No wonder Siri is having trouble connecting to the network now with all those requests
Me: "Talk Dirty to me"
Siri: "I can't. I'm as clean as the driven snow."
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How Apple Approached Developing Siri's Personality
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No wonder Siri is having trouble connecting to the network now with all those requests
Me: "Talk Dirty to me"
Siri: "I can't. I'm as clean as the driven snow."
Thanks for trying that mike. If someone complains something does not work, that is what we say first, 'Clear your cache'.. I thought Apple may have put in an easter egg for that.
btw, your complaints about this Siri not being that much more advanced than the Siri app is valid. It is better integrated with the phone itself with access to more apps on the phone. With Apple's resources and massive input data they are going to get, it WILL get better.
Your geofence problem, is that a SIRI problem or iOS 5 problem? Did you check if SIRI set the reminder properly? ( if there is a way to check.. I have not tried geofence based reminders in iOS5 on iPhone 4 yet )
I think the geofence problem is an iOS problem, not a Siri problem. Siri does set reminders with geofences the way I would if I manually entered it, which has potential to be very useful. I'm not sure if anyone else is having the same issue with it not actually triggering once you arrive/leave a location.
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By people you mean you right ? I suspect their is a specific reason they don't allow contact entries via Siri yet and hopefully it changes. However your claim that nobody has addresses with their contacts is weird
needa said:
By people you mean you right ? I suspect their is a specific reason they don't allow contact entries via Siri yet and hopefully it changes. However your claim that nobody has addresses with their contacts is weird
Okay, I'm going to put this whole tricorder/communicator argument to rest.
While the iPhone is a phone, and thus a "communicator", think about all the apps, all the different sorts of things it can do. It's much more of a tricorder analog. The iPad/PADD thing is a lot more easy to compare, but in the end of the day, the Siri team got it right having the iPhone be a tricorder. How do you use your iPhone? I'm willing to bet that for most people, most of the time, they don't use it as a "communicator" at all.
Perhaps that's one case where Star Trek has worse technology than the real world (and amazing that we got here so quick). Having to carry around two different devices, or pin something to your chest is just not as good as having a smaller-than-a-tricorder device that can do all kinds of crazy stuff and communicate too. Heck, on Star Trek they always have to manually set up their tricorders, today, we can just tell ours what to do, and Siri does it for us.
While the iPhone is a phone, and thus a "communicator", think about all the apps, all the different sorts of things it can do. It's much more of a tricorder analog. The iPad/PADD thing is a lot more easy to compare, but in the end of the day, the Siri team got it right having the iPhone be a tricorder. How do you use your iPhone? I'm willing to bet that for most people, most of the time, they don't use it as a "communicator" at all.
Perhaps that's one case where Star Trek has worse technology than the real world (and amazing that we got here so quick). Having to carry around two different devices, or pin something to your chest is just not as good as having a smaller-than-a-tricorder device that can do all kinds of crazy stuff and communicate too. Heck, on Star Trek they always have to manually set up their tricorders, today, we can just tell ours what to do, and Siri does it for us.
Siri does seem like a bit of a fake which is disappointing.
It's like you giving a job to someone who knows nothing about the subject, just looking up questions that are pre-printed on a sheet of paper and blindly reading back the answers.
The type of thing that appears cool for the 1st few days, but when you want to do something you realise what's going on.
Anyway, more to the point. I think we can all agree Siri needs the ability to launch apps and be used inside 3rd party apps. After all, that's a basic requirement.
Secondly does Siri recognise you the owner of the phone and ignore other voices? If someone else shouts over your shoulder will Siri respond to that, or ignore it, as it should as it recognises you, the phone owners voice?
That's another obvious requirement.
It's like you giving a job to someone who knows nothing about the subject, just looking up questions that are pre-printed on a sheet of paper and blindly reading back the answers.
The type of thing that appears cool for the 1st few days, but when you want to do something you realise what's going on.
