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Apple's 'Assistant' Seen as Key Feature for New iPhone Hardware
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Boy, I can't wait to hear all the people on the subway asking "Where can I buy milk?" into an iP5. Dumbing down of people is always sad 
A lot of long-distance trains here have silent cars ... where no mobile phone usage is allowed ... it will be quite nice when all of the cars on all of the trains go this route.
Link to quiet areas: http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/trains/overview/mobile-area.shtml
Therefore, I'm quite sad to see voice recognition being built into iOS, as it goes against this trend.
A lot of long-distance trains here have silent cars ... where no mobile phone usage is allowed ... it will be quite nice when all of the cars on all of the trains go this route.
Link to quiet areas: http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/trains/overview/mobile-area.shtml
Therefore, I'm quite sad to see voice recognition being built into iOS, as it goes against this trend.
Dear Apple,
Please do that with the iPod touch 5(p.s Nuance sucks with a Zambian accent, but 1GB RAM will be welcome)
Please do that with the iPod touch 5(p.s Nuance sucks with a Zambian accent, but 1GB RAM will be welcome)
Boy, I can't wait to hear all the people on the subway asking "Where can I buy milk?" into an iP5. Dumbing down of people is always sad
A lot of long-distance trains here have silent cars ... where no mobile phone usage is allowed ... it will be quite nice when all of the cars on all of the trains go this route.
Link to quiet areas: http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/trains/overview/mobile-area.shtml
Therefore, I'm quite sad to see voice recognition being built into iOS, as it goes against this trend.
Agreed. I think that like Facetime this feature will look a whole lot better in demo and commercials than seeing someone actually use.
"Newton Intelligence" rises from the ashes
Siri's interpretation technology is powerful. Combine it with today's best speech-to-text and text-to-speech facilities, and Apple's user interface acumen, and it reminds me very much of a Newton Intelligence 2.0. There, you'd write in natural language, things like "lunch tomorrow with Tim" and it would set up a calendar appointment. Current data detectors and apps like Siri are already doing similar things, but add interactive conversational speech and we may see it taken to a whole new level.
Siri's interpretation technology is powerful. Combine it with today's best speech-to-text and text-to-speech facilities, and Apple's user interface acumen, and it reminds me very much of a Newton Intelligence 2.0. There, you'd write in natural language, things like "lunch tomorrow with Tim" and it would set up a calendar appointment. Current data detectors and apps like Siri are already doing similar things, but add interactive conversational speech and we may see it taken to a whole new level.
I totally agree with you here. And to be honest, I would feel rather screwed if Apple made the Assistant feature iPhone 5 exclusive.
Remember, the iPhone 4 is just one generation old.
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I'll create an app called 'lonely hearts'. It talks and has a conversation with people when they are lonely
This sounds interesting.
As a side note. I find it humorous that people doubt a re-designed iPhone because the lack of part leaks, yet the original iPhone was kept under wraps forever without issue. After last year's fiasco I'm sure they are doing everything they can to hide this thing until keynote day.
As a side note. I find it humorous that people doubt a re-designed iPhone because the lack of part leaks, yet the original iPhone was kept under wraps forever without issue. After last year's fiasco I'm sure they are doing everything they can to hide this thing until keynote day.
I understand all the nay-saying, but wasn't this tech company that apple bought recently that did voice recognition supposed to be beter than the rest? I forget... But if it's even a half step up from decent ones like dragon dictation, and/or the mics and noise cancelling improved/ more refined, it could be VERY useful when in ones office or home (if not in the noisy environs of the outdoors) ... Which frankly is where I make most of my plans to get milk, etc .... So in other words I could see this being useful....
And I very much like the idea of gps-triggered reminders, that's cool.
Some of you are thinking way too small. Step back and see the big picture. This info is absolutely huge and it's a game changer, particularly the bit about wolfram alpha.
Dual-core with 1GB of ram is standard for a smartphone now days.
So is the four hour battery life...
I can't really see this being an iphone 4s/5 feature.
It's already clear that the 4 will get IOS5 - FACT
Apple have made it clear that IOS 5 will have ;
VoiceOver action support
Option to speak text selection
VoiceOver item chooser
I can't see them making these iphone4s/5 exclusive otherwise they would have saved them for the iphone announcement rather than announcing it in the IOS5 keynote.
It's already clear that the 4 will get IOS5 - FACT
Apple have made it clear that IOS 5 will have ;
VoiceOver action support
Option to speak text selection
VoiceOver item chooser
I can't see them making these iphone4s/5 exclusive otherwise they would have saved them for the iphone announcement rather than announcing it in the IOS5 keynote.
