John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team
apple.comLots of comments about improving Siri here. This is interesting to me for several reasons I won't address, but I will ask this: Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?
From a purely functional standpoint, they seem super awkward to me. I like buttons that click and reassure me of every input. I like to feel confident my actions won't be misinterpreted. I like that no one else near me will get weirded out or annoyed when I'm having trouble interfacing with whatever app I'm currently using. The only reason I can envision using voice controls for anything is in the car while driving, and you would only begrudgingly use them because it is overwhelmingly safer to have both hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.
Apart from not enjoying voice controls from a functional point of view, is no one else creeped out at always on mics and video cameras in their house? In this era of super crappy security, especially with consumer grade stuff, there's a not insignificant chance your stuff is currently being hacked by one or more non-government bad actors (I already assume the US government, and probably a few other governments, already have 24/7 access to every mic and camera that is connected to the web in any way).
I've been assuming voice commands will die out and that this Alexa / Siri hype (hype might not be the right word. buzz? rumblings?) was a result of Amazon and Apple pushing them from a marketing perspective. The amount of comments about Siri in a thread about a random exec being added to Apple is making me re-consider that PoV.
> Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?
Siri plus shortcuts have made many mundane tasks easier. When I get in my car to come home from work I say "Hey Siri, heading home." That causes my phone to text my wife my arrival time and starts the last podcast I had playing.
It's a simple thing, but is so much easier than texting and then thumbing through the podcast player to start where I left off. I have others like logging my water intake or weight, but it was really adding shortcuts to Siri that made these possible.
Playing music or TV shows is also much easier/nicer. "Hey Google, play The Office on Netflix".
Timers. Another simple thing that is so much easier when you can use your voice when cooking.
I am skeptical when technologists say voice assisted systems will become the dominant interface at least in countries with a high rate of literacy.
I just look at TV vs radio, texting versus calling, or audio books versus written content. I believe most studies indicate that people are better at visual comprehension versus auditory:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-audi...
I know scientists love working on voice and speech recognition, since it is a hard problem to solve, but it sometimes feels like its a bit of a solution in search of a problem. I'm sure there are good use cases, I'm just skeptical that they are profound enough for voice to be our primary medium for interaction.
More generally, I think the thing you are noticing is that visual and physical items offer random access.
Compare trying to find a specific piece of information in a book, vs in some training DVD.
If I'm just learning how to cook, watching a professional demonstrate the whole thing is going to be very helpful, but if I already know how to cook in general it's easier to flick to the right section of a book and scan the page for the bit of information I need.
Or compare the difference between listening to a phone system's 7 different options vs seeing all the options available on a single screen.
The other side of this is precision. Not only do input methods like a keyboard allow you to give extremely explicit, high information, instructions with no need for interpretation, they also have extremely fast feedback loops. Imagine trying to use your voice to click on a specific part of an image, or draw a circle around it. Far, far easier to move a pointer with your hand, watch where it goes, and then click when it's in the right position.
So visual comprehension probably is better than auditory, but I think the main things that are important are random access, specific and information dense input, and low latency feedback loops on input - all things that we are far better at achieving with physical/visual methods than auditory or speech based methods.
This is very well said and a great point. A lot of this relates to random access and which has an O(1) lookup. “Play season 2, episode 3” could be better as voice versus “if you want to reach reception, dial 1” is much better as an interface.
I agree with your skepticism about voice becoming generally dominant, but it’s already very useful. It may also become the dominant form of usage for some systems.
It's also hard to imagine sound as a dominant interface because all we have are mediocre examples. We have to work within clunky command boundaries, rephrase commands, be in a quiet environment, not have an accent, etc.
I'm glad we're making progress, but I'll be a skeptic until I can give voice requests as naturally as I'd give them to a human. IMO there's no limit from there.
I agree with your main point, but your examples seem suspect to me. TV is video _and_ audio, audiobooks are a translation of an existing artform (that is, books were originally created to be read, not listened to), and I find texting to be extremely clunky as a concept and do not enjoy tapping out long or interesting messages on a tiny touchscreen.
> Siri plus shortcuts have made many mundane tasks easier. When I get in my car to come home from work I say "Hey Siri, heading home." That causes my phone to text my wife my arrival time and starts the last podcast I had playing.
Wait, you do what?
How can I get SIRI to do this for me? Can you explain how you got SIRI to do that?
Along with iOS 12, Apple released a new app called Shortcuts. It is not preinstalled as far as I know. I think they got it via acquisition. There’s a bunch of new hooks that app makers can/must use to integrate with it, so not everything is supported.
It’s basically IFTTT for iOS, and you can assign phrases in Siri to it.
I never got Siri to work that well. I found it's had problems calling and some of it's standard features. It's still on my iPhone, there's no way to remove, but I've found Google Assistant to work better. Plus, the Google Home integration is nice.
I use Siri for almost every task that doesn’t require me to physically look at my screen, e.g. reading, watching a video or typing. The #1 and #2 problems I have with Siri recognizing my input are in order: the quality of the mic I’m using and the ambient noise level in whatever environment I’m in. The #3 problem is the quality of my network connection because it won’t work if it can’t contact Apple.
In my experience, AirPods are the best Siri input device I own. EarPods are a distant second, and the built in mic on phone is a not very distant third. It is effectively unusable on my laptop’s built in mic.
The ambient noise basically means I can’t use Siri in noisy places, and I’m typically not inclined to. I might raise my voice a little if I’m putting in a podcast outside and it is windy.
#3 means disabling WiFi when I leave my house, until I’m in a location with a solid WiFi connection, in part because I make use of my cable WiFi. If I have no service and no WiFi then I have no Siri, not even to set a timer.
Beyond that, I find the basic feature set adequate, but not comprehensive. Siri shortcuts doubled Siri’s usefulness and I only use them for three or four apps.
That said, I appreciate Siri’s presence because it does enable me to leave my phone in my pocket a lot more than I used to, so there will occasionally be a week where I didn’t spend more than an hour or two looking at my phone’s screen the entire week (not per day, per week), with 90% of this time spent reading a book. Observing my friends’ obsessions and work habits, I appear to be the outlier in that regard.
>Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?
Yes, daily.
I use it when cooking to get instructions on how long to bake a specific vegetable and at what temp. While I'm out driving to get directions hands free. When I want to do a search but can't be bothered to type the whole thing out on my mobile keyboard. When I'm at home and want to listen to radio on my speakers. I use a Pixel 2, so when I make a call I just squeeze it and say 'call {contact}', rather than find-and-open the phone app.
Don't look at voice commands as a interface replacement for keyboards. Instead, look at voice commands as a new interface for situations where using a keyboard or touch screen is a hassle.
20% of Google searches are made by voice. https://searchengineland.com/google-reveals-20-percent-queri...
That number is probably a little outdated now. But it’s definitely not targeting a niche audience.
I find this absolutely fascinating when I compare it to my personal experience. It begs the question: how frequently does the average person Google something compared to power users? I consider myself to have above average googling skills, and I'm a developer so there's obviously a lot of documentation searching regularly, but even excluding all of that I surely perform a good 10-20 non-programming searches a day and it could easily be an order of magnitude more if I'm actively researching something.