Anyway, more to the point. I think we can all agree Siri needs the ability to launch apps and be used inside 3rd party apps. After all, that's a basic requirement.
Secondly does Siri recognise you the owner of the phone and ignore other voices? If someone else shouts over your shoulder will Siri respond to that, or ignore it, as it should as it recognises you, the phone owners voice?
That's another obvious requirement.
Keeping it all server side is a great move by apple,
as it means they can:
Voice control on ios4 was nearly useless as there was no confirm stage:
"Call Home"
screen: calling Jack Stone
..and its already dialling, leading to me turning it off.
as it means they can:
- Track queries and responses in a database and refine/correct them for everyone.
- Get good (marketing) data on what people are actually using it for (joking around at the moment it seems!)
- Keep responses up to date - and fresh.
Voice control on ios4 was nearly useless as there was no confirm stage:
"Call Home"
screen: calling Jack Stone
..and its already dialling, leading to me turning it off.
I think it's all they can do, otherwise Siri would be seen as what it really is, if we are honest, totally useless and as dumb as a brick.
As I said before, it's like employing someone behind the front desk and having them listen to your question, look it up on a large sheet of paper and reading back the reply printed on the paper without having a clue about understanding what you actually said.
Then, to stop the person behind the desk appearing stupid as they would give the same answer to the same question day after day, week after week.
At the end of the day you would collect all the questions they were asked, and add new answers to questions you had not thought would be asked, and perhaps vary the answers to previously asked questions to give a bit of variety, or even give 2 or 3 alternate but equally correct answers to the same question that the dumb person behind the desk can randomly pick from when asked.
However it would be much better, I think we can all agree if the person behind the desk was not dumb, was not just reading from a printed sheet of paper and could understand your questions in the 1st place.
Sadly we are probably a million miles away from that.
I don't think that it's a fake, for its real work (making notes, booking appointments, etc) it's doing some incredibly clever state-of-the-art stuff but most of the funny stuff being posted here and on the easter egg thread is the fake stuff, i.e. someone has specifically coded in certain patterns to look for and a range of canned answers so what we are mostly seeing are the cases where Siri reverts to being a simple chatbot rather than attempting any sort of real AI.
That's a good observation, and one that has troubled AI researchers for decades. We (or I should say "they" since I no longer work in the field) tend to cite the "chinese room" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/) as being a famous AI example, I suppose it is to the AI world (or at least the natural language processing/understanding bit) something like Schrodinger's cat is to the physics world, i.e. a thought experiment that people like to trot out to illustrate a point.
Actually, I don't think that most people do realise quite how much is going on, i.e. just how difficult it is to do things that seem so trivial to humans because we do it so effortlessly. Having said that, I do worry that once the initial flurry of enthusiasm passes then people will start discovering the limitations and become frustrated. Siri's survival might become an arms race between the developers adding capabilities and the ever increasing user expectations.
For an insight into what is going on then the web site posted by admanimal a few pages back, and by me on another thread in the iPhone forum, is a good place to start: https://pal.sri.com/Plone/framework. There are a lot of PDFs posted under the documentation section that reveal just how complicated this stuff is when Siri isn't reverting to chatbot mode.
The feedback I've seen is that Siri often has difficulties in noisy environments so I think that the answer to your question is probably no. It might be an obvious requirement but that doesn't mean that it's simple to do.
- Julian
Thanks for the interesting reply.
My worry is that Apple might be raising people's, who don't understand, expectations that it's something that it's not.
If you've been around as long as many of us have, we know they've been working on AI for decades and are still miles away from it in reality.
AI systems perhaps need to grow and learn as humans do as opposed to just being programmed in and expected to know everything from day one.
Heck even humans sometimes don't get the meaning behind the words.
The facial expression and tone of voice and inflections in the words being just as important or more so that the words themselves.
