The brilliance of Siri isn't the voice interface or the replies using text-to-speech -- it's just the name. People feel they are talking to another person, not a phone or a computer or a google. People understand Siri approximates a person, so they can interact with it informally and somewhat personally.
You see it in all the news coverage. People refer to Siri as a person. It gets into your brain. Have you seen normal people showing off Siri to their friends? They are giddy with excitement over having a personal robot voice in their pocket that knows them by name.
I feel google doesn't employ anybody who has an average family or knows average people. Normal people don't know how things work. What's a "Google Now?" You'd have to look up a definition. It's about ten different things jumbled together under an Enterprise-Grade Naming Convention product umbrella.
Look at the Google Now product intro -- "Google Now has prepared an alternate route for your commute." People have to learn "Google Now" is a product and/or service that does specific things. People simply understand what Siri is after seeing someone else use it for a few seconds.
Even the Google Now tagline requires a level of mental disambiguation: "...with the predictive power of Now..."
Personally, I think that's a little gimmicky. I think it was very smart of Google to not differentiate this too much, but let people think that this smarter AI thing, is actually still "Google". So in the future people will just refer to "Google" when doing stuff like this.
It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.
Which one can give the answer a fraction of a second faster, or who's voice sounds less robotic means little to me.
I am more interested in knowing about speech recognition capabilities, edge cases handling, frequency of getting something wrong, accented speech recognition capabilities, artificial intelligence maturity and depth and breadth of the knowledge base the systems use.
But this video has focused on the wrong things. I was expecting that the presenter would be asking both some hard but useful questions and show us which one comes out with the right answer.
In almost all of the things you mentioned, google has the advantage to make a better product. They have an enormous power to train their creation, to achieve a higher level in terms of speech recognition and understanding. I'm not saying that they are already there, only that they have what is needed.
But i really don't know how far are they willing too go, as taking it too far away could end up being counterproductive to them, as they earn money showing ads in their results, so they need people using their website. That's why they released chrome now in iOS.
Well, I can't seem to find the raw source material -- but here's a news article about the relative accuracies of Google vs. Siri. 86% accuracy (Google) vs. 68% accuracy (Siri).
This is not surprising. Google has been doing question answering on web search for many years now. I believe it started answering direct free-form questions in its oneboxen in 2007 -- maybe earlier.
I've never tried Siri or S Voice so I can't say anything about the quality of the services or the overall experience but judging by what I saw in the video it didn't seem to me like it was "a complete blowout for Siri."
The main metric in the comparison seemed to be speed, at which S Voice was a little bit better than Siri. Also, voice quality was slightly in favor of S Voice.
The main differences were S Voice offering image results right away instead of asking to open the browser. On the other hand, S Voice required non-voice input to to specify the remineder time whereas Siri carried on "the conversation". Other than that, the two products pretty much behaved exactly the same. Ask something, get a result.
If you ask me, it was more of a 55:45 for S voice based on speed and naturalness of voice but then I don't run a gadget blog...
Watch the video again. That's not Samsung's S-Voice. It's Google's new Voice Search. And he's saying it's a lot better than Siri (as other sites and tests have shown, too).
He only mentioned S-Voice because he tested S-voice and Siri in another video (not this one), and in that one Siri beats Samsung's S-voice (powered by Vlingo).
Google's Voice Search seems faster, it's significantly more accurate (86% vs 68% for Siri), and it also comes with that smart Google Now thing, which learns things about you and recommends stuff for you to do based on your location, or behavior or whatever.
Oh, and Google's "voice" sounds a lot more natural than Siri, too, which sounds more robotic.
I propose we stop calling machine transcription and fixed-field extraction "AI." Second?
We all realize Siri is just a fancy Eliza with Internet access, right?
We can resume calling something "AI" when it can order a flight for you from the Ryanair website without making any mistakes (I'm not even at that level yet).
