> Six years later, the technology giant is struggling to find its voice in AI.
I know that this is the most common approach to the situation but the article -as many other articles that have argued this before- provides no proof other than analysts speaking in broad strokes.
I use Siri, Alexa and Assistant several times a week if not everyday and I'd hesitate a lot before saying that Siri is behind. Alexa is more responsive but it's domain is also more narrow. Siri does a pretty good job when I dictate a message or want to set a timer. It's limited, sure, but so are the other assistants I use. I might be the odd case, but speech recognition of Siri vs Assitant is pretty comparable in my experience.
Moving onto services. Google Photos is outstanding, yes. But I fail to see any other example that proves the big advantage other players have over Apple in the ML or AI field.
Am I missing something? I feel like a lot of these articles argue their view from the experience they got from Siri 5 years ago.
I don't know if that's your case or not, but I feel like English-speakers living in English-speaking countries dealing with only other English-speakers may never experience the misery of using Siri in other languages.
If I set it to, say, Portuguese or French, its capabilities are greatly diminished. Even simple tasks as "play a song by Pearl Jam" are impossible because Siri will try to find some Portuguese phrase that sounds remotely like "pearl jam". If I set it to English, then I can't use it to send a text to my wife (in Portuguese) or get directions to local streets (named in French). Also people's names.
Google Assistant at least allows me to tell it that I speak those other languages so if I speak in any of them, it will understand as such. I can say "play Pearl Jam" in English, "envie uma mensagem para minha esposa" in Portuguese or "trouve-moi le boulevard laurier" in French and Google Assistant will get what language I'm using. It's a big help. Not perfect, but at least it's usable.
This is "The Texas Problem". If I set the phone to english I can't say "give me directions to 'Taqueria Numero Uno'" and if I set it to spanish I can't say "donde esta el 'Wal-Mart' mas cercano" ... at least that was the case 2-3 years ago. Just this 5 de Mayo it got tripped up with "walk a moly" instead of "guacamole"
I have used Siri faithfully from 2011 til about the start of this year where I bought a google home.
Siri is flat out dumb and frustrating to use comparatively in terms of only understanding 85 percent of my queries vs. Google Home understanding 97 percent.
It seems to me Apple has not taken all their hordes of cash and used it to up the AI game. Looks like they are solely focused on the present while competitors are building the future in which they foolishly try to catch up with.
Like last weeks WWDC they debuted the AR kit but did not bother to create an amazing/innovate AR app to showcase and get the masses excited for AR and their possible upcoming AR gear.
>> Like last weeks WWDC they debuted the AR kit but did not bother to create an amazing/innovate AR app to showcase and get the masses excited for AR and their possible upcoming AR gear.
Why would they announce an app for supposed upcoming AR product before announcing the actual product? You announce the developer kit 6 months before that happens, get them working on apps, and then when you announce your AR product there are lots of apps, not just an in-house one, ready to go. Even if an AR specific product doesn't launch soon they've brought a good AR API to devs a few months before iOS 11 - and when it does (if developers take advantage of the API's) millions of people will be using AR daily on their iOS devices. Right now I know absolutely nobody using AR on any platform. That's going to change very quickly and an in-house app won't make a bit of difference.
> Like last weeks WWDC they debuted the AR kit but did not bother to create an amazing/innovate AR app to showcase and get the masses excited for AR and their possible upcoming AR gear.
It's a developer conference not a product launch, so of course it focused on the code rather than "getting the masses excited". The point is that developers can now spend the next few months creating those AR applications to impress people before iOS 11 with ARKit is launched to the public.
Yeah but they showed new features in iMessage, the camera app and etc. all copycat ideas.
They could have built an AR feature into the camera app to show they are not just followers of all other companies who innovate they still are innovators. Further to showcase and get the masses excited about AR.
I feel this fundamentally misunderstands how each of their AI's work.
You're describing an interface problem. Google's AI is extremely good at recognizing speech in comparison to Siri but that's a wholly different thing to deep understanding.
Siri is a more advanced AI in many ways due to it's understanding of intents. Google's is much more command based (under the hood). However Apple's speech recognition is letting it down here. Intents are a much more sophisticated way to interact with an AI than Google's command based structure but they are correspondingly more complex to integrate and you realistically need to infer things more from the user (which Apple needs to get better at).
I don't disagree that Apple needs to step up their game with how people interact with Siri, but it's a perceptual issue with the interface not with the underlying AI.
(source - have discussed these exact issues with one of the founders of Nuance).
> A recent study […] asked the major voice assistants 5,000 general knowledge questions
General knowledge questions is just one of the many things you can use voice assistants for. It's well known that Siri is the worst at general knowledge questions, but that doesn't mean Siri is the worst digital assistant.
This morning I told my Google Home "Can you turn your volume all the way up?" and it did it. It maxed the volume, not just turned it up a little bit. To me, this indicates that the Google Assistant is actually pretty good at understanding intent and not just repeating exact commands. Or maybe _I'm_ just misunderstanding your definition of 'commands' and 'intents'.
This is where a good UI can obscure the underlying thing though. Google is trying to find intent via the text of speech and that's one way to go about it for sure. It's totally valid. It's more limited, but it'll work great if there is a command that it can match it to.
But there has to be an underlying single command that is "turn volume up"
With an intent based system you can chain complex intents together and the result is the behavior of those intents interaction.
It's... ugh, I'm explaining this poorly.
Think of intents as building blocks to create something from whereas commands are just specific things. I wish I could explain this better.
I don't really understand your distinction between intents and commands. I've created apps that leverage a variety of bot frameworks, and most of them seem to fall under your "command" criticisms, but are labeled as intents. I think I understand the heart of your argument which is akin to saying google handles intents / actions as if it were filling inputs on a web form that ultimately goes to an api for response generation.