Like you could say "you utter bastard" to someone, but with the right facial expression and tone of voice, it's a funny joke that they will smile at, despite the words themselves carrying a very different meaning
Personally I would not expect Siri on a 800Mhz mobile phone to beat the words best super computers at AI.
But then as long as it does it's job then that's good enough.
As I say, I'd want it to recognise ME and not my friend who shouts a command over my shoulder.
I'd want it to launch apps "play angry birds"
And to operate apps "turn left, fire, take the third letter" etc etc.
And of course to operate the phone fully itself.
Finally of course not need any pressing of the screen to activate Siri in the 1st place.
When it comes to dictation Siri must be pretty much perfect and learn to add punctuation by understanding grammer and voice tones.
If I dictate "When will you be coming back from holiday" then Siri needs to understand it's a question and put a question mark at the end. The same goes for a period etc.
Asking a lot perhaps? The problem is expectations have been raised and it's going to be hard for a slow mobile device to do this when machines 100x the speed can't.
My worry is that Apple might be raising people's, who don't understand, expectations that it's something that it's not.
If you've been around as long as many of us have, we know they've been working on AI for decades and are still miles away from it in reality.
AI systems perhaps need to grow and learn as humans do as opposed to just being programmed in and expected to know everything from day one.
Heck even humans sometimes don't get the meaning behind the words.
The facial expression and tone of voice and inflections in the words being just as important or more so that the words themselves.
Like you could say "you utter bastard" to someone, but with the right facial expression and tone of voice, it's a funny joke that they will smile at, despite the words themselves carrying a very different meaning
Personally I would not expect Siri on a 800Mhz mobile phone to beat the words best super computers at AI.
But then as long as it does it's job then that's good enough.
As I say, I'd want it to recognise ME and not my friend who shouts a command over my shoulder.
I'd want it to launch apps "play angry birds"
And to operate apps "turn left, fire, take the third letter" etc etc.
And of course to operate the phone fully itself.
Finally of course not need any pressing of the screen to activate Siri in the 1st place.
When it comes to dictation Siri must be pretty much perfect and learn to add punctuation by understanding grammer and voice tones.
If I dictate "When will you be coming back from holiday" then Siri needs to understand it's a question and put a question mark at the end. The same goes for a period etc.
Asking a lot perhaps? The problem is expectations have been raised and it's going to be hard for a slow mobile device to do this when machines 100x the speed can't.
Incremental AI improvement
If any of you remember Eliza (example: http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/) , the AI program from the 70's then I don't think you'll be terribly impressed with Siri. I played with Siri for a half an hour and there is some depth to it's programming, but fundamentally, if you ask something out of pattern it defaults to searching the web.
I do see it having some utility while wearing a headset and driving, for example to compose a text message but I don't see it as a revolutionary improvement in AI. It's not a very intelligent system unfortunately. I wonder how much Apple paid for this tech?
If any of you remember Eliza (example: http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/) , the AI program from the 70's then I don't think you'll be terribly impressed with Siri. I played with Siri for a half an hour and there is some depth to it's programming, but fundamentally, if you ask something out of pattern it defaults to searching the web.
I do see it having some utility while wearing a headset and driving, for example to compose a text message but I don't see it as a revolutionary improvement in AI. It's not a very intelligent system unfortunately. I wonder how much Apple paid for this tech?
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It was impressive enough to get massive DARPA funding and evolve into the most ambitious artificial intelligence research project ever made. From that sprung Siri inc which Apple bought. The point is not to be a chatbot, others have done that already.
Here is Robert Scoble of Rackspace doing an interview with some people behind Siri, also doing some tests of the capability of it at the end.
http://scobleizer.com/2010/02/08/why-if-you-miss-siri-youll-miss-the-future-of-the-web/
not sold... if all it does is parse the input for phrases like "what's the weather", "I'm hungry", "call John" etc. and sends the rest to Wolfram Alpha then consider me unimpressed... I am pretty sure the novelty will wear off quite quickly. That being said, it makes for great marketing
not sold... if all it does is parse the input for phrases like "what's the weather", "I'm hungry", "call John" etc. and sends the rest to Wolfram Alpha then consider me unimpressed... I am pretty sure the novelty will wear off quite quickly. That being said, it makes for great marketing
4 minutes to respond to me, yet the interview is 30 minutes. Things have definitely improved since Eliza, look at Watson for example..