Does the average user perform significantly less searches, and so the novelty or occasional voice search moves the needle 20%, or are they performing as many searches as me but using voice for many of them. I personally only ever found voice search useful for things that are more like questions and not research ("how old is _______" is a classic example) so I find it difficult to believe the latter. The former would be quite the revelation though because I always assumed _everyone_ googled as much as I do but it seems that might not be the case.
I rarely use google outside of work. At home, I have a few regular sites I keep up with, I know the URLs and I just type them in.
The article says that it is 20% of mobile searches. I doubt many people are doing very lengthy research mobile. I have seen siri and okgoogle being used pretty commonly for mobile searching. I'd be interested to see how many searches happen on mobile vs desktop though.
I would also be interested in seeing if people looking for places/directions factors into this in some way.
I thought the same, then visited family who use it constantly and it all made sense.
> Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?
A friend of my partner uses voice commands for everything on her iPhone. She is almost blind on one eye, and has terrible eye sight with the other eye (albino trait).
There are some use-cases where voice is a better interaction method. Driving alone in a car is one -- so you can keep both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road. Another one is in the kitchen. My hands are often full/busy/messy when I'm cooking -- which is a pain when I need to set a timer on my phone. Being able to say "Alexa - set a timer for 12 minutes" is great. The novelty of the Echo has faded almost completely beyond Timers, spotify and weather. Beyond that -- it's a novelty. But I do love those timers.
That's the thing though, given how cheap they an echo dot is, especially during promotions, there's very little reason not to get one. They're the perfect small gift.
Virtually every other hot gadget from the last decade has been far more expensive at this stage to the point where it slowed down the adoption rate (smartwatches, certain cameras), or made it absolutely never go anywhere near what the hype train lead us to believe (VR/AR products).
> given how cheap the echo dot is ... they’re the perfect small gift.
At the Real Canadian Superstore you get a gift when you spend over $300. It changes weekly. Sometimes it’s a box of cereals or chocolates. Sometimes it’s houseware, a plant or a lawn chair. At thanksgiving it’s a frozen turkey. That one time it was 2kg of bacon. Last week it was an Echo Dot.
Based on popularity within the family, and compared to the alternatives, it’s far from being the perfect gift. That said, it does seem to be cheap.
I would take 2kg of bacon over an Echo Dot
I think you're more likely to use a smart assistant as their ability to understand and respond correctly improves.
Hiring away Google's head of AI seems to have made a material difference in how well Siri performs in an annual head to head comparison of how well various smart speakers responded to 800 sample requests.
>Google Home continued its outperformance, answering 86% correctly and understanding all 800 questions. The HomePod correctly answered 75% and only misunderstood 3, the Echo correctly answered 73% and misunderstood 8 questions, and Cortana correctly answered 63% and misunderstood just 5 questions.
>Note that nearly every misunderstood question involved a proper noun, often the name of a local town or restaurant.
https://loupventures.com/annual-smart-speaker-iq-test/
A 22% increase in correct responses over last year's performance.
They're very useful for very limited things - "Set a timer for 30 minutes" or "Wake me up at 8am" is easier than doing that yourself. Even dictating a short text in a pinch is nice. Think "in the kitchen" with wet or dirty hands.
I use this in the same way for location based reminders ie. "...when I leave work" or "...when I get home"
>Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?
You mentioned this, but constantly in the car, but it's not even sort of begrudging. I got an early sale on the Echo Auto devices (Alexa for your car, basically), and love it. Everything I could do by dinking around with my phone, I now don't have to.
Outside of the car, voice commands for stuff like home control is natural, and almost kinda magical. Walking in with both hands full of groceries and barking "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights" is awesome. Same for setting timers while cooking, turning on music, and so forth. So long as you remember that you're dealing with what amounts to a voice command line, not the Enterprise's computer, everything flows smoothly.
Conversely, I almost never use Siri even though by way of car bluetooth it should have the same kind of functionality.. but it's so limited and inaccurate as to be functionally useless.
>is no one else creeped out at always on mics and video cameras in their house?
Not for me, because a device that is local-only listening for a wake-word is not even sort of creepy. Your explanation, intentionally or not, paints it as a device that maintains a constant connection to the mothership and gives $company a live stream of everything happening around it.
This is an incredibly annoying misconception that I've grown weary of seeing.
Voice commands are useful if you are having conversation with friends and a question comes up that group wants an answer to. I find it more social to ask a phone with a voice command than to open the phone, type a query into google, and search for an answer.
Of course Siri defaults to an incorrect google search on nearly every question, so this often doesn't work in practice...
I never got into voice control. For two reason. If you have a job that does day to day coding, office or paper work and voice are less used, may be speaking a few command doesn't feel that much. If your day to day job is managing dozen of people which involves lots of listening arguing and speaking as well as selling your idea. The last thing I want to do at the end of the day is to speak again to get what I want. I can use the phone and press a few button, it might take a little longer. But it feels much BETTER.
The second is command. I don't want to put Siri in front of every sentences. It is unnatural. If I have a maid, that is not how the conversation would go if I need to get something done. The amount of work ( turning something on or off, or text, or music ) is relatively small compared to the amount of commands I have to give. Or in other words, Giving a command to Siri, ( 4 - 6 words ) is more troublesome than pressing 3 - 4 buttons.
Being able to hold up my watch and say “set a timer for 30 minutes” is significantly better than fumbling through menus.
In the kitchen, I use a real mechanical timer. Twist, set, done.
Yes. And for my 5 1/2 year old son, who’s always had voice around, it’s very natural. The first words I utter every day are “Alexa, start my day”, which triggers a whole bunch of automation (lights, plugs, news, etc) while I get my cereal and coffee ready.
The number of times I've seen people using voice commands since Siri launched isn't more than 5 (except when people were experimenting with jokes and stuff). This may be specific to where I live idk.
I'd say we need 10-20 more years for voice assistants to be smoothly integrated with our daily lives. Until then big tech companies have just started the race (collecting data, enhancing experience) to be the best voice interface in the future.
From my point of view, users of our generation are just experimental subjects for currently unfunctional & uncommon but buzzed products like voice assistants and VR.
I frequently use voice commands for both my Android phone and for my Amazon Echo, which is the only way to interact with it. I even have my phone wake up and unlock from the sound of my voice because it's so convenient. I do it when I'm driving, when I'm in my bed and my phone is plugged in and out of reach and when I'm just too lazy. Outside of that I use my Echo for shopping, adding things to the shopping list as I'm looking through my fridge, timers, recipes, music, asking factual questions and more. I love voice activated features and don't find them super-awkward in the least.
> Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?
I was recently getting a dental procedure done and the Periodontist kept using Alexa while he was treating me. "Alexa, play the Eagles!" "Alexa, skip this song!" He seemed super impressed like he was really excited to show it off... I thought it was annoying. I think voice command stuff is lame. I have siri permanently disabled on my iphone and apple watch.
I've heard some people like using siri with the apple watch, but I never got into it- I would always accidentally set it off when I was weightlifting.
Have you tried Google assistant? I find it to be much more useful than Siri.
People tend to use it quite heavily, once it crosses the threshold where it understands you the overwhelming majority of the time. IOW the threshold Siri is yet to cross.
Ease of use and friendliness of the user interface is what the spirit of Apple Computers is all about. If I were to guess Jobs might be focusing on if he were alive would be the convenience and ease of use of Apple products. I think voice communications would be something he would use. That is based on his various biographies about him. Whether this is ethical or morally right to have tech go this direction is another matter. Ease of use is the trend.
