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Apple's Machine Learning Has Cut Siri's Error Rate by a Factor of Two

Siri should:

1) Work offline (for tasks not requiring internet: calling, creating lists, setting a timer, etc.).
2) Instead of telling me she doesn't understand, just take what she thinks I said, send it to Google, and show me the top result(s).
 
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NY Guitarist said:
I like Siri on the iPhone when it works, but at times it totally gets things very wrong that it previously got right.

What really gets me ticked off is how Siri on ATV is worse than useless almost every time I try to make use of it.
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What are you using Siri on ATV for? It's not really Siri but a subset of Siri functionality. I wish they would open that up more for basic internet info but then you have to open up a browser on the TV which most people do not want - everyone says they want it but no one wants to surf and type on their TV as testing and failed products have shown again and again.
 
Rogifan said:
This all seems a little defensive to me. The flavor of the year according to the tech press is AI/ML so now Apple's out there saying we do this too!
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It is a little out of left field for Apple to reveal behind the scenes stuff like this. I think they're trying to appeal to new and casual users. For power users, Siri fails more often than not but so do all of the other assistants out there too. No one has mastered AI. Apple is just trying to promote the the idea that they're still in the AI race too since Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon spend so much money telling everyone else how advanced their respective AI systems are.
 
"It's not just the silicon," adds Federighi. "It's how many microphones we put on the device, where we place the microphones. How we tune the hardware and those mics and the software stack that does the audio processing. It's all of those pieces in concert. It's an incredible advantage versus those who have to build some software and then just see what happens."
Click to expand...

Uh huh. Meanwhile Google Now on a six-year-old iPhone 4 is more accurate than Siri. Ouch.


Mike
 
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I'm thinking of jumping ship this Fall and moving away from Android phones for the first time to Apple. One thing I expect I'm going to miss is Google's excellence voice recognition. My wife will press the button, ask Siri something, and get no useful help/response. I'll say OK Google to my phone 5 feet away, my phone activate with a beep, I ask it, and within seconds its doing what I wanted. Its sheer magic and works 90% of the time for me.
 
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wigby said:
What are you using Siri on ATV for? It's not really Siri but a subset of Siri functionality. I wish they would open that up more for basic internet info but then you have to open up a browser on the TV which most people do not want - everyone says they want it but no one wants to surf and type on their TV as testing and failed products have shown again and again.
Click to expand...

Mostly when I search from within application like Youtube, etc. I use Siri as a keyboard replacement due to the abysmal text input interface and would buy a keyboard for the ATV if there was indeed a web browser app. I was highly disappointed that I can't surf the web using the ATV; it seems like a highly artificial limitation.
 
These guys are honestly getting desperate at marketing, trying their best to give a SJ-esque spin. (Which is odd, since in their last interview they claimed that Tim Cook was different than SJ, and that was fine).

If Siri was that much improved, or was that important to Apple, why did the guys who invent Siri leave Apple to make a new, better, product (Viv)? Surely it can't be for purely monetary purposes (i.e., flipping it to the highest bidder). I think the Siri guys were shafted, and could not make it as powerful or as capable as they had originally intended. I think they left Apple out of frustration for not being able to innovate Siri to a whole new level:

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/viv/ - “I’m extremely proud of Siri and the impact it’s had on the world, but in many ways it could have been more,” Cheyer says. “Now I want to do something bigger than mobile, bigger than consumer, bigger than desktop or enterprise. I want to do something that could fundamentally change the way software is built.”
 
Google Now is by far better (even on the iPhone) --> there is no reason to torture myself with Siri
 
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Am I the only one who thinks Siri has gotten WORSE over the past year? I swear, I find myself having to say "Revise" more and more and end up talking slower and slower that she'll understand. Must be my Oklahoma hick accent....
 
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CarlosQG said:
I would love more functionality and less jokes. Yesterday I asked her to show me Foxes music on iTunes and had the common "I don't understand what you mean by blabla...".

If they added Translations like Cortana I'd be a very happy chap, I watch a lot of video recipes and would love to ask Siri stuff like "How do you say shallots in Spanish".
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You can ask Siri about a translation of shallots in Spanish...
 

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jsalda said:
Am I the only one who thinks Siri has gotten WORSE over the past year? I swear, I find myself having to say "Revise" more and more and end up talking slower and slower that she'll understand. Must be my Oklahoma hick accent....
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For me it has, at times, gotten slower and for sure snarkier. The other day, early and while still in bed, I asked, "What is the weather going to be like today?" After a number of seconds my wife said it ignored me. I said, no she is just slow. Maybe a bit sleepy. Finally Siri replied with, "Michael! It is going to be hot today! Better wear sunscreen!" Thanks for the specifics, Siri.



Mike
 
And yet aside from setting alarms for me, Siri is still so hit or miss as to be basically worthless due to her unreliability. Don't get me wrong, I think there is a bright future ahead for this sort of man/machine interface, but we aren't anywhere near there yet.
 
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Siri works well enough for what I use it for, which is setting reminders and calendar appointments, mostly. Those two tasks are faster with Siri.

But the bottom line (for me), though, is that most tasks are simply faster to accomplish manually than to tell a voice assistant to do them. So unless my hands are tied up, I generally just use my thumbs rather than my voice for most things.
 
Of course most commenters would not comment on the more interesting claims from this article and instead complain how certain specific Siri queries did not work for them.

It’s interesting how much artificial intelligence and machine learning have become more prominent within Apple although until now with very little fanfare.

Or how they think they have found ways to avoid collecting massive amounts of privacy-sensitive user data to train their algorithms.

Or how Apple has been struggling with relinquishing control of human curation and design to AI results but seems to have included it as part of product teams wherever it makes sense.

Or how they progressively inhoused things like voice recognition (First versions of Siri used Dragon Dictation tech, if memory serves me well).

Just weird how they did not mention anything about their plans for SiriKit to include third-party devs in the improvements—one of the biggest selling points of Amazon’s Echo are probably the Alexa skills like calling an Uber. The model that Apple pursues there with specific knowledge domains modelled by Apple instead of passing results around is interesting and worthy of discussion, I think.

Most comparison tests of Siri/Google Now/Cortana I have seen seem to show they are roughly at the same level, just better at different tasks.

Sure Siri has a long way to go but the accuracy seems to have vastly improved and capabilities extended, and Apple promises even more improvements.

The best part about this article is that it proves Apple is taking this much more seriously than most people seem to think.
 
"Some people perceive that we can't do these things with AI because we don't have the data"

Doesn't it all start here though.... Regardless of how good anything is, Siri or any AI, will always be dumb if it doesn't have data in advance, to "know" what u'r talking about at any point to go on.

Cool as it is.....
 
Siri still isn't there in my experience. I hate having to say, "Hey Siri" multiple time just to get a response. When I'm home, I default to my Amazon Echo. Much better voice recognition and I'm not sent to the web for my answers.
 
My issue with Siri is it doesn't take geolocation into consideration for navigation. Sometimes I have get off the freeway due to congestion and take unfamiliar surface street. Asking Siri for directions to well known landmarks within 15 minutes drive would show results way off in another part of the state or even a different state. I think the A in AI with regards to Siri stands for Airheaded. Google Search and Google Maps are much more reliable but you can't set them as defaults on iOS. iPhones would be much better if they ran Google Android and services.
 
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