Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The brilliance of Siri isn't the voice interface or the replies using text-to-speech -- it's just the name. People feel they are talking to another person, not a phone or a computer or a google. People understand Siri approximates a person, so they can interact with it informally and somewhat personally.

You see it in all the news coverage. People refer to Siri as a person. It gets into your brain. Have you seen normal people showing off Siri to their friends? They are giddy with excitement over having a personal robot voice in their pocket that knows them by name.

I feel google doesn't employ anybody who has an average family or knows average people. Normal people don't know how things work. What's a "Google Now?" You'd have to look up a definition. It's about ten different things jumbled together under an Enterprise-Grade Naming Convention product umbrella.

Look at the Google Now product intro -- "Google Now has prepared an alternate route for your commute." People have to learn "Google Now" is a product and/or service that does specific things. People simply understand what Siri is after seeing someone else use it for a few seconds.

Even the Google Now tagline requires a level of mental disambiguation: "...with the predictive power of Now..."

> People simply understand what Siri is after seeing someone else use it for a few seconds.

Well, they understan what it should be, but it is so far from reaching that goal it's ridiculous.

Remember the introduction of Siri? It was presented as your personal assistant, understanding your commands and making sense of everyday speech.

So far from the truth.

Personally, I think that's a little gimmicky. I think it was very smart of Google to not differentiate this too much, but let people think that this smarter AI thing, is actually still "Google". So in the future people will just refer to "Google" when doing stuff like this.

It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.

>It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly what the future will bring us as SIRI improves. People talking to it more or less the same you see them talking to their pets now.

It's difficult to observe someone talking to Siri. I believe Apple preemptively realised that people wouldn't like to talk aloud to their phones in public (and in the process revealing their personal requirements/plans to anyone in ear shot). The much better method of using Siri in public is with the handset against the ear.

In public it's much easier, more accurate and far less obvious to use this other method of activating Siri: When the screen is on, picking up the phone and putting the handset to ones ear will activate Siri, but far more discretely that the usual full volume activation. Any casual observer won't even realise that the user is engaging Siri, let alone talking to a robot.

This is also part of the problem with the "accuracy" studies of Siri in public places. It's just non sensical to be shouting at your phone over street noise, of course the accuracy is decreasing in this environment. Not even the users voice is the same in this environment. However when using the handset to the ear method: the accuracy remains acceptably high, and no one has to look silly publicly announcing their dinner plans.

Perhaps Google need to emphasise that you can "ask" Google questions, not just make "searches".

If you watch normal people using Google, you'll notice that they do this already.

Heck, I suppose I do, too.

I do it too. Not so much because I want google to parse the question and answer it, but often because I want to find forums/etc where someone has already asked the same question and hopefully got an answer

Siri in portuguese is crab. So the "People feel they are talking to another person" doesn't apply everywhere.

Siri doesn't support Portuguese, or any Latin languages other than French at this time. iOS 6 adds Spanish and Italian, and I assume Portuguese can't be far behind.

So what? My point is that Siri doesn't apply as a valid/common "person" name in some languages and used the meaning in portuguese as an example.

I thought you misspelled "crap"...

Well, now we just need Google-tan...

Interesting point. And I am curious how the average joe would answer the following question:

"What is the difference between Google Now and Google Instant ?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com