The only reason I can envision using voice controls for anything is in the car while driving, and you would only begrudgingly use them because it is overwhelmingly safer to have both hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.
Yup, that's pretty much the only reason I use Siri. Though I could see VR as another possible use case, since hand controls in VR are less precise and slower than keyboard/mouse for textual input.
> Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?
On my phone it's rare unless I'm getting in my car and having it pull up directions.
Where I found I use it all the time is with the Amazon Fire Stick. When I have a show I want to watch I don't have to fumble with a stupid keyboard on the TV, I just say the name and it works. Also setting timers in the kitchen when I'm cooking, it saves me from getting raw meat on all the surfaces
Two scenerios:
- when I’m driving is the big one
- and for reminders.
It’s lot easier to say:
- remind me to call my mom when I get home.
- remind me to call my wife when I get in the car.
- remind me to get milk when I get to $grocery_store
Than to set up the reminder manually.
I use it for a few things only:
- Remind me to X in N minutes/hours/days
- Set an alarm for N minutes
- What’s the weather like today/tomorrow?
- Play X by Y (when driving and wanting a specific album or song to play)
- What is [insert some question of simple knowledge I’ve forgotten]?
Nothing else seems worth bothering with.
I used Google voice a handful of times every day when I was on Android. Now that I'm on iOS I have Siri disabled. It's infuriating that Apple supply sub part services, and don't let you choose something else as a default replacement.
I say "Wake me up at 7" and "Turn off my alarm" every work night and work morning. If I'm ever timing something (like how long to let my French press steep), I say "Set a timer for x minutes."
You can set an alarm once for M-F, etc.
I prefer to do it every night before going to bed. I like to feel like I'm choosing to get up at that time, as opposed to being under a pre-ordained schedule. (Which, of course, it is, but perception matters.)
I used to use voice commands extensively when I used Android. But in 2015 I got an iPhone and Siri is so much worse (both recognition accuracy and available functionality) that I stopped bothering. It’s a shame.
Yes, in the car via CarPlay. It makes for safer driving. I just plug my phone in and put it away so I can’t reach it to text and drive. I then ask it to text, look up directions or play whatever song I want.
This would be great if Siri ever reliably worked for me. It works just often enough that I keep trying to use it before giving up in frustration for the umpteenth time. I recently retrofitted CarPlay to my Mazda and it's better than Mazda's voice recognition, but that's a very low bar.
Here's an example of something that seems obviously should work: I'm driving to pick someone up. Apple maps is navigating. "Hey siri, text <person I'm picking up> my ETA."
Yeah, that doesn't work. The only thing I reliable get out of Siri is setting a timer and opening the camera.
I mostly use it to set alarms and reminders, it's much easier to say "Remind me to do something in an hour" than go find the app, set up the correct time, and write the description.
Voice commands are the future . “Turn off kids bedroom” “remind me about ... later today”, “call wife”, “set timer for 3 minutes” - it is so much faster then fumbling through the UI
I only use it to spell words I don’t know the spelling of. :p
I speak with an accent so it was always hit and miss for me - although it had gotten better in recent years.
I’m also too lazy to talk ...
I dislike voice commands.
I have tried using speech-to-text for text messages and emails, and I usually spend more time correcting the mistakes than it saves.
Not to mention that this input can only be used in private spaces: Home or separate office cabins.
> Do people really use voice commands for, well, anything?
Setting alarms and reminders
Also to request playing Downton Abbey. Although Alexa is sketchy about specific episodes and seasons. And no way can she understand "play the bit where Mary and Matthew are standing outside as it begins to snow"...
There's a (perhaps apocryphal) story about Minsky and Engelbart: Minsky proudly proclaimed, "We're going to make machines intelligent! We're going to make them walk and talk! We're going to make them conscious!" Engelbart shot back, "You're going to do that for computers? Well, what are you going to do for people?"
https://books.google.nl/books?id=uNDW_dQ_dlAC&pg=PA167&lpg=P...
Ben Shneiderman's 1993 IEEE Software article, "Beyond Intelligent Machines: Just do it!" was prompted by discussion between Mark Weiser (father of Ubiquitous Computing) and Bill Hefley, and argues that users want a sense of direct and immediate control over computers that differs from how they interact with people.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/93-03/93-03.html
[...]
WHY NOT INTELLIGENT? I am opposed to labeling computers as "intelligent" for several reasons. First, such a classification limits the imagination. We should have much greater ambition than to make a computer behave like an intelligent butler or other human agent. Computer-supported cooperative work, hypertext/hypermedia, multimedia, information visualization, and virtual reality are powerful technologies that enable human users to accomplish tasks that no human has ever done. If we describe computers in human terms, we run the risk of limiting our ambition and creativity in the design of future computer capabilities. In the same way that most of us have learned to use terminology not specific to any gender, we should now learn not to limit designers of computers with the tag "intelligent" or "smart."
Second, the qualities of predictability and control are desirable. If machines are intelligent or adaptive, they may have less of these qualities. Usability studies at the University of Maryland show that users want the feelings of mastery, competence, and understanding that come from a predictable and controllable interface. Most users seek a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, not the sense that some intelligent machine magically did their job for them.
Another reason I'm concerned about this label is that it limits or even eliminates human responsibility. I am concerned that if designers are successful in convincing the users that computers are intelligent, then the users will have a reduced sense of responsibility for failures. The tendency to blame the machine is already widespread and I think we will be on dangerous ground if we encourage this trend. As part of my work, I collect newspapers articles about computers, some of which bear the headlines "Victims of Computer Error Go Hungry," "IRS Computers Err on Refund Reports," and "Computers That 'Hear' Taking Jobs" -- all of which seem to absolve human operators by implicating the machine.
Finally, I have a basic philosophical objection to the "intelligent" label. Machines are not people, nor can they ever become so. For me, computers have no more intelligence than a wooden pencil. If you confuse the way you treat machines with the way you treat people, you may end up treating people like machines, which devalues human emotional experiences, creativity, individuality, and relationships of trust. I know that many of my colleagues are quite happy to call machines intelligent and knowledgeable, but I prefer to treat and think about machines in very different ways from the way I treat and think about people.
[...]
+ Natural-language interaction seems clumsy and slow compared to direct manipulation and information-visualization methods that use rapid, high-resolution, color displays with pointing devices. Lotus HAL is gone, Artificial Intelligence Corp.'s Intellect hangs on but is not catching on. Although there are some interesting directions for tools that support human work through natural-language processing (aiding human translators, parsing texts, and generating reports from structured databases) this is different from natural-language interaction.
+ Speech I/O in talking cars and vending machines has not flourished. Voice recognition is fine for handicapped users and special situations, but doesn't seem to be viable for widespread use in office, home, or school settings. Our recent studies suggest that speech I/O has a greater interference with short term and working memory than hand-eye coordination for menu selection by mouse. Voice store and forward, phone-based information retrieval, and voice annotation have great potential but these are not intelligent applications.
[...]
It's just unbelievable to me that the company sitting on a quarter trillion dollars is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that hoard to hire the best of the best in order to fix the very thing that will kill their cash cow in the next 5 years. I'm on iOS myself (and have been faithful since the first iPhone), but $30 Google Home puck feels like it's from the future. Understands me perfectly, comes up with decent answers, doesn't require rigid commands, etc. Whereas Siri is so bad I use it only to set alarms and timers. Not even setting of reminders is reliable.
