Siri's Accuracy Continues to Improve as Apple Works to Reduce Reliance on Google

[nagromme]

Sometimes I wonder if Google intentionally screws up voice searches made from their iOS apps--but of course that would make no sense. They care about searches far more than they care about Android.

But whatever the explanation, Google's voice search has been near useless to me (I have a very ordinary American accent). Super slow, and nearly always gets words wrong.

Whereas Siri/iOS dictation is faster (but still not instant) and amazingly accurate.

An easy comparison: use the official Google YouTube app, which supports both Google's voice searching and Apple's search entry (via the mic button on the virtual keyboard). Google is nowhere close for me: it's like a joke from the 90s. Apple gets me the search I want 90% of the time on the first try, and 99% on the second try (I speak more clearly the second time).

I don't know why my voice or habits would be unusual, but Google's voice processing seems absurdly bad to me--and awkwardly slow, despite people praising their speed. I'm stumped.

I use Siri mainly to initiate Google/Wikipedia searches, secondarily to set timers/alarms, and lastly to get directions. Those three uses alone make Siri terrific--and I know there's more it can do, but other uses have been less reliable for me (like setting up appointments--I always have to edit some details afterward).

 

[Tech198]

The way I see it, unless Siri is 100%, people will always rely on keyboard for input...

No exceptions.... It's possible, just like OS's being 100% secure, but companies like to "get users to test them while improving", and of couse, they have to keep to a dead-line...

Take these two away, and the sky's the limits... Easy ..

And, that is a well-known fact.

 

[iMerik]

I miss the days when Apple and Google were friends. I feel like Google services meticulously baked into iOS would make for a better iPhone experience.

 

[petsounds]

I don't know, that net percentage increase (4% better) year over year seems kind of low to me. Am I the only one who feels that way? Not my field of study, so I'm not entirely sure if this is supposed to be impressive.

I don't know if I would say "impressive" or not, as I'm not qualified to judge such progress, but Natural Language Processing is one of the most difficult problems in computer science. Trying to understand what someone means (often said in a lazy and imprecise way) via complicated languages like English in which word usage and meaning is often subjective, is a very difficult task.

My main complaint with Siri continues to be that Apple is not making big improvements. One of the most fundamental problems is that Siri has no conversational capabilities (except in a few pre-defined cases), and thus is a fairly poor personal assistant. For instance, I can't say "Siri, make a reservation for two at Veganville tonight at 8" and then say "Please send Annie directions to the restaurant". Nor does it actually understand any of the data it receives from APIs it uses, so you cannot build questions on top of previous answers.

 

[postpc]

99 out of 100 Siri queries will just stall and the remaining 1% it won't understand what you're saying. It's years behind Google voice recognition.

 

[NightFox]

Palm graffiti says hello. Technology was developed (specific rules of how each character were written), people learned how the technology worked (people had to conform to the rules), everyone was happy.

Graffiti sadly went the way of the dodo due to bad management. Meanwhile, various companies are trying to make handwriting recognition more "natural", and it couldn't be more off-base. Meanwhile we have touchscreen keyboards, swype, all failing to be excellent...

But I'd respectfully argue that that is exactly what I mean. Whilst users at the time had to adapt their handwriting to the technology, the way forward was rightly seen as to continue to improve handwriting recognition so people wouldn't have to write in a special way in the future, rather than leave the technology as it was and expect this new way of writing be become the norm in the future.

The fact that with the existing technology some people do need to change the way they speak for Siri to understand them should be seen as a current failing of Siri, not a current failing of those people. Technology serves us, we don't serve technology.

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This is because it is only looking at words heard correctly. Since it can now hear and understand more words and phrases, even those more complex - it is not illogical that Siri would not be able to answer all of these questions correctly.

Yep, I see that - good logic

 

[nope7308]

Siri is and always was a pure gimmick.

I'll tell the phone to call Danielle and it starts calling Phil. Let's hear the explanation for that one, Apple.

 

[radiohead14]

google voice is more useful and practical to me

 

[Cappy]

A few things...

