chad olson

Harry C. Marks:

Why would devs want to illegally clone Siri if Android’s Voice Actions have been touted as “just as good”? Maybe they’re not after all.

Google has since pulled the Siri clone from its Marketplace.

Mat Honan in piece called “Siri Is Apple’s Broken Promise”:

And for me, once the novelty wore off, what I found was that Siri is not so intelligent after all—it’s simply another voice program that will obey very specific commands. If it knows those commands. If it can understand you. And if it has a network connection. Were this Google, or Microsoft, I’d shrug. But it’s not, it’s Apple. And Apple is the company that sells perfection. It’s a company that usually keeps its promises, and in its Siri ads, it promises far more than what it actually delivers. That’s not what any of us signed up for.

Here’s how Apple describes Siri in “What is Siri?”

Siri is the intelligent personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. It allows you to use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. But Siri isn’t like traditional voice recognition software that requires you to remember keywords and speak specific commands. Siri understands your natural speech, and it asks you questions if it needs more information to complete a task.

Siri uses the processing power of the dual-core A5 chip in iPhone 4S, and it uses 3G and Wi-Fi networks to communicate rapidly with Apple’s data centers. So it can quickly understand what you say and what you’re asking for, then quickly return a response.

Siri is currently in beta and we’ll continue to improve it over time.

Note also that on the same page Apple spells out exactly which apps currently work with Siri:

Here’s a list of what Mat Honan tried to do with Siri:

• ask “the fastest way to an emergency room” and expect it to show travel time or traffic congestion rather than “where is the nearest hospital”
• expected Siri to have built-in Voice Navigation GPS
• wanted Siri to tell how much battery life was left
• wanted Siri to turn wifi on/off
• wanted Siri to tell him how much free space was left on his phone
• wanted Siri to switch his phone into airplane mode
• wanted Siri to launch apps
• wanted Siri to integrate with 3rd party apps
• wanted Siri to use iPhoto faces to show pictures of certain people
• wanted Siri to list off open wifi networks in a coffee shop

I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be neat if Siri actually did those things, but to expect it right out of the gate on day one was a bit optimistic. Apple’s advertising/communication around Siri is very careful to show what Siri is capable of in it’s current state.

The Siri interface even has a built in tutorial showing its current capabilities:

The problem with Siri (and similar voice recognition software) is that they have no perceived boundaries. Up until now in computing we’ve been using bit-mapped screens that show us buttons/menus/panels that clearly layout what a piece of software will and won’t do. Siri, on the other hand, has no perceivable boundaries (which is exactly why Apple provided the in app list of suggested commands).

Is Siri an uncharacteristically unfinished product for Apple to be pushing as a main feature? Sure. Will it get better over time? Of course (in fact it’s rumored that iOS 5.1 will be adding some of the functionality that Honan was looking for). Is it fair to say “Apple broke its promise”? Only if you weren’t paying attention to what Apple was saying in the first place.

Devindra Hardawar:

The hack also requires you to send your Siri commands through CD-Dev Team’s proxy servers, which gives the shady group direct access to your contacts, calendar, e-mail, location, and more personal data.

If those red flags weren’t bad enough, reports from multiple early adopters show that H1Siri can cause a variety of problems on your iPhone — including settings malfunctioning, difficulty booting, and even completely killing (bricking) the phone.

Yikes.

Guy English: 

Siri is a process of disambiguation, but installing random apps from the App Store that support Siri can only increase how ambiguous any request is. 
 
I’ll bet on an API later rather than sooner. If only because the success of Siri is determined upon it generating the best possible results and the ranking of those results must be determined by the plug-ins it uses. Once you allow plug-ins that potentially lie then you’ve ruined the entire Siri experience.

Jacqui Cheng crunches the numbers:

If you use Siri 2-3 times per day at an average of 63KB per instance, you might expect to use 126KB to 189KB per day, or 3.7 to 5.5MB per month. For 4-6 times a day, that might come out to 252KB to 378KB per day, or 7.4 to 11MB per month. If you use it 10-15 times per day, you might end up using 630KB to 945KB per day, or 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.

Non-issue on wifi of course.

Analyst Shannon Cross:

Early reactions have missed the extent of Siri’s capabilities, perhaps confusing it with mere speech recognition (translating spoken words into text, but not interpreting meaning and executing actions) or simple keyword-based voice response systems (like some in-vehicle systems, where quality has been underwhelming)

Quite simply, we have not seen a demonstration of comparable AI in any other consumer system

Cross gets it.

The trick with Siri is that it’s hard to describe with words, but once you show people Apple’s walkthrough video it becomes immediately obvious what a big leap forward it is.

I can’t tell you the number of folks who after that seeing that video are suddenly excited not only about the iPhone 4S, but what it means to the future of computing in general.

But hey… the 4S looks just like the iPhone 4, so I guess it’s not a big deal….