What a blindingly ignorant rant. A couple breathless prognostications that really annoyed me:
"If A.I. knows about insurance, will you ever google for it?"
Uh, all the "A.I." is doing is googling it. So basically Siri will use speech-to-text (which I've had on my Android phone for years) and put it in the google search box for me. Then it will read the first result. Zippity-doo-da.
"We will teach it how to use Excel."
Can you possibly imagine trying to tell a speech recognition system to input into a spreadsheet? Quite a step backwards, if you ask me.
Look, the interpretation of language into meaning and then into commands has been around for a while, and it's been constantly improving. Siri is another product in that crowded market. It's really swell that they included it in iOS; like I said, I've had it on my Droid for two-plus years and it's pretty handy. This is the worst kind of blind Apple fanboy-ism. They are a good company that makes some great products. Stop it with the hyperbole simply because you want to justify your new phone purchase to your wife before you're off-contract.
No, no and god no. Siri is not voice recognition. It is not even in the same universe as the voice control in Android.
And yes of course A.I. will use one or more search engines to look information up. But Google might not necessarily be one of them and consumers will not care two cents as long A.I. gets the job done. My point it that A.I. will fly over Google's moat unless it is Google's A.I.
So does Google, I am pretty sure it remembers your previous searches and knows therefore that if you are searching for "Paris" you mean the city and not "Paris Hilton" (or vice versa).
Kind of like how I just typed "When is thanksgiving day?" and Google told me the date. It understood my question and gave me the answer. How does Siri differ?
Try "will it rain tomorrow", or "should I wear a coat tomorrow"? Siri is an answer engine that tries to determine the meaning of your query and answer it. Google in recent years has started to add those capabilities to it's search interface, but it is not there yet.
Siri is much more like Wolfram Alpha or IBM's Watson then a standard search engine.
Bullshit - Siri has some special loops for recognizing questions about date, location and the weather. That's it. It really is not more advanced than "call xyz", except it not only uses the address book, but also the calendar and the weather service.
... Siri is a front-end to Wolfram Alpha and other data providers. It roughly identifies what you're looking for and forwards it along to the best data provider. Google has the advantage of being one of those data providers.
I love how I'm being downvoted to oblivion when nobody is able to produce a single example of what Siri does that other products don't. That's my entire argument, that the technology already exists and is not some major revolution. I guess no place is impervious to Apple fanboyism, even HN.
Yaaa....I think this flew over your head. You are saying that, for example, Wolfram Alpha is like Google. They are completely different: One gives you links that you still have to go through to reach what you need and one gives you a direct answer. Even Woz said in his interview on TC...we don't need search engines, we need answer engines. To say Siri is a search engine with voice to text is a great mistake. Voice recognition is just the outer layer that makes the experience a human experience.
I don't take the words of the author as a prophecy but I see where he is going; and isn't that what science fiction authors kinda did 20-30 years ago? They dreamt; and I wish more people can dream of greater possibilities.
And I think that my post flew over your head. Wolfram Alpha and Google are different, sure, but at the end of the day they're simply algorithms that take requests, process the data to find the best answers they know how, and return results. That's it. To call those, Siri, or anything else more than that is intellectually dishonest.
Siri might be a great interface, and I bet it's really handy to be integrated into applications. I'm not hating on the concept or the product; it just annoys the hell out of me when people pretend it's something it's not. It shows a lack of understanding about how these things work.
Remember the hype about the Segway? "Walking is obsolete!" some people proclaimed. It turns out people didn't end up liking it because it made them look like lazy idiots. Do you really envision having a conversation with your phone, saying things like "I feel like Italian food today"? I don't. If I feel like Italian food, I'm going to ask my handy device where I can get some. And my phone does that without the "magic" of Siri.
Yes but they are not generally seen as mere transportation. If you use it as that you kinda look like you are a overgrown teenager. If you use it as a platform for tricks and jumps it is again fairly dangerous. This time not in lives lost but in bones broken.
When I see Tony Hawks Segway Pro in the shelves because people want to do those tricks but are afraid to break their bones, then maybe then Segways will be cool. All I see on the horizon is "Ride your Segway like Woz" the iPhone App that really only plays 3 videos (But you know how hard it is to get a video into iTunes).
You use a reasonable amount of energy skateboarding. I would guess 300-500 cal/hr depending on what you are doing. You'll notice there are no fat skateboarders. The Segway didn't take off for a combination of factors. It looks lame, there's no place you can ride it legally, it costs the same as a motorcycle but you can't finance it, etc.
While I agree with you in principle, I feel like the conceptual use cases you're imagining implement current practices with basically a speech to text. What the author is suggesting is that it would be beyond this, skipping out the step where you determine how you do something, but instead telling Siri what you want to do. For example, with excel I'm not sure he envisaged something like "A5 is 20, A6 is 30" and so on, but more like, "Take my taxes from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet".
That said, irrespective of any kind of AI revolution Siri may (or as I suspect) may not induce, I feel like predicting it's impact before we've even had the chance to test it out in any kind of capacity (OK the 4S has been on sale for two hours, but you know what I mean) is somewhat short sighted.
Except Siri doesn't do anything of the kind. It would be trivial to build "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet" into Siri (or indeed any speech recognition engine). But that would only be one more special case. The code is literally "if (recognizedText == "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet"){writeExcelSheet(parsePDFTable("taxes.pdf"))}
Sure, and I'm not for one second Siri could do that, but
a) I was under the impression Siri was doing some kind of semantic analysis rather than straight text recognition?
b) I just meant if we suspended disbelief and Siri was this magical AI tool it would do something like that, my second point is just that because we don't know what Siri can/will do it seems ridiculous to say it's going to change the world.
I totally agree with you, I'm just saying there are almost two separate discussions here, one being Siri and it's implementation, the other being the impact of AI on our lives. If Siri was the new AI, then these would be the same discussion, but as I don't think it is, it's not.
Ahh, but the devil is in the details. In the given example, "Take my taxes from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet", it sounds really nice. However, consider this: Anything that you can't tell a person to do, you won't be able to tell this system to do. If you task a person with "taking your taxes and putting them into a spreadsheet", they're going to ask, "how?" "What's the purpose?" "What do you want the spreadsheet to look like?" "Do you want everything from your taxes on one sheet?" The list goes on and on.
So, while the idea seems really nice, the idea that this or any A.I. implementation will be the kind of insane revolution the OP is predicting is laughable.
"If A.I. knows about insurance, will you ever google for it?" Uh, all the "A.I." is doing is googling it. So basically Siri will use speech-to-text (which I've had on my Android phone for years) and put it in the google search box for me. Then it will read the first result. Zippity-doo-da.
"We will teach it how to use Excel." Can you possibly imagine trying to tell a speech recognition system to input into a spreadsheet? Quite a step backwards, if you ask me.
Look, the interpretation of language into meaning and then into commands has been around for a while, and it's been constantly improving. Siri is another product in that crowded market. It's really swell that they included it in iOS; like I said, I've had it on my Droid for two-plus years and it's pretty handy. This is the worst kind of blind Apple fanboy-ism. They are a good company that makes some great products. Stop it with the hyperbole simply because you want to justify your new phone purchase to your wife before you're off-contract.