support and needlessly broke the version people already had that worked without it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3215420

yeah definitely -- Google Voice Search and all the work they put into building up the database/quality of voice recognition has been in place for years. I've tested voice search with many of the Siri-like statements and commands and they all work. The only thing is the device doesnt' talk back, seems like that means they're way past 50% complete on this 'feature'.

it might be intrusive to use in presence of others

In my experience, it essentially looks the same as voice actions, except with a much higher success rate. The least socially intrusive action is whatever lets me transition back to the conversation the soonest, and voice actions win in terms of speed for a lot of use cases. Also, if you absolutely have to turn to your phone with someone else around, it's kind of courteous to telegraph exactly what you're doing.

You're ignoring pretty much all the situations that would stop me from wanting to use it: The vast majority of the time I use my phone for something other than conversations is spent in the presence of colleagues, family or commuting in situations where I would not be interacting with them, but where talking to my phone would potentially disturb them. Voice actions is not an alternative - I never use them for exactly this reason. The alternative is my phones touch interface.

If I "had to" interact with my phone in the middle of a conversation, it might be different, but that's a fringe case I very rarely encounter.

I can't get my friends to shut the hell up when I'm using voice search or music match software. I say "hang on a second" /beep/ "search for polar be" "dude we should get Taco Bell" "ars in Michigan".

"Now searching for taco bears in Bell, Michigan"

Yeah they held back their perfect Siri-beating tech because they were sure nobody wanted to talk to their phone.

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