It is even worse if you use it in languages other than english since Siri only recognizes the language you have set before and that also applies to artist names and titles. In my case I would have to pronounce bands like "Real Estate" the german way in order to use this function.
Apple should have anticipated that and allowed music related commands to be analyzed in your native language and english.
If its better, the question becomes: does Google release it on iOS as well, and will Apple allow them too.
However, i think the US readers are missing the most important aspect: how many people in the world can you serve?
This is a system selling feature during a crucial generation. The speed they can rollout new languages, will determine the world market and the long tail, which will prove crucual.
Currently, Google has the best infrastructure to do that, but Apple seems to care more. I live in Holland, for example. No siri, but at least we can buy content from iTunes. Google isnt selling anything but apps in its playstore.
I think whoever is able to actually give me all these features first, wins Holland. Why would it be any different in any other country?
There are markets up for grabs, and the first one to realize that fully, wins.
I'm curious if Google's new thing has the capability to carry on a conversation. With Siri I can ask her something, see it, then say "email that to ___" and she can do it.
Here's a question: how well will the voice recognition features of the next version of Android compare with the next version of iOS? And what proportion of Android users will be able to upgrade to it?
Releasing a slightly superior clone of a feature in a rival product over six months after the first product shipped isn't enormously impressive, although it is more impressive than shipping an inferior clone of a product two years after the first product shipped, so that's definitely progress.
Android has had voice actions and voice search since 2.2--over a year before the Siri beta was even announced. Speech control has been a rapidly evolving and increasingly robust set of features in Android, but for some reason people are claiming Apple moved first. Honestly, I'm amazed at the extent to which marketing can completely overwrite people's recollection of objective reality.
In fairness, the video seems to be comparing exactly this -- the sports questions seem to show that he's using iOS 6.
Speed and voice quality are irrelevant to me, but I do really like what he was able to do with the image search on android. It wasn't clear if the android version integrates with wolfram alpha, or any of siri's other sources.
This great but it's nearly entirely dependent on the network connection otherwise they're both useless.
I supposedly have an HSPA+ 21Mbps connection yet only get 1Mbps/.03Kbps maybe 5Mbps/950Kbps Kbps on a good day and latency is 100ms or more, Bell Mobility in Canada. I'll never get 21Mbps but less than 25% at best?
Google and Apple can make fancy tech but it's ruined by poor networks.
Comparing efficiency of pre-release software is kind of pointless. Either one might be missing some optimizations that are put in on the final release.
[+] [-] seiji|13 years ago|reply
You see it in all the news coverage. People refer to Siri as a person. It gets into your brain. Have you seen normal people showing off Siri to their friends? They are giddy with excitement over having a personal robot voice in their pocket that knows them by name.
I feel google doesn't employ anybody who has an average family or knows average people. Normal people don't know how things work. What's a "Google Now?" You'd have to look up a definition. It's about ten different things jumbled together under an Enterprise-Grade Naming Convention product umbrella.
Look at the Google Now product intro -- "Google Now has prepared an alternate route for your commute." People have to learn "Google Now" is a product and/or service that does specific things. People simply understand what Siri is after seeing someone else use it for a few seconds.
Even the Google Now tagline requires a level of mental disambiguation: "...with the predictive power of Now..."
[+] [-] geon|13 years ago|reply
Well, they understan what it should be, but it is so far from reaching that goal it's ridiculous.
Remember the introduction of Siri? It was presented as your personal assistant, understanding your commands and making sense of everyday speech.
So far from the truth.
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
It's also a bit silly seeing people talking to "Siri" in public.
[+] [-] brcrth|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taligent|13 years ago|reply
"What is the difference between Google Now and Google Instant ?"
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] z92|13 years ago|reply
I am more interested in knowing about speech recognition capabilities, edge cases handling, frequency of getting something wrong, accented speech recognition capabilities, artificial intelligence maturity and depth and breadth of the knowledge base the systems use.
But this video has focused on the wrong things. I was expecting that the presenter would be asking both some hard but useful questions and show us which one comes out with the right answer.