They can't just throw more random people at the problem - Adding too many developers can slow projects down and make them less likely to work. (9 women can't make a baby in a month, and all that..)
The guy this post is about just came from Google, where he lead on the stuff you're praising. He can push these efforts in the right direction, and help make other strategic hires..
Isn't this exactly what you want?
9 women can't make a baby in a month but 9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months instead of 1 woman making 1 in 9 months.
More people can work on more/different things in the same period of time, thereby increasing total work done. (Parallel vs sequential and all that..)
Sure, but then you try to make the children be playmates, and only 3 might work for a while, 1 might be a jerk that hurts the others; and 5 years down the road, you move anyway, so you only have 1 baby.
^ Sticking to the analogy when it comes to integrating into business; competing products, and which one actually maintains adoption.
9 babies in 9 months is basically what Google has done with its messaging apps.
Off topic question: is there a word or phrase for this conversation?
Something to describe arguing about the issue at hand completely through the metaphor and not directly referring to the issue at hand.
The word is pretty much analogy and counter analogy.
See this wikipedia article that discusses it in the context of logic.
"Hackernewsing"
Darmoking?
Sorry, but is there some kind evidence that Giannandeea is incabale of the strategy and logistics needed to manage multiple projects in parallel?
But those 9 women don’t need to coordinate, each one will merrily go along with her task alone. So let’s keep the metaphor as used originally, it doesn’t extend further
This example took a life of its own.
Just wanted to clarify an irrelevant point to this discussion - Length of the pregnancy isn't 9 months.
9 women cannot make 9 babies in 1 month nor 1 women can make 1 baby in 1 month. no concurrency in baby making for sure.
There is some potential concurrency: a woman can produce two or more babies in 9 months, although it is uncommon.
the process is not concurrent. it is still parallel.
Unless the child processes have different fathers, which can and does occasionally happen.
Let's say you have a project with 9 parts. Each part will take ~9 months to complete.
If you take 9 people and give them each one part it will take ~9 months to complete.
If you take one person it will take ~81 months as they need to finish each part before they can go onto the next one.
Someone read The Mythical Man Month. :)
Lol beat me to it. Number of ppl in our industry who don’t seem to be aware of the Brooks’ Law never siezes to amaze me.
I've always found the mythical-man-month thing to be completely at odds with reality. Cities and ant colonies work because they use sophisticated collaboration technologies instead of top down rigid hierarchies. But maybe I'm wrong and there is a better explanation for NYC.
The "Mythical Man Month" was specifically about challenges in software development with humans, so comparisons to cities and ant colonies aren't all that helpful. It is not a general purpose rule to be applied to any task that can be performed by n+1 people or ants, purely an observation on the nature of software development. I think many of us can likely attest to its frequent validity in that domain, even if it doesn't ring true in others.
> sophisticated collaboration technologies instead of top down rigid hierarchies
Let me know when you find sophisticated collaboration technologies working beyond a team of say, 5-10.
I'll take that bet. The iPhone is going to keep printing money for the next 15-20 years at least.
Apple is a 40 year old company, and they're still raking in the dough from their original product category.
> The iPhone is going to keep printing money for the next 15-20 years at least.
How? The improvements to the iPhone are less compelling every year, while the prices are going up. The company recently stopped reporting iPhone sales numbers.
> Apple is a 40 year old company, and they're still raking in the dough from their original product category.
Are they, though? Aren't Mac sales insignificant compared to iPhone sales? Haven't the latest Macbooks suffered from significant feature regressions?
Aren't Mac sales insignificant compared to iPhone sales?
You're saying that having two successful products is only good when they have equal sales figures?
I don't know of a single company on the planet that would turn its nose up at a product doing $25 BILLION in sales.
Tbf macbooks/imacs still make good money... just completely overblown by iphone sales. Apparently ~25b for macs in general for the last 3 years at least: www.statista.com/chart/amp/13710/apple-revenue-by-product-group/
> improvements to the iPhone are less compelling every year
[citation needed]
> Haven't the latest Macbooks suffered from significant feature regressions?
No.
I beg to differ.
Unreliable keyboards and security chips that frequently crash the computer are feature regressions.
The keyboard issues were fixed in the 2018 MacBook Pros.
And there is no systemic issues with the security chips. We have entire floors of developers using MacBook Pros and no one has had “frequent crashes” from the T2 chip.
I know it tends to be more preference, but even on the 2018 MacBook Pros I find the keyboards terrible. Dust and spill resistant sure, slightly improved tactile response yes, but unlike my 2015 MacBook Pro my fingers seem to get strained and sore from the butterfly keyboards. I like travel in my keys.
I had the same experience with the new MacBooks - tired fingers. Ended up switching to a Dell XPS. That might not be an option for many, but I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the keyboard feels. I would've gladly paid Apple for an updated version of the 2012-2015 (2016?) version, but ultimately had to vote with my feet.
I find the opposite. I can happily type all day on a 2016 MacBook Pro, but got RSI pain after an hour or so from the 2012-era keyboards.
So dongle mania and crap keyboards aren't an issue for you?
I vastly prefer the keyboard in the 2016 series even to a Lenovo X220, and don't possess a single dongle - other than a (desktop) USB-C dock which connects everything in one hit.
So no, both were significant improvements from my perspective.
Crap keyboards are an issue (they may have fixed them, but I think we need another ~9 mnoths to really say that for sure), but I really don't get the complaints about dongles.
Well, let me rephrase that: sure, I get that dongles are annoying, and there are capital-I Issues with USB-C that need to be worked out. But the alternative to dongles is "never change hardware connectors." Unless you make the leap to USB-C by replacing every single peripheral and cable you own, you will probably need an adapter. And you may say that now is not the right time, and you might be right, but again: unless the entire market shifts virtually overnight, there is going to be a period where using a new connector is annoying, and is going to require dongles.
tl;dr: I'm happy to be a homesteader in Dongletown, baby.
15-20 years? How are you SURE that smartphones will still be a thing in 20 years? Let alone that Apple will still be the hip premium brand? 20 years is a LONG time. The average lifespan for an S&P 500 company is less than that these days.
Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. The smartphone is unlikely to be replaced for a long time to come. There will be plenty of head fakes along the way no doubt (smart speakers and voice bots come to mind), but the smartphone is simply too good and has too much utility to be easily challenged.
And you also have to make a bet that Apple won't come to dominate that area as well (even if they aren't first to it). AR glasses have some promise to be a new general purpose computing platform, but even then I'm skeptical that it will be able to mount a serious challenge to the smartphone.
> Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare.
They've only happened every decade so far: 1960 (IC), 1970 (DARPA), 1980 (PC), 1990 (GUI), 2000 (Internet), 2010 (smartphone).
Point of order: the last 3 transitions have been layering versus actual shifts.
Text-based computing -> GUIs was a shift. Broadly speaking, there is no market today for consumer-facing computers where text is the only input capability.
The most profitable company in the PC era also has the most profitable PC unit today. The Internet runs on top of the GUI layer. The smartphone is (in much of the world) an "also" not an "instead."