1. Gene Munster has always been an Apple cheerleader. I take nothing from him as objective and have serious doubts about his tests.

2. My own personal experience with Siri from the beginning until now matches those of others I know in that Siri has not improved and in some ways is much worse at picking up correct statements. One example of this is I have a playlist called Jim's Music. When Siri first came out, I could play it via Siri with no problem. Not anymore...about a year or so ago Siri started thinking I said gyms music. There have been other situations as well like this but that one is the most memorable.

3. I find Siri's voice being speeded up in iOS 7 as ridiculous. It no longer sounds real and I can't help but suspect that it was speeded up because of criticism that Google's version was much faster at responding to speech. Siri is just as slow as before but speeding up the voice gives people the illusion it's faster now.

My two cents. Siri was pretty great when it came out. I used it daily for quite some time and then about the time the iPhone 5 was released it started getting worse. For what it's worth I still use the same 4s that I had back then.

 

[Nunyabinez]

Siwi, can you wecommend a good westuwaunt?

Enough said.

 

[Cappy]

Sometimes I wonder if Google intentionally screws up voice searches made from their iOS apps--but of course that would make no sense. They care about searches far more than they care about Android.

Sorry but that's a silly assumption to make. They've been known to taint search results.

 

[jdiamond]

What am I doing wrong?

I've tried Siri on a number of devices with iOS 6, and I can count on one hand the amount of times it has EVER gotten text right or did what I wanted. I see all the commercials - doesn't happen for me. At first, I assumed that the Siri for the iPhone must be different than the Siri on the iPod or iPad, but I have no idea.

It's really like Applewocky - unusable. My daughter will sit there and keep saying a single word at a time over and over until just that word is right - and sometimes, even that never happens. Typically, if you say a sentence, Siri will reply with a completely different sentence for which one or two of the words sound a little like words from your sentence. I've currently tried this with two iPod Touch 4s and two iPad Minis, all running iOS 6. And no, we don't have outlandish accents.

Given that the brains for Siri aren't even in the device, could there be some issue with mic noise? The sound sounds OK when we record, but it's not crystal clear.

My only other thought is that Siri is heavily context based, that is, look at what's on your device, etc. So if you have a pretty empty device, Siri won't understand much.

For us, Google Voice Search works fairly well - it messes up, but works the majority of the time. So what I would have expected to see in this article was more like "Google - 70% accuracy, iOS 6 - 10% accuracy"

 

[AppleScruff1]

Siri still isn't very useful, IMO. I think that Google Now works better.

 

[Parasprite]

Yes. I used to work for AT&T/Bell Labs, training voice recognition software, 15 years ago when I was in college. We trained the software to recognize all kinds of accents, slang phrasing, pick out words from background noise, etc.

That was a nifty bit of software, actually. The Text->Speech engine they used to have was the only one I've found that let you input IPA symbols and get even close to a half-decent result.

Whatever happened to that, by the way?

 

[springsup]

Siri's actually been a bit worse for me. I can no longer ask for friends' locations (via Find my Friends) from my iPhone, but I can from my iPad.

 

[HenryDJP]

I know right? All those other dialects are just obvious bastardizations of the superior Upper Midwest American English master race, what with our long vowels and quirky rhotacism. Why can't they learn just to speak properly??

It's good to finally meet someone who has perfect pronounciation!

Uh, I think you mean "Enunciation", although you're not wrong per say but your choice of words isn't correct. Hmm, a human can't even comprehend with another human and they expect Siri (A computer generated AI) to be perfect.

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Yes. I used to work for AT&T/Bell Labs, training voice recognition software, 15 years ago when I was in college. We trained the software to recognize all kinds of accents, slang phrasing, pick out words from background noise, etc.

