Facebook Testing Siri Competitor 'M' Inside Messenger App

I can imagine now we'll get virtual psychotherapists in the not so far future...
- Z, make me happy today.
- Ok, John, let's see what you really need and how I can help you...
 
This is awesome. I wish there was a way to text with siri instead of always having to use voice. It's obnoxious. In unprofessional in work environments!

This however, is great.
 
Razeus said:
Siri is a joke at this point. Cortana, version 1 mind you, does more out of the box on day one than Siri has done in the last 3 years. I'm not sure what Apple is doing over there, but it's definitely not software inner workings of Siri.

After looking how Google Photos works automatically, I'm not sure what Apple is doing anymore to improve our lifes/save us time with software other than coming up with hardware designs.
Click to expand...

LOL. Came from Android and G Now was practically useless as a voice enabled assistant.

And don't even get me started on what a pile of garbage Google Photos is. Lightroom worked 100x better than Google Photos.

Then again I barely use any of these assistants as talking into your phone to one of these things makes you look like a moron.
 
drakino said:
I use Siri frequently for the following:

  1. Remind me about something when I get home/leave work/etc
  2. "Hey siri, what time is it" at night in bed. I have terrible vision without glasses and no alarm clock is readable by sight.
  3. Timers similar to your use
  4. When a job had a commute running next to the baseball stadium "Hey Siri, are the Blahs playing today?" as I left work to know to take an alternate route
  5. When riding my motorcycle, Siri is reachable thanks to my bluetooth enabled helmet. Good for switching music or getting directions to the nearest gas station when needed.
  6. Asking for the weather forecast when packing
  7. Unit conversions since the US is still stuck using King Henry's foot to measure things while otherwise swearing off anything British.
I've used it for many other things as well, but not as frequent as the above uses. Thankfully the use of "Hey siri, dial 911" has been pretty limited when out riding the motorcycle, but nice to know will work if something does go badly wrong on the road.
Click to expand...

I have yet to find a headset that will work reliably with my motorcycle helmet. Which one do you use?
 
joejoejoe said:
This is awesome. I wish there was a way to text with siri instead of always having to use voice. It's obnoxious. In unprofessional in work environments!

This however, is great.
Click to expand...
I've never found talking to ones phone acceptable if courtesy and respect are considered when around others. However for those who wanted to show off Siri I think it bolstered their egos.

Google Now gets my nod because it's just brilliant at learning very quickly. By typing is as little as just one word, sometimes only the first few letters it guesses precisely what I want. It takes less than a week to learn what's important as long as you use it.
 
CarlosQG said:
Maybe people can ask M how to close their accounts.
Click to expand...

Facebook is dying. Everyone I know is using it less and less.

To make up the volume Facebook seems to be generating faux posts/likes as well as putting more and more "whatt you did 12 months ago" type posts. Its also becoming a Meme factory where instead of sharing anything about themselves people are just reposting cat pictures and the like.

So this is just like the Facebook phone, another desperate attempt to remain relevant.
 
maxsix said:
I've never found talking to ones phone acceptable if courtesy and respect are considered when around others. However for those who wanted to show off Siri I think it bolstered their egos.

Google Now gets my nod because it's just brilliant at learning very quickly. By typing is as little as just one word, sometimes only the first few letters it guesses precisely what I want. It takes less than a week to learn what's important as long as you use it.
Click to expand...


You are not the only one that loves her. That number is 690 out of 16,000 users.
 
itguy06 said:
Then again I barely use any of these assistants as talking into your phone to one of these things makes you look like a moron.
Click to expand...

In the future we will all look like morons. And it will be almost impossible to tell who the real morons are. You will need a modern version of the Turing Test to know.
 
I really tried to use Siri, on multiple occasions. I kind of wanted it to work, but it was not saving me any time at all, in opposite. It felt like babysitting.

Apple advertises Siri as "intelligent". And I think the problem here is that Siri (nor any other assistant) simply is not intelligent at all. It never did anything that ever gave me the impression that there is some intelligence at work (combining information in a non-trivial fashion, an individual learning process etc). It's actually programmed in the most linear way you could imagine. It takes the output of the voice recognition, looks for certain combination of words and eventually does one of it's dozen tricks. In fact, Siri's possibilities are so limited, that I often find that it would make a lot more sense if it would just offer the twenty things it can do on a homescreen like menu. Than I would at least know what I'd get. Very often using Siri is frustrating simply because I have to hope it does what I expect it to do, but in like 20% of all cases it just doesn't do that at all.

So, unless M does major leaps in AI-technology, it will be just as useless.
 