(One could argue that the original MSFT goal of being on every desktop was centered on work. By that metric, most smartphone usage falls into a separate category of consumer computing that largely is distinct from business computing, where desktops & laptops still rule.)
A grandparent(-ish) post compares the iPhone to the Google Home. Much like the iPhone did not replace my laptop (which did not replace the server in the datacenter), voice-driven devices will not replace mobile phones. All Excel (ahem) at different use cases.
Tacking on to your comment, one could argue that voice alongside increasing number of sensors and inputs available on smartphones are very similar paradigm shifts to that of the text-based computing to GUI shift.
We're replacing the keyboard and GUI to one that is far more ubiquitous and backgrounded, and computing experiences are based on all data that is available and economical to process rather than having things be the more traditional user giving an input and then getting an output.
I partially agree. My terrible pun of including Excel was a reference to a very common application that's not going ubiquitous or backgrounded anytime soon. Similarly, nobody's soon going to be coding via a voice-drive device without a display.
On the mobile side, imagine the hellscape of privacy intrusion that would result if people all used voice to message each other (instead of text/email/etc).
GUIs are sticking around because they are the best available option for many use cases. Portable GUIs are likewise going to stick around for a long time. Fashionable nerds may decide to stop calling these "PCs" or "mobile phones" at some point, but the form factors will prove resilient.
I watched The Office for the first time a few months ago.
I was AMAZED that a show that recent had a lot of office workers with desks with no computer.
In 20 years, I don't think it's crazy to think the next generation will look back at our time and think... I can't believe you sat there staring at a rectangle and pushing buttons all day.
I'm not betting on it, but it seems plausible to me that in 20 years Hololens / Google Glasses combined with voice recognition and some type of gesture control could be good enough and desirable for most people.
From a hardware perspective: servers, personal computers, smartphones
That’s 3 computing paradigm shifts in 60 years.
Are you calling out the time these became mainstream? I'd argue if the PC can be slotted in at 1980 (the IBM PC didn't come out until 1981), the GUI should be listed as 1984, not 1990. Alternatively, the PC should be listed a lot later.
I was not going for exact years but some semblance of "around then" which conveniently rounded up to the nearest decade. The Apple II was 1978 and the PC was 1981. I agree that the GUI should be listed as 1984 in some official capacity (or is it 1978 with PARC?), but most of the world and I were using text mode by default in the 80s; it wasn't until Windows 3.1 (1990) that the GUI became the default. Similarly the internet was around before 2000 but became The Thing with the dotcom bubble (maybe this one should be called Google instead of Internet since I already put DARPA at 1970. Maybe 1970 should be UNIX instead?). Anyway I don't think this detracts from the larger point, which was that these huge shifts do seem to come along about once a decade in the computing sphere. Oh and we forgot to mention virtualization/cloud, is that more or less of a paradigm shift than Google and the smartphone?
The GUI is not something I'd break out separately from the PC. And the internet is something that massively improved the utility of PCs and increased demand for them, it wasn't something that was going to replace it.
> And the internet is something that massively improved the utility of PCs and increased demand for them, it wasn't something that was going to replace it.
No, it just devastated the market for native PC applications.
The GUI is not something I'd break out separately from the PC.
Why not? The PC (and I’d include things like the Apple ][ and C64) was a legitimate success before GUIs took off. The GUI was a separate step, also hugely important.
And ~1980 and ~1990 are reasonable dates for when personal computers and Windows took off, give or take a few years.
and Apple is still profitable on a product line they introduced in 1984.
All its going to take for the next paradigm shift will be for voice assistants and batteries to get better, and for google glass-like devices get so good that they match the feature set of smartphones and standalone VR systems and also become so small that they fit in a regular looking pair of sunglasses.
I'm not sure how long it will take, but it honestly seems inevitable.
Maybe it won't be glasses, but it will almost certainly be something we wear instead of a thing that we carry around forever.
A smartphone with a connection to a monitor, keyboard and mouse could replace a desktop. If I were the CEO of MSFT, I'd put serious R&D funds into this.
Think about all of the things that you don't have to carry with you if your smartphone is good enough: camera, wallet, keys, pieces of paper (containing printed maps/directions, emails etc).
It's notable that a combination of Apple Watch + Airpods can fulfill most of these needs, with the exception of being a high quality camera and a few other things that require a larger screen. But that just shows you that if anyone is going to disrupt Apple, it's going to be Apple.
> How are you SURE that smartphones will still be a thing in 20 years?
I'm sure someone asked a similar question about personal computers in the early 80's. They didn't go away when smartphones became prevalent, they became computational work-horses and in the same way an AR system will never be able to pack the computing punch and battery life of a smartphone.
But similar to how a smart-phone complements a PC, AR tech will simplify how we interact with specific parts of the world around us like navigation, notifications, and merge with existing tech like wireless earphones with noise cancellation and conversation/audio-enhancement to provide minimum necessary utility.
More features will bleed down the chain from PC to phone to AR, but with size comes certain advantages and disadvantages, and a large object can always hold more juice and computational power.
I think the biggest disruption will come from global low latency wireless internet - suddenly computational power can be uncoupled from the device and AR would be able to offload the power-hungry CPU/GPU's and large batteries needed for fluid and powerful interaction. But I'm not sure Elon Musk's satellite internet project will be that disruptor - so it might be another long wait until that next big thing happens.
It seems pretty obvious that personal computers (not workstations) are going the way of the typewriter right now. Most people just don't need a computer when they have a smartphone.
The PC can be dated back 1975. But even in 2000, only 51% of US households had a personal computer. Not even 20 years later, it sure looks like the PC is going the way of the calculator and typewriter.
The first modern smartphone can be dated back to 1996, but it wasn't until 2013 that 50% of US adults had one.
Two year later, in late 2015, mobile web traffic had already overtaken desktop.
By 2033, I would be surprised if we don't have something challenging the smartphone. And the technology is probably around already.
These technologies seem to have about a 40-50 year life cycle. The first half of the life-cycle is the stage it takes to get to 50% saturation. Then the next third of the stage they dominate. The final third of the stage, they phase out to a niche market.
Sure, the smartphone is the bees knees today. But, really, is it? You've got to carry it with you everywhere you go. What if you just had a contact you kept over your eye at all times? What if you just had something you kept tucked behind your ear at all times?
How often do you REALLY need that screen? Remember, when the iPhone came out -- most people were thinking -- who's going to buy a smartphone without a freaking keyboard? Within literally 2 years, Blackberry's stock had dropped like 70%. Within 5 years, it was on the brink of bankruptcy.
And before that, when the first Palm came out in 1996 -- how many people do you think REALLY envisioned the smartphones we have today dominating web traffic and starting to encroach on the work station?
Why should I believe that AR will even be it's own unique product platform rather than just a part of every single smartphone app. Smartphones were much easier for people to adapt too since virtually everyone had already carried around wallets and keys, and I'd be hard pressed to believe that wearing glasses will ever be something that the majority of people do voluntarily, in the same way smart watches never became completely ubiquitous, short of maybe within professions where you both need your hands to be free and where visual computing would be useful.
Apple is only hip and premium because they make quality products.
And that comes down to the culture and mindset of the company. Which given that they have Apple University and have an executive team which very much encapsulates the “Apple Way” isn’t going to change.
