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Hey Viv, get me one of those things that have the twirly thing and the thing at the back and get it from the place down the road, not the one on the left but the one with the red door where I usually get my bacon and get some fish and chips and a large orange mocha-frappacino.

Viv displays quotes from Zoolander.
 
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Looks interesting . Very surprised viv understood his questions everytime, first time. Looks like a controlled demo.
 
It shows great potential but I don't know why they only do partial voice controls. If you search for flowers and there is a list, why not scroll it down/up by voice. I dislike the fact that you do an initial search than you're stuck interacting manually with the device after. Wake me up when it's complete! Again, it's one of those things that will be useless outside the US because they don't integrate with anything else. Apple pay only have one bank partner in Canada. U-s-e-l-e-s-s!

:eek:
 
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He seemed to be pitching this pretty hard toward companies to join the backend. Wonder how it would handle 15 different florists competing.

Or worse, 10 different hotel booking sites, all selling the same hotels.

The most exciting thing about this is the ability to scale on its own... But I'd like to see the impact of that on the simplicity of using it. It would definitely need to learn who we prefer to do business with, and learn quickly.
 
In a Guardian article the CEO of the company say that Apple have done nothing with Siri and they effectively have sidelined it hence why they have continued without Apple. It's another Apple failure.. Buy the tech and then leave it to rot! How many times have we seen Apple buy a bit of software only to let it wither on the vine afterwards. Siri is like Mac products, it's out of date!
Considering how Siri is the backbone of the Apple TV and a key way of interacting with your Apple Watch, I don't believe Apple will leave it to rot. But I do wonder if there are problems such as office politics which are preventing Siri from improving as quickly as it should?

No doubt Siri has improved since its debut in 2011, but it's still quite slow and inaccurate for me.
 
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Oh wow, just tested it and it works. Never knew that.

Learn something new every day.

Like look before you leap?
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In a Guardian article the CEO of the company say that Apple have done nothing with Siri and they effectively have sidelined it hence why they have continued without Apple. It's another Apple failure.. Buy the tech and then leave it to rot! How many times have we seen Apple buy a bit of software only to let it wither on the vine afterwards. Siri is like Mac products, it's out of date!

Don't believe everything you read.
 
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Really impressed with this. Apple desperately needs to improve Siri, it is garbage and I have it disabled simply because 9 times out of 10 it gets what I am saying wrong and I have to do the work manually anyways. Google's voice recognition is leaps and bounds better than Siri in that regard and many others. I really like my iPhone but obviously voice assistants are a future in mobile, I just hope Apple isn't betting on the wrong horse here. There are few things keeping me on iOS at the moment, and RCS replacement of SMS will be coming down the pipeline when I am looking for a phone again (2-3 years).

Time will tell.
 
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If Siri keeps evolving at the current pace, we will have this...never?

The typical Apple approch: BUY a company that has created a highly interesting and promising technology and slam the brakes hard, stall all further product evolution.

This drives the original people working on the technology out of the company and eventually kills the product.
 
Wonder if that was one of those cellphone sale calls.. 201-844-9120 so annoying.
 
But it can't talk back and give a straight yes and no answer? He asks about the weather and all he gets is a screen with the weather app. Not that great for me.
If you watch the the full demo he states quite explicitly at the start that this feature is still in development, but will be 100% set for the final release.
 
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One of the things holding SIRI back is lack of an API. Most of the things shown in the demo could be done by SIRI if it had and API (which it used to). Apple spent a lot of time on improving the voice recognition, but none on 3rd party integration. Sports and movies aren't enough. Having said that, I feel e-commerce, using a bot or AI, is going to be very frustrating. If i want to see a move I think it's easier just to go to the website instead of answering all the questions needed. which movie?, which time?, which theater?, which seat?. I bet most transactions can be done faster using a website optimized for sales. If you notice, in the demo, he opted for all of the defaults and the transactions were fast, that would rarely happen in a real world case.
 
Why is the guy's MBP running QuickTime all the time during the demo?

He's screen recording. You noticed QT was the active app, but missed the active window is showing screen recording.
QT is a great and simple way for recording the screen or a selected window.

But how they bought Siri and actually had these guys working for them and yet Apple aren't the ones making this announcement is incredible.

This presentation should have been a part of WWDC, built into iOS 10, OS X, watch OS 3.0 and the newest tvOS. I guess we'll have to wait until June 13th, but man, this will be hard to beat.

Well, Apple didn't do much with them. They basically promised to adopt and love their child with full visitation rights and then.... well, didn't give much in the way of visitation rights.

Or more simply, they screwed them. The Apple of now thinks innovation in Siri is adding "hey siri" years after OK Google.

Pretty much how I am forced to get SIRI to work on my iPad — by putting my mouth right up against the mic.

While a great improvement over SIRI in terms of more complex requests, the real breakthrough with voice commands must come on the hardware side. The hardware needs to be more on level with human beings. Even in a somewhat noisy room, if I speak loud enough, a real person could understand me. SIRI (and apparently VIV) have their hands tied on that front due to lack of advances in voice detection by the mic and noise filtering.

Hmm. Many companies have long addressed this.... Apple is just not one of them.

I have an LG-V10 which has 4 mics and filters for background noise. I can easily use Google now while in the shower without the shower noise causing any issues most of the time when asking Google to change a song or something.

My Samsung tablet is also top notch at this, and it's a few years old. If I said OK google right now I'd have 2 devices ready and waiting for what I was going to say, but the LG's accuracy is better.

Most high end Androids have good mics and noise filtering.... low to mid range are on par with the iPhone.

This is where Apple's fixation with making everything thin kills some hardware advancements.
Few people want or need thinner.... and thinner kills space for more than 1 mic, better speakers, etc.

It's disappointing because the iPhone does have a great camera and video recording but awful sound on video.
 
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What strikes me as odd is that, let's pretend Siri can be split into two halves: Speech-to-text and Text-to-Action

Even if the speech-to-text wasn't great, and you had to be really clear when you spoke to it, why isn't the Text-to-Action good? Aren't there people at Apple looking through Siri queries, and able to spend all day every day adding new functionality?

It debuted in 2011, surly even if someone was to write out the commands a user needed to say by hand they could. "Siri can't do this, but it would be cool if it could. How many ways are there to say it?"

Isn't someone ticking off a list ensuring that every function of the device can also be accomplished using Siri? Why not add feedback to the Siri UI: "Did Siri do what you wanted?" with a Yes / No. Then they can look through all the "No"s and work out what happened, how to improve the service, etc?

Totally agree. Makes no sense that a largely server-side service shouldn't be incrementally improving monthly in terms of responses. You'd think they could just hard code a lot of requests at this point if their sentence parsing tech isn't advanced enough.
 
Are you sure Quicktime is capable of that? Because I'm pretty sure it isn't (but would love to be corrected).

It's totally capable for iPhones and iPads.

The recording features of quick time are really not promoted much. It's my favorite for screen capture and it's free.
 
Bottom line.... Siri has gotten better over time, but its time Apple really up the anti here. They bought some cool AI in 2015, I hope we see something more than cool at the WWDC.
 
Two comments.

First - The magic is more in the machine learning and programming. He even emphasized that. A program that is writing it's own code on the fly.

Second - I hope that they stay independent and license their software to any/all OEMs. I really hope Apple (for example) doesn't buy them because as we've seen with Siri - decent integration - but pretty stagnant. In the same time, these guys have taken voice assistance to a whole new level. And Apple has far more resources that COULD be available to them.
 
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