Risco said:
I have yet to find a headset that will work reliably with my motorcycle helmet. Which one do you use?
Click to expand...
Last time I needed a new helmet, went with a Nolan and added their headset/bluetooth NCom kit to it. People I've had phone calls with said they couldn't even tell I was riding. Well worth the investment for 2 months I was on the road, and for helmet to helmet communication when riding with a friend.
 
Razeus said:
Siri is a joke at this point. Cortana, version 1 mind you, does more out of the box on day one than Siri has done in the last 3 years. I'm not sure what Apple is doing over there, but it's definitely not software inner workings of Siri.
Click to expand...

I use Siri pretty much everyday as it's invaluable in the car. Mainly:

- Music (really good now with Apple music).
- Messages (read and reply, iMessage/text and email).
- Directions (good when travelling with work in cities I'm not familiar with - "find a petrol station" or "Closest cash machine").
- Initiate calls.
- Additions to calendar (this one only occasionally).
- Setting reminders (especially useful when driving, remind me to do x when I arrive at y).

The competitors may do more, but let's not confuse that with Siri being a joke. For me it's a really useful service.

You say Apple have done nothing for 3 years (obviously not true), more useful would be to hear what you want adding and why.
 
sir1963nz said:
Facebook is dying. Everyone I know is using it less and less.

To make up the volume Facebook seems to be generating faux posts/likes as well as putting more and more "whatt you did 12 months ago" type posts. Its also becoming a Meme factory where instead of sharing anything about themselves people are just reposting cat pictures and the like.

So this is just like the Facebook phone, another desperate attempt to remain relevant.
Click to expand...
Yes my facebook feed has never been more active than in the past 6 months.
Until people find another service to replace facebook, it'll stay strong. Google Plus was bad (and Google even recognized it), Twitter is different, etc.

Edit > In fact, it just reached a new milestone of 1 billion different accounts online in a single day (on monday).
 
Last edited:
Keane16 said:
You say Apple have done nothing for 3 years (obviously not true), more useful would be to hear what you want adding and why.
Click to expand...
An API to integrate Siri to third party apps, improve voice recognition (it fails quite a lot in French), and better contextual informations.
Google Now learns very well my habits, where I am and where I'm likely to go soon. It directly proposes me directions to go to work, and if I ask to text <name>, it'll find the most relevant name according to where I am and what time it is.
 
Alenore said:
An API to integrate Siri to third party apps, improve voice recognition (it fails quite a lot in French), and better contextual informations.
Google Now learns very well my habits, where I am and where I'm likely to go soon. It directly proposes me directions to go to work, and if I ask to text <name>, it'll find the most relevant name according to where I am and what time it is.
Click to expand...

Hopefully the addition of Proactive in iOS 9 will help us in terms of Siri learning our habits:

http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/iosapps/how-use-proactive-siri-in-ios-9-virtual-assistant-3616319/

Users on the betas have already started seeing some helpful additions:

https://www.macrumors.com/2015/08/11/proactive-suggestions-ios-9-closer-look/
 
Alenore said:
An API to integrate Siri to third party apps
Click to expand...

People bring this one up ALL THE TIME without considering the implications. How do you feed her context? If you have multiple apps all doing the same or similar things, which one gets the priority? How do you give her enough vocabulary to recognise subtleties between actions?

Extensibility like this is an impossible puzzle to solve. So it won't be for the foreseeable future.

I'd much prefer them to focus on fine-tuning a first party intelligent assistant than having to deal with the incomprehensive mess that serving a third party API would create.
 
ErikGrim said:
People bring this one up ALL THE TIME without considering the implications. How do you feed her context? If you have multiple apps all doing the same or similar things, which one gets the priority? How do you give her enough vocabulary to recognise subtleties between actions?

Extensibility like this is an impossible puzzle to solve. So it won't be for the foreseeable future.

I'd much prefer them to focus on fine-tuning a first party intelligent assistant than having to deal with the incomprehensive mess that serving a third party API would create.
Click to expand...
If Siri doesn't know which application use in a context, it can simply ask you what you want to do ? Kinda like "text <insert name>", if there's 2 mobile numbers it'll ask you which one you have to use.
Then, you can also do exactly that on Cortana for instance. Developers can create voice command definition files to route different sentences to different apps, even taking into account the context and additional user input.

Then, just because you don't see how to solve this problem doesn't mean it can't be done. If I asked you to describe the behaviour of a group of people going down a street using maths, you probably couldn't. Yet it's possible.

The problem right now is they don't open up Siri and yet it doesn't really evolve, compared to other solutions.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Back
Top