Yes there are plenty of failed companies but very few aggressively defend their culture like Apple does. And culture rot for me is such a big part of failure.
Because Moore's law has ended.
Any amount you want to bet...ill take the side that there will not be an "iPhone 25."
They might just rename it before that point to just “iPhone”.
Or use the iMac naming scheme, e.g. iPhone (Late 2027).
If you two would actually like to bet, I'm happy to shepherd that bet through the process here: http://longbets.org/
We've been going 16 years at this point, and we have bets out to 2150: http://longbets.org/11/
> they're still raking in the dough from their original product category.
I'm not sure which you mean The Apple II product line, or desktop computing in general?
Either way, pretty sure neither would be considered their cash cow.
> The iPhone is going to keep printing money for the next 15-20 years at least.
iPhone sales are down, which is why Apple stock is down about 30% from its highs.
Sales have already tapered off and Apple stock fell off a cliff when they announced their most recent production numbers.
> $30 Google Home puck feels like it's from the future
Is it? Is the $30 puck better than the Home assistant or does it just suck that much more in French than it does in English? (Not being snarky, genuinely asking)
It doesn't understand followup commands, the Hue integration is rotten bad, and the commands definitely have to be rigid. Things like "What were my meetings on the 12th of December" aren't understood.
Also having to say "OK google" and not being able to change that is so bad. At least "Hey Siri" is natural.
> Is it? Is the $30 puck better than the Home assistant or does it just suck that much more in French than it does in English? (Not being snarky, genuinely asking)
Absolutely it is. In general, my Siri usage is limited to opening Google Assistant, that's how bad it is. Also, "Hey Google" works as a command on most devices.
I'm pretty sure you can say "Hey Google" as well.
"Hey [huge corporation here]" is not a great user experience for a device meant to be at home.
It's exceptionally good in my experience in English. It helps when you train it on your voice. Also, it wants me to say "hey Google" these days, if you like that any better than ok Google.
I'm with you. I was severely unimpressed - I can't say "go to sleep in a half hour," but must say "go to sleep in 30 minutes." If I accidentally say "go to bed" I've got to start up a whole new "Hey Google" cycle again.
At least I know it's not listening to me all the time.
> At least I know it's not listening to me all the time.
Do you really though?
Google admits its new smart speaker was eavesdropping on users https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/11/technology/google-home-mini...
And while Google responded quickly:
Google just permanently killed the feature that made some Home Minis eavesdrop https://www.the-ambient.com/news/google-home-mini-spy-proble...
who is to say what the next update brings?
Let's keep some perspective here. By "eavesdropping", you mean a small handful (~4000 devices) of first gen devices that were never sold to actual customers with defective touch sensors causing the recording to be activated.
The software fix pushed out simply disables the "push-to-talk" feature entirely.
Unless you think Google has some kind of motive to listen to completely randomly-triggered recording (and they don't; the data would be garbage from almost any standpoint I can imagine), your post is incredibly misleading at best and malicious fearmongering at worst.
Can't you say Hey Google now?
No in French, from what I can tell. (Pronounced the same)
Um...you know JG was formerly at Google doing all that magic you love and is now at Apple, right?
Google is a lot more than one guy
For the rest of us, who is JG?
Haha nvm made the connection... r/whoosh
JG was _managing people_ doing the magic. There's a difference. By himself, he can't really do much. He's not even a ML/DL guy per se.
Magic is about management. The most talented ICs can't do much unless management supports them in it. (And I say this as an IC.)
Management is a necessary but insufficient condition for magic.
Not in research.
Even in Research.
Xerox PARC is a great example - PARC invented everything, but very little of it was immediately commercially applicable - Good management, is what turns "people producing great things", to "people producing great things regular people can use"
Anyone with a successful research lab is a manager: they're spending a good chunk of their time herding grad students, writing grant proposals, hiring junior faculty, etc. This model works.
Managers decide on the culture, composition and priorities of a team.
They are just as significant as individuals in the team.
JG is the reason Google has all that ML effort. He joined google via the MetaWeb acquisition; when he'd finished his earn-out he wanted to leave but was asked to look around for something useful to do and consolidated a bunch of dispersed ML efforts. He also bought Deep Mind on behalf of Google.
I don't know why you would say he's "not a DL/ML guy per se" -- he's a programmer, not an MBA type. You consider MetaWeb and TellMe inadequate?
So you concede that there was “magic” being done at Google, but you want to argue that Giannandrea’s leadership of the search and AI teams had nothing to do with it?
If there’s one company that’s proved how successful non-technical leaders can be, it would seemingly be Apple.
jg isn't non-technical.
Don't you think it's likely that JG will convince other top AI/ML talent to join Apple? That's usually a senior exec's main job, to recruit, retain and grow people who are building the products.
Uh, Jobs was not an engineer either, just a simple ol' manager, right? Managers don't have any power and capabilities, right?
ffs jg is an Engineer.
what is it you think executives do?
The issue is not personnel — it is data privacy/ethics. Apple has come down heavily on the side of “we aren’t going to do creepy shit with your data”. Google, Amazon, and FB can all pull ahead because they have no such scruples.
Who is this best of the best that they didn't hire?
Everyone who cares even a little about their academic career. Apple doesn't really let you publish. Even pop-sci articles they do publish on their website don't have any names. I know no sane researcher who would agree to end their academic participation so abruptly, particularly in order to work for an organization widely perceived as a perennial laggard.
Actually they fixed that 2 years ago:
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2016/12/6/13858354/app...
But... they didn't. In the very page you linked, try to find a single name of a concrete researcher who wrote/contributed to the article. If there's no name on the paper it's not "publishing".
They won the Best Paper CVPR prize in 2017.
Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training by Ashish Shrivastava, Tomas Pfister, Oncel Tuzel, Joshua Susskind, Wenda Wang, & Russell Webb.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/08/25/apple-wins-best-paper-prestig...
Names are there. Check the arxiv link.
so is it "they won't open their wallet!" or "they won't let you publish!"
How about both. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook both pay their researchers very well and let them publish extensively. That's why they have world-leading research organizations, and Apple does not.
Do you have evidence that Apple pays AI researchers less than those other companies? Honestly I'm not sure that you even understand the argument you're trying to make. The rest of us here certainly don't.
In my experience, the offers that google, fb & netflix give are better than the offers that amazon, msft & apple give on a consistent basis. 'Special' people will get special offers, but we would have to compare their offers of what they would get elsewhere, and if their special skill would be equally valued at other companies.
Apple has an institutional memory of almost dying, so they can be a very 'cheap' company under the hood when they can get away with it. It reflects in their pay.
Just because you aren't understanding doesn't mean most others aren't. He clearly said the other companies have an AND situation in regards to pay and publishing. He is saying Apple does not, as it does not allow proper publishing.
I.e. {'Pay' AND 'Publishing' > 'Pay'} not {Apple 'Pay' < Other 'Pay'}
If Google’s strategy is to be emulated, then why is hiring someone who was part of that strategy a bad move on Apple’s part?
I'm not saying it's a _bad_ move. It's just insufficient. And until they unclench wrt publishing nothing is going to change for them. And even after they do that, it will take a lot of convincing (and large wads of cash) to hire the best talent that can not only get Siri to catch up to Google, but overtake it.
My problem is not with Giannandrea's new position, it's with the lack of urgency on Apple's part. My patience has been wearing thin as of late.