Having said that, I don't know how you can say that Siris backend is much better from an intent perspective without being able to leverage it properly because of the shortcomings related to the UI. From what I've seen, it doesn't even handle context well. Now it sounds like Siri will be used to do proactive things which is certainly new and different from Google Assistant. Yet, I suspect that logic is just being branded as Siri because it is a push to label Siri as your intelligent assistant as opposed to the weird robot thing you can use to check the weather
The power to create connections between things of the underlying system is greater.
Basically if Apple actually manages to get the voice recognition part down (so it parses intent/structure rather than just pure words) it'll be very powerful.
Right now Apple has a frontend that is more suitable for a command-based system and Google has a frontend that is better for am intent based system.
It's easier to improve the frontend than create a better backend though. So that's the competitive trade-off that Google has made.
I actually think it was smart of Google, and quite un-Apple like of Apple to do it the way they did. Usually they are very focused on the interface as well.
Then again, at the time, Siri was quite good at that. It's just Google focused on it (clearly).
Ultimately Siri is a chatbot, and the pushback against Siri is a pushback against expectations with chatbots. The movie "Her" is still utter fantasy to mankind.
It's a massive stretch to call voice recognition AI, and the recognition leap that happened recently is not so much better from what was built into the early OS X versions. Apple's largest AI project that I've seen so far has been music recommendations on apple music.
Siri is obviously behind Google Assistant on general knowledge queries. It seems like if Siri doesn't understand something, it falls back to unhelpfully searching the web, something that is not useful if you can't look at your phone. Assistant on the other hand attempts (with decent accuracy) to extract a useful answer to your question, and reads it back to you.
For me, Siri is horribly behind. I've gone to the point of installing Google on my iPhone and using it even though it's a struggle to activate it compared to Siri.
My big problem with Siri is that I have to time when I start talking. Also, her voice recognition is awful in noisy settings.
> My big problem with Siri is that I have to time when I start talking.
What do you mean? You can just say "Hey Siri, blah blah blah" and Siri will pick up the "blah blah blah" just fine.
If you're adding an artificial delay after "Hey Siri", waiting for her to respond before continuing, then you're just making it harder. Just speak conversationally.
>If you're adding an artificial delay after "Hey Siri", waiting for her to respond before continuing, then you're just making it harder. Just speak conversationally.
I actually find this frustrating and I'm surprised Apple went this way given their usual commitment to humanistic interaction design. When I'm addressing someone in real life, I call out their names and wait for acknowledgement that they're listening before rattling off questions at them.
The fact that Siri doesn't acknowledge it's listening or even give you a visual indicator that it's attention has been caught (like a person does by making eye contact) makes interaction with it feel strange and unnatural.
It's especially weird when you're in a room with multiple "Hey Siri" capable devices. If I call out "Hey Siri" I'd like to know whether I should be speaking at my iPhone, my iPad, my girlfriends iPhone, or a hypothetical HomePod. Which ones should I direct my voice at and expect a response from? All? None? Some? Can I tell my girlfriend's iPhone to go away because I'm talking to my phone right now? I'd like to. . .
> The fact that Siri doesn't acknowledge it's listening or even give you a visual indicator that it's attention has been caught
Yes it does. It makes a very distinct sound when it starts listening, and the screen itself transitions to the Siri screen and shows the animating waveform.
It's weird. It takes several seconds after saying "Hey Siri" before it starts doing that. It works fine if you say "Hey Siri blah blah blah." But if you wait for the indication, then it actually messes up. It's listening before it's brought up, but it doesn't seem to listen to what you say immediately after it's brought up, it takes a second. It's very strange.
Tangent: wouldn't it be nice if you could say "Siri, ask Google to..."
I wonder if implementing the feature of calling 3rd party assistants from the flagship assistant would pay off strategically.
On one hand, you appeal to people who like other assistants better, or like different assistants for different things. On the other hand, you give up on forcing people to get used to your assistant.
Also, could an isolationist provider stop other assistants from calling their one? Technically? Legally?
Lol, you can't even ask Siri to play a song on Spotify so you can forget about that. Anyway at that point why do you want to play telephone with chatbots? Just get an android phone.
>I wonder if implementing the feature of calling 3rd party assistants from the flagship assistant would pay off strategically.
It'll never happen, but I can definitely see some utility in building this in. For example: "Hey Siri, have Alexa order some paper towels from Amazon." I can see Amazon allowing this since they're going for a more generic approach. But I don't think Google, Apple, MS, or Samsung will.
Sometimes I'll be watching a baseball game in my living room with the volume pretty dang loud. The sound of the crowd in the background is almost like a static noise, and then you have the yellers, as well as the commentators speaking clearly, distinctly, and loudly. Then I use Siri to set a timer for something I'm cooking, or to "Call X person on speaker." and it picks up my voice without any hesitation or anything, and gets the words exactly right.
Siri is still frustratingly hard to activate though. Once activated, it does a pretty reasonable job for what I need it to do. Alexa is much easier to activate (but the echo has the hardware specifically for it).
I know that this is the most common approach to the situation but the article -as many other articles that have argued this before- provides no proof other than analysts speaking in broad strokes.
I use Siri, Alexa and Assistant several times a week if not everyday and I'd hesitate a lot before saying that Siri is behind. Alexa is more responsive but it's domain is also more narrow. Siri does a pretty good job when I dictate a message or want to set a timer. It's limited, sure, but so are the other assistants I use. I might be the odd case, but speech recognition of Siri vs Assitant is pretty comparable in my experience.
Moving onto services. Google Photos is outstanding, yes. But I fail to see any other example that proves the big advantage other players have over Apple in the ML or AI field.
Am I missing something? I feel like a lot of these articles argue their view from the experience they got from Siri 5 years ago.