[+] [-] molmalo|13 years ago|reply
But i really don't know how far are they willing too go, as taking it too far away could end up being counterproductive to them, as they earn money showing ads in their results, so they need people using their website. That's why they released chrome now in iOS.
[+] [-] rryan|13 years ago|reply
This is not surprising. Google has been doing question answering on web search for many years now. I believe it started answering direct free-form questions in its oneboxen in 2007 -- maybe earlier.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/29/minneapolis-street-te...
[+] [-] lmichelbacher|13 years ago|reply
The main metric in the comparison seemed to be speed, at which S Voice was a little bit better than Siri. Also, voice quality was slightly in favor of S Voice.
The main differences were S Voice offering image results right away instead of asking to open the browser. On the other hand, S Voice required non-voice input to to specify the remineder time whereas Siri carried on "the conversation". Other than that, the two products pretty much behaved exactly the same. Ask something, get a result.
If you ask me, it was more of a 55:45 for S voice based on speed and naturalness of voice but then I don't run a gadget blog...
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
He only mentioned S-Voice because he tested S-voice and Siri in another video (not this one), and in that one Siri beats Samsung's S-voice (powered by Vlingo).
[+] [-] shangaslammi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmichelbacher|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netnichols|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
Oh, and Google's "voice" sounds a lot more natural than Siri, too, which sounds more robotic.
[+] [-] geon|13 years ago|reply
"Play music by Milk Inc."
It might ask me if I want to buy milk. Or if I say
"Play Acappella by Kelis."
It will respond
"Sorry, I can't find a capella in your music."
Stuff like that. And it is borderline unusable at all if I'm out of breath, like when I'm running and handsfree controlls makes sense.
Siri doesn't need a speed improvment. It needs orders of magnitude better AI.
[+] [-] seiji|13 years ago|reply
We all realize Siri is just a fancy Eliza with Internet access, right?
We can resume calling something "AI" when it can order a flight for you from the Ryanair website without making any mistakes (I'm not even at that level yet).
[+] [-] thirdsun|13 years ago|reply
Apple should have anticipated that and allowed music related commands to be analyzed in your native language and english.
[+] [-] lordmatty|13 years ago|reply
Google coming out with a competitor that stacks up feature-wise doesn't fix that for them because it will only run on Android.
Google's going to miss out on a lot of search/ad revenue due to Siri in the future.
[+] [-] ralfn|13 years ago|reply
However, i think the US readers are missing the most important aspect: how many people in the world can you serve?
This is a system selling feature during a crucial generation. The speed they can rollout new languages, will determine the world market and the long tail, which will prove crucual.
Currently, Google has the best infrastructure to do that, but Apple seems to care more. I live in Holland, for example. No siri, but at least we can buy content from iTunes. Google isnt selling anything but apps in its playstore.
I think whoever is able to actually give me all these features first, wins Holland. Why would it be any different in any other country?
There are markets up for grabs, and the first one to realize that fully, wins.
[+] [-] prezjordan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tloewald|13 years ago|reply
Releasing a slightly superior clone of a feature in a rival product over six months after the first product shipped isn't enormously impressive, although it is more impressive than shipping an inferior clone of a product two years after the first product shipped, so that's definitely progress.
[+] [-] justinschuh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvidler|13 years ago|reply
Speed and voice quality are irrelevant to me, but I do really like what he was able to do with the image search on android. It wasn't clear if the android version integrates with wolfram alpha, or any of siri's other sources.
[+] [-] dhughes|13 years ago|reply
I supposedly have an HSPA+ 21Mbps connection yet only get 1Mbps/.03Kbps maybe 5Mbps/950Kbps Kbps on a good day and latency is 100ms or more, Bell Mobility in Canada. I'll never get 21Mbps but less than 25% at best?
Google and Apple can make fancy tech but it's ruined by poor networks.
[+] [-] mjleino|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dannyr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawndumas|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebbi|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomelders|13 years ago|reply