The fundamental problem is that Apple has been focused on making end user products for a very long time, but Google has been dealing with data and the cloud for 20 years.
Apple could probably become as good as Google at its own game, but it would take a lot of effort and I don't think Tim Cook et al have the vision to move in that direction like Microsoft did.
I feel Apple will become more and more irrelevant as years pass. With a bandwidth singularity end user hardware will be irrelevant in 10-20 years from now and other companies like Google and Microsoft are slowly catching up in making great end user experiences.
>It's just unbelievable to me that the company sitting on a quarter trillion dollars is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that hoard to hire the best of the best
Their current B people do hire the best of the best ... of B people. It like my current BigCo (we are straight C people) feels no talent shortage even right now in the Bay Area while also supposedly hiring only the best people - there is no shortage of C people. We enjoy our work/life balance while of course we can't even dream of producing anything even just slightly resembling Siri.
From what I've heard it is much harder at Apple to use your user data non-anonymized i.e they focus more on Privacy vs Google, Amazon etc where any team can use your data to do experiments and run A/B tests, ultimately what this means is that the quality of AI will be poorer. Developers of the $30 Google Home puck uses your data without thinking of the privacy consequences (internal bad actor), and hence is way better. This is what I've heard from developers/spokespeople of Apple. Has anyone else heard the same excuse ?
For some reason Apple is extremely stringent with their Servers / Cloud Investment. They were late to building their DC, late to owning their CDN ( despite being huge in volume ) Basically Tim Cook has a model that they should not own any "asset". the Asset Light Strategy. Compared to Google which is beating any AI , Deep Learning problems with brute force, and optimise later.
Even their Maps are late, 7 years later since the first apology of Apple Maps they still aren't anywhere close to Google Map.
It's quite good at accents as well.
Apple cannot hire 'the best of the best'; those people are freaks and are probably not publicly presentable. The shareholders would not approve.
I used to work for Apple. Pretty diverse. Plenty of normal people and plenty of freaks.
Wiki link on the guy for the lazy, as I had no idea who he was: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Giannandrea
Pretty short page but solid background.
Hopefully this is a signal that Apple is going to take steps to improve Siri. If Apple can find a way to get the best of both worlds from data privacy and machine learning then it will have been well worth the wait.
I am really annoyed by Siri these days. I was so excited when they introduced it in 2011 (?). But I feel like there was almost no progress since then. It’s so painful to use Siri even for the simplest of tasks
I don’t use Siri enough to have a personal opinion but read this article. Someone who tested 800 questions (on a HomePod not iPhone) and earlier this year got 52% correct responses and now got 74% right. From that it looks like it’s improving quite rapidly.
See comparison Siri Alexa google and Cortana: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/20/siri-on-homepod-vs-alex...
>From that it looks like it’s improving quite rapidly.
I fear the challenge will be one of perception. Speech is really a make-or-break first impression kind of technology, since speech is so personal. I'm afraid that Siri will need to become twice as better as the competition to regain the trust of users that it won't completely fail them, or even to just get them to retry it.
I wonder if, in the future, there will be some sort of marketing push called "Siri 2.0" or maybe even regular "releases" (even though I'm sure it's not updated on that kind of cadence). Since the technology is all invisible, there's no way to tell that something has changed, unlike a traditional OS, which changes its appearance even slightly.
Maybe. I don’t have any comparison. And I haven’t used Siri for a long time. But I started again 1-2 weeks ago and I’m super annoyed because it’s such a pain.
Totally agree. On my first iOS device (XR) since the first Android device arrived. The speech recognition on Android is FAR better....it would get it right 99% of the time. Siri is so bad I've considered starting a Twitter feed of "sh Siri thinks I said..."
Oddly, even speech to text with GBoard on the iPhone is noticeably worse than on Android as well.
There's a subreddit that captures your idea: https://www.reddit.com/r/SiriFail/.
I've been using iPhones for some number of generations now but the autocorrect on iOS is terrible compared with Android from 5+ years ago.
I would suggest trying Shortcuts, because Shortcuts are so phenominally easy to create, share, and modify that it blows my mind.
It took me all of 3 minutes to create a Shortcut that lets me message my wife with my ETA at my house when I say "hey siri coming home" (or use the Siri activation in my car) and then "yes" when she asks for confirmation to send it. Takes my current location, finds the route to my house, grabs the time, and plops it into a custom message that I typed up that's sent to my wife's iPhone.
Shortcuts is not quite the same as Siri.
After so many years Siri still doesn’t do “take me to the nearest McDonald’s” like Google Assistant can. And whenever Siri isn’t “confident” it just launches Safari, but it’s often not even the best starting point, and Siri sometimes gives up silently without feedback.
Also for a bit of fun, ask Siri for the population of Buffalo NY. I noticed because Siri also tells you that Buffalo is big, and then goes on to say...
I just tried “take me to the nearest McDonalds” and it replied “which local business, tap the one you want” with a list from nearest to farthest and when I click on it, it gives me directions to the one I choose.
As far as the second question - yeah that one was weird. It said that the population was 69 but the text summary that it displayed was 269,000. It’s the only city that displayed that bug.
Did you see how Google Assistant handles the nearest McDonald’s request? Google doesn’t ask you which McDonald’s is the closest one, tap the one you want.
I'd rather have the list than a single choice. That way I can pick one that isn't in a crappy neighborhood, or is on the way to a place I'm going anyway.
My biggest frustration with my car's built-in navigation is that when I ask it for the "nearest" item, more than 50% of the time it tells me to make a U-turn because it picked the mathematically nearest item, rather than picking the conventionally nearest item.
I actually think if you said "closest" or "nearest" and Siri just gives you a list, then Siri has missed out on useful information. You can also say "Nearby McDonald's" to Google and get a list, versus "Go to the nearest McDonalds" and you'll get navigation.
There are all sorts of ways to handle this request, but Siri's is the laziest, and in doing so asks more of the user's attention. If you just say "McDonalds" to either voice assistant, you also get a list. From that perspective, it's as if Siri ignores any information that might be gleaned from the rest of your sentence.
Siri learns from us but we also learn from Siri, and we might find that some words don't matter. You mind as well just say "McDonalds" if Siri is going to ignore the rest.
It understands “take me to the closest” and doesn’t give you a list but “take me to the nearest..” does.
Reminds me of some of the chatbots that I use to make. No matter how hard I tried to test them, they always worked as expected. The minute someone else used it, it fell apart. Subconsciously, I knew what would work and what wouldn’t.
Yeah sure you rather have a list. Why not have it return a list of answers for every question that had a definite answer like this then? Options are better.
But that’s more of an interface choice than a technical limitation. Siri both understood the question and had the ability to navigate to it.
In my case, there were 9 McDonalds within a 10 mile radius.
In cases where there was only one location nearby, it took me right to it.
I think you give Siri too much of the benefit of the doubt when you say that Siri understands your request. You may be correct, but maybe Siri just looks for a location like "McDonalds" and most of the time just shows you a list? It's easier when you're ignoring the rest of the sentence as if it has no relevance to improving your response.
It's very hard for us to discuss Siri's internal state; by contrast it's easier to discuss Google's observable performance, which is to semantically differentiate between these two requests.
You can just ask Google, "Nearby McDonalds" and you'll get a list. "Go to the nearest McDonalds" and you get navigation.