Oh yes! When I ask my phone to call the "work office" it dials "sushi kings", even when I'm sober...
I had an Android phone for work and the voice recognition was worse than worthless. My old Windows mobile 6 phone would at least confirm if it picked the right name. The ***** Android would just dial whatever name it thought you said
I like the idea too. The part I don't like is that location based reminders requires location services to be active almost constantly. That will have a huge impact on battery life. I am going to guess it will not be GPS but wifi location for this feature in order to reduce battery drain, but it will still be a drain.
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iPhone 3G got iOS4, but was missing some features. iPhone 4 getting iOS5 implies nothing.
I agree. I think the usual voice-to-operation software is useless and the text-to-voice software is never used by anyone as it's so unnatural.
Also, I've never seen a really good implementation of either. It's usually faster to enter information manually.
That's the current setup, but what if they could do it in the phone itself? Not possible? Perhaps not, but I don't think a hybrid system is out of the question.
Note current phones, even old ones, already have good built-in, speaker independent voice recognition. You can make calls and control the iPod software. How does it do that? By severely limiting the vocabulary - you can only say a few things. But consider the hardware difference between the first iPhones that had that system, and the iPhone 5 with a much, much faster, dual core CPU. I bet they could expand the vocabulary by a LOT at this point.
Still, you surely can't do the virtually unlimited dictation allowed by the server-based system. But you could probably do plenty. Add recognition of dates and times, and specific commands for the built in apps, and so on, all able to be done right in the phone even without Internet connections. It's likely you could send things like address book names and addresses to the Net for preprocessing and keep that data in the phone so it could recognize those items as well, offline. For the final touch, when you do have an Internet connection, send commands to the server when doing general dictation.
Some kind of hybrid system using iPhone 5 hardware could be powerful when the Internet is not available, and awesome when it is.
it'll be a disappointment if it doesn't work on the iPad 2, it was just released this year and I'm sure there will be a lot of sales this holiday season...
It'll be too bad if you get an brand new iPad 2 with iOS5 on it, only to find you can't run a newly promoted feature. So my guess is that it will run on at least the existing A5-512 chip.
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There's absolutely no reason why the iPhone 4 couldn't handle this feature. Frickin ridiculous if you ask me. Another way for Apple to make money.
If this is a legitimate example, the problem is that "play song" is not a feature of the iPod app voice control.
- Call someone in contacts Say call or dial, then say the name of the person. If the person has more than one phone number, you can add home or mobile, for example.
- Make a FaceTime call to someone in contacts (iPhone 4) Say FaceTime, then say the name of the person. If the person has more than one phone number, you can add home or mobile, for example.
- Dial a number Say call or dial, then say the number.
- Control music playback Say play or play music. To pause, say pause or pause music. You can also say next song or previous song.
- Play an album, artist, or playlist Say play, then say album, artist, or playlist and the name.
- Shuffle the current playlist Say shuffle.
- Find out more about the currently playing song Say whats playing, what song is this, who sings this song, or who is this song by.
- Use Genius to play similar songs Say Genius, play more like this, or play more songs like this.
- Find out the current time Say what time is it? or what is the time?
- Cancel Voice Control Say cancel or stop.
Boy, I can't wait to hear all the people on the subway asking "Where can I buy milk?" into an iP5. Dumbing down of people is always sad
A lot of long-distance trains here have silent cars ... where no mobile phone usage is allowed ... it will be quite nice when all of the cars on all of the trains go this route.
Link to quiet areas: http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/trains/overview/mobile-area.shtml
Therefore, I'm quite sad to see voice recognition being built into iOS, as it goes against this trend.
The german silent cars are a joke. I travelled for four years from Frankfurt to Munich each week and constantly had to tell people to turn down their headphones (1st class cars). The car was usually full of arrogant people watching a movie after work who didn't understand that sound bleeds out of these things. There is nothing more annoying than sitting next to someone with too loud headphones. 2nd class was even worse.
On top of that Germans are so individualistic that the whole car of people is audibly sighing and being annoyed at the noise, but too chicken to say something about it. The same in the cinema. They are able to sit and watch an out of focus movie packed with 500 people in the theatre and there is no-one that is pro-active enough to go out and ask someone to twiddle some knobs..
Apple have done a good job of not letting much get out about the new model, as evidenced by these placeholder articles!