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Yadda yadda fanboy arguments yadda yadda.

iPhone wins for design (although not for practicality, grrr glass backs), app store, and optimised OS.

Android wins for better OS with more features and more customisation, and all that awesome Google support (sync & gmail etc).

Personally, I wont ever go back to iOS till all the features which require a jailbreak to use are implemented as standard (tethering without an extra contract, bluetooth to other phones/devices, customisable themes, etc). Its such a closed platform.
 
Yadda yadda fanboy arguments yadda yadda.

iPhone wins for design (although not for practicality, grrr glass backs), app store, and optimised OS.

Android wins for better OS with more features and more customisation, and all that awesome Google support (sync & gmail etc).

Personally, I wont ever go back to iOS till all the features which require a jailbreak to use are implemented as standard (tethering without an extra contract, bluetooth to other phones/devices, customisable themes, etc). Its such a closed platform.


Damn.. those customizable themes... total Deal breaker. The iPhone doesn't do bluetooth to other devices? oh... ? I guess my BMW and my wife's MINI must be messed up... should get that checked. tethering without an extra contract - fee free.. really? Wow .. I wasn't aware that if you owned an Android phone you could tether without a contract... I wasn't aware the carriers gave android a pass... cool. /s
 
someone please ask Siri
1. why AT&T won't unlock my iphone.
2. when/if they will unlock it for people out of contract.
 
Intelligent? This isn't artificial intelligence, these are pre-determined answers programed in for predicable questions. cute yes, magical, no.

The neat thing about Siri is that it (finally) finds a practical, everyday use for "Eliza" type programs, combined with TTS and speech recognition for even better effect.

If you've ever played with those programs, you know that they have a set of pre-programmed responses to certain keywords or contexts, and they choose randomly between them. Say the same request over and over enough times and you'll discover all of the variations.

Someone at Apple has clearly been having fun writing canned responses to a variety of situations. Very cool, and very entertaining, but let's not attribute too much intelligence to what is essentially a keyword-matching algorithm.

Actually, since it looks like the parsing and responses may be coming from Apple servers, there is the potential for Siri's repertoire to become vast indeed, or continue to change (perhaps in a year, she'll tell you that she's sick and tired of being asked to open pod bay doors...) Much like a chess program looks "smart" because it is able to calculate thousands of potential moves and choose the best one, Siri could appear to get smarter as the set of programmed keyword responses continues to grow and change.
 
Too Cool

That's neat. I'm sitting here with my thunderbolt comparing apps and wondering if I should brave the lines tomorrow anyway. Probably wait for the next one but this update is really cool to watch. It's the little things like that matter because we all know how good of a phone it is.
 
You guys realize that it's some geeky guy programmer who anticipated your stupid questions and picked out key words and formulated a nerdy response to satisfy you, right? It's not really a sexy woman computer answering. :rolleyes:

In a week everyone will totally be bored with Siri and it will go the way of facetime as something you never use.

Tony

Your prediction has been noted. What you're failing to factor in is that Siri will get *smarter* as more and more people use it. That's the point. It's not some static bucket of answers. Human input will feed this thing with endless information.

I think it's AWESOME that Siri works this way. It really shows how fun technology can be, rather than just some boring electronic device. I get a kick of out of these responses every time I see them.

----------

If you've ever played with those programs, you know that they have a set of pre-programmed responses to certain keywords or contexts, and they choose randomly between them. Say the same request over and over enough times and you'll discover all of the variations.

The canned responses are only part of it. Siri is plugged into ever-changing data sources (ie. WolframAlpha). Siri has the ability to statically pull information from such sources, but this is just the beginning (the beta phase). Over time, it will be able to take the initial question, pull information from multiple sources, and then compile an intelligent response... it will learn and think.
 
You guys realize that it's some geeky guy programmer who anticipated your stupid questions and picked out key words and formulated a nerdy response to satisfy you, right? It's not really a sexy woman computer answering. :rolleyes:

In a week everyone will totally be bored with Siri and it will go the way of facetime as something you never use.