Take me to the nearest McDonalds - gives me a list.
“McDonalds” - gives me a list.
“Take me to the closest McDonalds” - brings up maps and starts navigating to the closest McDonalds.
After further experimentation. Siri doesn’t understand Nearest but does understand “closest” to mean that I don’t want a list.
If you said “take me to” an not “show me a list” then it actually did the wrong thing by showing you a list. I suppose “not working” is technically an interface choice, though.
"what is the population of buffalo, new york" (that's what i told siri) shows me London?
> Also for a bit of fun, ask Siri for the population of Buffalo NY.
Nice
Someone at Apple may be reading this thread, because it returned the answer normally for me.
Yeah, they must have—this afternoon it told me the population of Buffalo, New York was 69. I’ve got a window, I was pretty sure that’s not correct.
The worst part for me is it opens it in Safari and not Chrome. (As well that it opens directions with not-Google Maps)
Isn’t it still the case that “third party” browsers on iOS are just wrappers around Safari/WebKit anyway?
For the longest time Chrome on iOS was just using WebKit/safari’s UIWebView then later WKWebView for rendering webpages, much like many other iOS apps that display web content. For various reasons the App Store rules have always banned third party browser rendering engines, I haven’t heard any change in this policy recently?
The only real advantage of Chrome on iOS was ancillary features like Google account bookmark/history sync etc if you are all in on Chrome elsewhere, which isn’t all that useful in the context of a link provided by Siri, for me at any rate. The feature that lets apps using WKWebView access your password/auto fill data only works with Safari on iOS as well, which is all the reason I need not to bother with the WebKit-wrapper rivals anyway.
The maps issue is significantly more annoying to me.
i use siri to turn off and on hue lights (sometimes) and sometimes to set reminders. I do feel that since I dont have Siri on an "always on" speaker, it becomes less useful. I dislike the idea of having an "always on" speaker, so I'm not sure what to do. :)
If it makes you feel better, the “always on” recordings never leave your device. They’re not even that great at recognizing anything other than “this sounds like a ‘hey Siri’”.
For a fun experiment, yell RED FIRE TRUCK into your phone then immediately activate Siri manually.
With Hey Siri turned on, you will reliably get all three words. With it off, you will usually get Chuck or Truck, or sometimes FIRETRUCK depending on timing.
This seems to be for people who start talking before the Siri prompt is fully active like “Set <button> Timer for 5 minutes”.
But shows that Apple is typically pre-recording if not also pre-processing.
I don’t get anything, just activates Siri normally.
I’m on iphone8 and can get it to happen reliably. Weird.
How old is your iPhone? I don’t recall the first model to introduce it, but all iPhones now I believe have supported an “always on” hey Siri mode for a while, even if phone is in standby.
Yup, the first iPhone to introduce this was iPhone 6s.
Oh, well maybe it is on then...
Honestly voice control is a gimmick to me, I much prefer Apple to make exactly zero compromises on privacy and have Siri languish.
Especially because the ecosystem that Siri can use is so nice, with homekit devices and shortcuts.
His role: senior vice president of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
For all the folks lamenting Siri: that was likely just the prototype. I'd bet good money that Apple is working on something far better than a personal assistant for the home—that's just how they got their feet wet while staying competitive. Siri is going to be a robot in your home one day—not just a bubble on the credenza. In order for that to happen, their best talent needs to be focused on that.
This is giving them a lot of benefit of the doubt. Do you have any evidence?
Their track record and the caliber of folks floating around Apple.
that's just how they got their feet wet while staying competitive
Siri is nowhere near the competition.
Reading the dumb things people in this thread go to the effort of making a voice controls for simply for the sake of using voice controls perfectly summarizes how useless voice control tech is. You're literally saving seconds of effort in order to open up yourself to an infinite amount of attack vectors. You deserve to be pwned.
Also the "Apple is gonna make voice control mainstream!" arguement in 2017+1 is hilarious. Apple has failed every new tech endeavor since the iPhone. The tablet, the smart watch, the touch bar, the ear pods, forcing usb3- everything has been a failure.
Was this sarcasm? Their tablet, watches and Airpods are all very well received and successful. I have the Watch and AirPods and they're great. As for USB, I assume you mean USB-C, what would you prefer? Another proprietary connector?
JG is a smart and nice guy. Congrats.
SVP is probably a very important position in corporate AAPL, however, I will feel more excited for Apple if someone like Chris Lattner would join/return as chief AI/ML engineer.
His experience seems to be entirely focused on compilers. He's a talented engineer and leader, and his decision to join Google Brain indicates interest in AI, but wouldn't the chief AI/ML engineer have some demonstrable expertise in that particular field?
Chris Lattner works on Swift for TensorFlow, so it’s not hard to see why he was picked for this role.
That might be credited more to his role in creating Swift than his expertise in ML.
To be clear, I'm not claiming he's not capable of the role at some point. I don't know one way or the other. But his transition from compilers to AI seems fairly recent.
Jeff Dean didn't have a demonstrable expertise in AI before heading Google AI.
Yes he did -- He co-authored an influential deep learning paper in 2012: https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub40565
I think his contribution at that time was mainly clever ways to drastically scale up existing neural net techniques, but just scaling things up 100x or 1000x seems to be a large part of the magic of deep learning.
And not only that. Even his undergrad thesis back from 1990 was on neural nets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I1fs4sczbCaACzA9XwxR3DiuXVt...
Jeff cofounded the google brain team.
And TBH, it was him, who knows general computing from circuits to planet scale distributed systems, really enabled the AI as it today, at least inside Google.
Chris latner is probably at google because google pays him better.
I wonder at what point the pay becomes just a number. I am hoping people at Chris’s position are where they are because of the role, organization and the opportunity and not just because of money
Apple is not an innovative company.They are a marketing company. What do marketing teams do when they have a lot of money ? They start removing stuff, remove the wires, remove the inputs/outputs and kill the company. Good bye Apple, even this guy can't save you. I won't miss you.
You can't just will this to happen by saying it. The reality is very different. Either their brainwashing works so well that tons of consumers AND other companies buy into it and follow along, or maybe they're onto something.
Are we trotting out that old trope again? Two words for you: Apple Watch. Nobody is even close to what they did with Watch and what they are doing with health. Look at the camera and photos app: on device ML. Look at the tech behind Memories for instance. They’re doing this without sending your photos to some privacy-invading server. Look at FaceId. Sure Samsung had facial recognition — but it could be fooled with a printed photo. Look at what Apple has done with AR. Their computational photography stuff is also incredible. But sure let’s lament the loss of a SCSI port and call it a marketing decision.
Yes, I couldn't resist. I am sorry, but I have maybe seen 2-3 people wearing an Apple watch and never heard about Memories. Apple watch (and Siri) might be a thing in the US but definitely not in Europe or Asia. I feel like Apple have only 2 successful products: Iphone and Macbook. Their biggest success however is creating a cult and closing personal computer hardware (remember IBM/compatible).
And did closed turn out to be an invalid decision? Closed meant control, control meant more security and privacy and avoiding reliance on advertising revenue.
Good marketing decision
Why does everybody else copy them, then?
If it’s just clever marketing, you have to wonder why marketing is working so well compared to the innovation that other companies are presumably doing.