Has anyone asked Siri if "I can has cheeseburger?" I know it's an old meme, but I'm curious if they made her aware of such things, so to speak.
Edit: Or tell her the cake is a lie...
Edit: Or tell her the cake is a lie...
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Thanks for the link and you're right I did not finish the video before replying... but really, the "proof is in the pudding" and the results from Siri while neat are not revolutionary.
You're welcome. As for your worry, I completely and utterly agree with you; that is my concern too.
Oh, it's more than having been around as long as many of you. The reason I did a comp sci degree in the first place was to get into AI, inspired as a child by things like HAL in 2001 and computers in Startrek. I got what I wanted and spent about the first 6 years working in AI research, and in particular I worked in the field of natural language processing/understanding. In fact in 1984/1985 I was working on a project that, when considered in terms of the technology that was available at that time, was a very similar project to Siri.
Ultimately, and looking back on it now with some degree of shame and regret, I got out of AI research partly because I became disillusioned by the fact that what we were doing in the early 80s was really no more impressive than stuff that people like Winograd had managed in the early 70s.
I'm not personally so concerned about launching an app like Angry Birds since, once it's launched, it seems to me to be optimised for non-verbal interaction so, since you already have the phone in your hands, then why not use your fingers to launch it? You are however stating what you want, and if that's one thing that you want then it's a fact that it's something that you want so I can't possibly tell you that you're wrong, just that it's not something high on my priority list.
As far as wanting Siri to correctly punctuate then I too would want that, partly for the obvious convenience, but also (putting my AI hat back on) because it would be indicative that robust synactic, semantic and probably even higher level analysis is being employed. I'm unclear as to how much higher level sytax/semantic analysis is going on right now, and how much (if at all) it is being used to guide the voice recognition, but if they want to push Siri further then these are critical areas.
- Julian
Truth. The older folk around here have all seen attempts dating from decades ago. We understand that it's not deep AI, and it's certainly not magic
Just a note: much of the voice recognition and all of the AI processing is done off-device. The phone's CPU only processes the speech into chunks; then that data and the name/address info from Contacts (along with other tidbits such as which app you were using) is sent to Apple's servers to parse and create a reply.
This raises all sorts of questions: does Apple cache any of this info between requests to speed things up? Does it store the questions so it recognizes repeats? Or is that part done on-device?
For a phone, yes it is. Sorry, but it is. If you've ever used Google Voice or any other half-baked talk feature on a phone, you'd know exactly what I'm talking about -- provided you're not a raging Fandroid.
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If someone is actually dumb enough to believe that Siri is real, true Artificial Intelligence, he or she deserves to be mocked and ridiculed.
I think (or hope anyway) that most people are sensible enough to know better.
Thanks for the link subsonix. This interview is fairly close to the time Apple bought it, so what is in Siri now is probably at the same state as what these founders describe.
Yes, it is much more than a simple chatbot, it does three things as the founders say.
1) Intent understanding. What, When and Who
2) Reasoning about time and place to support the task and integrate with thousands of backend APIs
3) Personalized to each individual
One thing that is interesting from the above interview is a possible future source of revenue for Apple from advertising. Instead of Search Engine Optimziation techniques, companies will be competing with each other to get high on the rankings in SIRI's list. And Apple gets paid for each completed action and not simply a click. ( like they say, Netflix will pay them $10 for each signed up customer )
If Apple gets a cut from Escort Services, then Apple is entering a whole new profession
Can someone try 'Siri Partners' and see what it says.
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