Tony

LOL. Clueless git. :D
 
Seriously, months after Macrumors has debuted this new format, I'm still amazed at the people who piss and moan about articles in the sidebar. Do you have nothing better to do? It's the sidebar for a reason!

Personally, it gave me a good chuckle on a Friday morning and for that reason alone I find it had value. Also, I agree with LTD, I don't have an iPhone 4S so it was also further insight into the 'intelligence' of Siri. It is about the details, and it's pretty clever that Apple built in one of their most well known slogans 'Think Different' into its brain...

Well said. A bit of humor breaks up the pace and allows us to learn in different ways. If someone doesn't want to read those articles, they're easy enough to avoid.

I love the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". You can get a good cut of that entire book simply by reading the sidebars.
 
People could also interpret "The one you're holding" in a different way:

Similar to "The best camera is the one you have with you," the best phone can always be the one you're holding at any given moment.

But that's not the right way to interpret it. Because the iPhone IS the best phone.
 
The canned responses are only part of it. Siri is plugged into ever-changing data sources (ie. WolframAlpha). Siri has the ability to statically pull information from such sources, but this is just the beginning (the beta phase). Over time, it will be able to take the initial question, pull information from multiple sources, and then compile an intelligent response... it will learn and think.

I just think we need to be careful when applying phrases (and expectations) like "learn and think" to something like Siri. Yes, it will get better and more effective, but I don't know if I'd call it "learning" or "thinking" (at least not in a machine learning context, if the "learning" is driven by human programmers adding more canned responses over time or adding more hooks into data sources).
 
So Siri tells the best phone is the 4S? Hmmm... I wonder if the answer will be the same after the iPhone 5.
 
Very cool, and very entertaining, but let's not attribute too much intelligence to what is essentially a keyword-matching algorithm.

Agreed with rest of what you wrote and may be even this keyword-matching for these easter eggs, but for its regular operation it does have an intent determination engine and a reasoning engine ( Get me Giants tickets means different things in San Francisco and New York ).
 
Agreed with rest of what you wrote and may be even this keyword-matching for these easter eggs, but for its regular operation it does have an intent determination engine and a reasoning engine ( Get me Giants tickets means different things in San Francisco and New York ).

Fair enough. I just -- again -- don't want people to get too excited when they hear "Siri is AI". AI spans a broad spectrum of algorithms. I'm not at all trying to downplay what Siri is actually doing. It clearly has a level of reasoning, intent determination, semantic knowledge filtering, and of course natural language processing. It's going to be a while yet before we have the Star Trek computer, or Jarvis.

When it comes to how Siri responds outside of its knowledge base, as in all these funny examples, it's just programmed outcomes based on the keywords (like "HAL 9000" or "pod bay doors").

I'm not an expert in the field, but I have taken courses on the subject and I have written my own versions of ELIZA programs in the past. For all the amazing things SIRI is doing, outside of its knowledge domain, she falls back to playing ELIZA.
 
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Just watched a comparison of the Galaxy S2 and the iPhone 4S. I have to say. Siri isn't as impressive as it's advertised to be. Android on the S2 can do the same as Siri and sometimes better. For instance asking for directions. Siri give you a map, while on the S2, it does the same, but it gives you turn by turn directions. So the S2 wins in that, but Siri can check your calender, So Siri wins in that. I believe Siri and Android's equivalent on the S2 are the same.
 
I asked Siri about the best phone, and one response I got was "you're kidding right?"

HAHAHHA
 
Intelligent? This isn't artificial intelligence, these are pre-determined answers programed in for predicable questions. cute yes, magical, no.

I don't think you've tried Siri yet. Her ability to figure out what I'm asking is quite remarkable. I can still tell it's not a human, but ...
 
Agreed. Its very misleading.

This site has some funny stuff Siri says:

http://shitthatsirisays.tumblr.com/

I do have to say though I smell shenanigans since on the site one of the replies has Siri calling the user a "Douche Bag", although the rest seem like plausible responses.

You know, I thought that at first when reading the same reply calling the user a "Douche Bag". But, as another person posted, it uses the name that you give it, so that person most likely just entered a contact with Douche Bag as the name.
 
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