Okay, Google, you officially beat Siri

The author takes this as an example of Google Now being very smart and learning from his behavior. It knows he watches TV at night so it provides him the identification feature during that time period. It doesn't provide it to him during the day, because it knows he isn't usually watching TV during the day (at least this is the author's assumption).

I take away a different message from this example and it is part of the reason I am very skeptical of software like Siri or Google Now.

Fundamentally I believe the one of the most important features of a software application is that it is predictable. When I do 'X', I expect the program to do 'Y' always. If it can't do 'Y' because of certain situations, I should get an explicit, informative error message.

The author's TV example is an illustration of deep unpredictability. It is quite possible that he is right and there are powerful learning algorithms driving the Google Now's behavior in this case. But all I see is unpredictability.

Yes, I want to customize and shape software to my own identity and patterns. But unless I control that process, I am likely to become very frustrated, very fast as a software application changes under my feet.

The first thing that amazed me was that Google understood what I meant by vidyarthi bhavan! Note vidyarthi bhavan is a generic phrase in many Indian languages which just means 'student building.' In Bangalore, it refers to a specific restaurant in Gandhi Bazar famed for its masala dosas. And I bet there are plenty of people who live in Bangalore right now and don't know about this restaurant. The contextual knowledge here is amazing. And it wasn't just geolocation, I was about 15km away from Gandhi Bazar at that point. And Bangaloreans will know corresponds to an eternity given the traffic situation. And the software did all this by recognizing a phrase consisting of two words, both of which are not in English!

That moment was an epiphany for me, it the precise moment that I realized that personal digital assistants are here, and they actually work.

Marcio Cyrillo is the director of marketing at CI&T, who work for Google:

http://www.ciandt.com/us-en/about-cit/partnerships

The key use for me is responding to texts or making phone calls while driving. Being able to say "Call home" is really great, but the really annoying thing is that it I can't appear to force it to use speakerphone. Why is such a small feature unavailable to me? Also, the response time for Siri is extremely slow, and the responses are far too verbose. I wish you could do things like adjust the speaking speed, etc.

The other thing is Apple should have allowed people to integrate their apps with Siri, but it doesn't seem like it's possible. I would love to launch some apps verbally, but Siri isn't useful enough to do that.

Sure, it's clever enough to figure out "I'm locked out of my house" to mean call a locksmith, like the ad shows, but other than what I mentioned above, and setting timers and alarms verbally, it has become almost complete useless to me.

I was visiting Hawaii and Google Now popped up saying that there has been an earth quake in Vancouver and there is an expected tsunami within 2 hours in Hawaii. I was just about falling sleep at the time. I got up, checked the TV and sure enough there was an expected tsunami. The expected water elevation was 3 feet and we were at 30 feet.

Another time it popped up to tell me that my flight was cancelled the day the Korean 777 crashed at SFO.

I have disabled Google Now and Location Services (the service that tracks your location and also sucks a lot of battery life) on my phone.

[1]: http://apcmag.com/Content.aspx?id=3786

More so than that, I don't want to invest a piece of my life into a service, when Google has a track-record for either A) abandoning the product, or B) mucking it up. Let's talk about the future, where Google Now feels like a human secretary in its capacity for intelligence. One day you ask it to schedule an appointment for a Friday lunch. Instead of the usual friendly acknowledgement, (s)he asks you if you'd like to share this appointment on Google Plus. Suddenly you can't make reservations at a restaurant, without having a Google Plus profile. They wanted to abate abuse of the system by linking reservations to real people. Now you have to "fire" your secretary, and spend weeks training up a new one. And (s)he'll never be as good as the old one.

Hopefully you understand the point I'm making. It wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the tendency of all these modern services to form their own little monopolies. Take YouTube for example. I want to switch away from YouTube. But the content creators I love don't have their content available elsewhere. We talk about all the freedom our modern internet enabled society brings ... but yet most of what we create these days gets linked inextricably with some walled garden.

I want a technology like Google Now, but I want the data it learns to be stored in an open format which I can port around as I see fit. I want to be married to my data, not to a service provider.

Having said all that, I know my dream won't come true for quite some time. Non-trivial technology almost always breeds walled gardens, due to the expense required to develop and maintain them. We likely won't see open standards here until the technology is old enough to be implemented well in an open source project.

I understand that he isn't personally concerned by this, but I feel that a lot of people would be scared by things like this.

How long before those "personal assistant" start influencing and controlling our decisions then our lives ? The stasi or the eye of moscow would have love theses devices and probably made them mandatory.

http://i.imgur.com/CoKDEVh.png

I would never trade these informations about me for some extra convenience.

To me, it's always been a choice, no matter which service I use (paid or free) I am not going to naively believe that for one second my information won't be "abused." When someone says, "XYZ is collecting data on you" the obvious [and always correct] retort is "so is your XYZ provider; or at the very least the NSA is making them." The questions should rather be "who is going to do the least harm with your data?", "who will try to help you the most with the data that they have collected about you?" and "who will make a competent effort to fight for your privacy on your behalf?" From what I have been reading lately, Google gets the best scores - which is why they will continue to trusted with what I choose to share over the internet. Technology should get a job done and then get out of the way as quickly as possible - if "whoring" out my personal information to someone is the path to putting technology back into its rightful place, then so be it.

That's an interesting way to put it. One could also say that Google Now is a great continuation of Google Voice Search. Or a great extension to Google Search. But of course it's also ok to say it's a response to Apples response to these technologies. Probably makes a better headline as well.

Siri is a voice interface that doesn't really do anything preemptively.

Neither of them have the ability to "program" via voice the way Plexi does. http://plexivoice.com/