Excellent then tell me why Siri isn't perfect enough for some as of yet? Is it because Apple is just being lazy and doesn't care one way or another if their product sucks or maybe it's because technology hasn't advanced as of yet?
Right now the MS XBOX ONE has major VR issues. You'd think MS, a company that helped pioneer the computer industry would be able to do that well by now right? Perhaps but technology just isn't up there and sadly technology has spoiled way too many people and they become so entitled that they down a company for not making their products act exactly like a "human".

 

[JoeRito]

Siri doesn't like a Boston accent (Southie).

 

[mantan]

Google Voice search is FAR superior to Siri. Unfortunately, I bet the overwhelming majority of iPhone users don't know versatile it is...they think Siri is is as good as voice control can be.

Like many others on here, I gave up on Siri to do all the but the most rudimentary tasks (setting reminders, etc.) I can't even get it to play the right music on the consistent basis. The rental company gave me a Ford Edge on a business trip last week. The Ford Sync system operated my iPhone 10 times more accurately for calls/messages/music than Siri.

Siri remind me of Bing and Apple Maps in that their usage numbers are inflated by being the default app. And the end user suffers by getting an inferior experience.

 

[variable455]

maybe it's not Siri

There is no way these charts are accurate. Even when I speak as clearly as possible and enunciate every syllable, Siri understands me about 40% of the time.

so brudder.. you speaking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Pidgin

how do they spell http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/annunciate in Hawaii?

 

[slu]

I find Google Now to be much faster and much more accurate on my Nexus 4 than on my wife's iPhone 4S. My step-father thinks Siri is only good for swearing at. For my anecdotal evidence, most of my family and friends that have smartphones are iPhone users. None of them use or like Siri. The one or two that have Android phones use Google Now.

 

[mofunk]

You could with Siri in iOS6 reply to emails. In iOS7 you can reply or forward any emails using Siri. I say Siri gets a C- or D.

 

[pmbooks]

I upgraded from an iPhone 3 to the 5s, so this past month was my first time using Siri. I've tried it several times and have given up—it simply doesn't understand me.

Unable to understand me, Siri's smarmy reply is "If you say so." Talk about sophomoric programming.

Google voice search, however, usually does understand [the same phrase].

I've been an Apple devotee for 25 years, and don't plan to switch hardware, but the Siri thing is, in my experience, a huge fail.

just my 2 cents.

 

[Oletros]

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster

Enough said

 

[MrBitchen]

She still can't recognize the city Temecula CA. Here's an example "Find movies playing into macula California" Who in the whole god damn world uses the word macula in conversation! WTF!!

 

[Michael CM1]

This last line really points out the true difficulty of what Apple and Google and anyone in voice recognition have to deal with. In my local dialect of Midwestern English sugar is pronounced as if there is an h after the s. Is there a pronunciation difference between aunt and ant? How about pin and pen? Is drag a regular or irregular verb? And I could go on and on for days, and this is all just within the umbrella of US English. Try adding in the various dialects of British English, Canadian English, Australian English, etc.

How about the Spanglish spoken in places like Gibraltar or Southern California where the speaker will switch mid-sentence between English and Spanish? Heck, as one poster pointed out, even humans have a hard time understanding each other a lot of the time. So, why do we expect a machine as stupid as a computer to be perfect?

Could it improve? Yeah. Will it improve? Yeah. Will it ever be perfect? Heck no.

That being said, I have to really question just how much this is really an article concerning Apple doing well. Doesn't Apple still use Nuance for the voice to text conversion which is then fed into Siri's knolwedge base search engine? If that is true then isn't an improvement in understanding what is asked an improvement for Nuance? While the drop in returning a correct response when the question is understood (nuance did its job) actually a bad thing for Apple?

I live in the South. Plenty of people around here talk like Larry the Cable Guy. I can't imagine how any computer can translate some accents that heavy. I'm pretty good at pronouncing stuff and don't have much of an accent after going for a degree in journalism, meaning I'm more picky in my brain about language than the average bear. But I'm not the majority of people.

I find it amazing how accurate Siri is at times. I've learned a few key phrases to get her in the right direction. In fact, I always try to say "get directions to" and then an address. As you said, Siri will NEVER be perfect.