John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team (opens in new tab)

Siri plus shortcuts have made many mundane tasks easier. When I get in my car to come home from work I say "Hey Siri, heading home." That causes my phone to text my wife my arrival time and starts the last podcast I had playing.

It's a simple thing, but is so much easier than texting and then thumbing through the podcast player to start where I left off. I have others like logging my water intake or weight, but it was really adding shortcuts to Siri that made these possible.

Playing music or TV shows is also much easier/nicer. "Hey Google, play The Office on Netflix".

Timers. Another simple thing that is so much easier when you can use your voice when cooking.

Yes, daily.

I use it when cooking to get instructions on how long to bake a specific vegetable and at what temp. While I'm out driving to get directions hands free. When I want to do a search but can't be bothered to type the whole thing out on my mobile keyboard. When I'm at home and want to listen to radio on my speakers. I use a Pixel 2, so when I make a call I just squeeze it and say 'call {contact}', rather than find-and-open the phone app.

Don't look at voice commands as a interface replacement for keyboards. Instead, look at voice commands as a new interface for situations where using a keyboard or touch screen is a hassle.

That number is probably a little outdated now. But it’s definitely not targeting a niche audience.

A friend of my partner uses voice commands for everything on her iPhone. She is almost blind on one eye, and has terrible eye sight with the other eye (albino trait).

Hiring away Google's head of AI seems to have made a material difference in how well Siri performs in an annual head to head comparison of how well various smart speakers responded to 800 sample requests.

>Google Home continued its outperformance, answering 86% correctly and understanding all 800 questions. The HomePod correctly answered 75% and only misunderstood 3, the Echo correctly answered 73% and misunderstood 8 questions, and Cortana correctly answered 63% and misunderstood just 5 questions.

>Note that nearly every misunderstood question involved a proper noun, often the name of a local town or restaurant.

https://loupventures.com/annual-smart-speaker-iq-test/

A 22% increase in correct responses over last year's performance.

You mentioned this, but constantly in the car, but it's not even sort of begrudging. I got an early sale on the Echo Auto devices (Alexa for your car, basically), and love it. Everything I could do by dinking around with my phone, I now don't have to.

Outside of the car, voice commands for stuff like home control is natural, and almost kinda magical. Walking in with both hands full of groceries and barking "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights" is awesome. Same for setting timers while cooking, turning on music, and so forth. So long as you remember that you're dealing with what amounts to a voice command line, not the Enterprise's computer, everything flows smoothly.

Conversely, I almost never use Siri even though by way of car bluetooth it should have the same kind of functionality.. but it's so limited and inaccurate as to be functionally useless.

>is no one else creeped out at always on mics and video cameras in their house?

Not for me, because a device that is local-only listening for a wake-word is not even sort of creepy. Your explanation, intentionally or not, paints it as a device that maintains a constant connection to the mothership and gives $company a live stream of everything happening around it.

This is an incredibly annoying misconception that I've grown weary of seeing.

Of course Siri defaults to an incorrect google search on nearly every question, so this often doesn't work in practice...

The second is command. I don't want to put Siri in front of every sentences. It is unnatural. If I have a maid, that is not how the conversation would go if I need to get something done. The amount of work ( turning something on or off, or text, or music ) is relatively small compared to the amount of commands I have to give. Or in other words, Giving a command to Siri, ( 4 - 6 words ) is more troublesome than pressing 3 - 4 buttons.

I'd say we need 10-20 more years for voice assistants to be smoothly integrated with our daily lives. Until then big tech companies have just started the race (collecting data, enhancing experience) to be the best voice interface in the future.

From my point of view, users of our generation are just experimental subjects for currently unfunctional & uncommon but buzzed products like voice assistants and VR.

I was recently getting a dental procedure done and the Periodontist kept using Alexa while he was treating me. "Alexa, play the Eagles!" "Alexa, skip this song!" He seemed super impressed like he was really excited to show it off... I thought it was annoying. I think voice command stuff is lame. I have siri permanently disabled on my iphone and apple watch.

I've heard some people like using siri with the apple watch, but I never got into it- I would always accidentally set it off when I was weightlifting.

Yup, that's pretty much the only reason I use Siri. Though I could see VR as another possible use case, since hand controls in VR are less precise and slower than keyboard/mouse for textual input.

On my phone it's rare unless I'm getting in my car and having it pull up directions.

Where I found I use it all the time is with the Amazon Fire Stick. When I have a show I want to watch I don't have to fumble with a stupid keyboard on the TV, I just say the name and it works. Also setting timers in the kitchen when I'm cooking, it saves me from getting raw meat on all the surfaces

- when I’m driving is the big one

- and for reminders.

It’s lot easier to say:

- remind me to call my mom when I get home.

- remind me to call my wife when I get in the car.

- remind me to get milk when I get to $grocery_store

Than to set up the reminder manually.

- Remind me to X in N minutes/hours/days

- Set an alarm for N minutes

- What’s the weather like today/tomorrow?

- Play X by Y (when driving and wanting a specific album or song to play)

- What is [insert some question of simple knowledge I’ve forgotten]?

Nothing else seems worth bothering with.

I speak with an accent so it was always hit and miss for me - although it had gotten better in recent years.

I’m also too lazy to talk ...

I have tried using speech-to-text for text messages and emails, and I usually spend more time correcting the mistakes than it saves.

Setting alarms and reminders

https://books.google.nl/books?id=uNDW_dQ_dlAC&pg=PA167&lpg=P...

Ben Shneiderman's 1993 IEEE Software article, "Beyond Intelligent Machines: Just do it!" was prompted by discussion between Mark Weiser (father of Ubiquitous Computing) and Bill Hefley, and argues that users want a sense of direct and immediate control over computers that differs from how they interact with people.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/93-03/93-03.html

[...]

WHY NOT INTELLIGENT? I am opposed to labeling computers as "intelligent" for several reasons. First, such a classification limits the imagination. We should have much greater ambition than to make a computer behave like an intelligent butler or other human agent. Computer-supported cooperative work, hypertext/hypermedia, multimedia, information visualization, and virtual reality are powerful technologies that enable human users to accomplish tasks that no human has ever done. If we describe computers in human terms, we run the risk of limiting our ambition and creativity in the design of future computer capabilities. In the same way that most of us have learned to use terminology not specific to any gender, we should now learn not to limit designers of computers with the tag "intelligent" or "smart."

Second, the qualities of predictability and control are desirable. If machines are intelligent or adaptive, they may have less of these qualities. Usability studies at the University of Maryland show that users want the feelings of mastery, competence, and understanding that come from a predictable and controllable interface. Most users seek a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, not the sense that some intelligent machine magically did their job for them.

Another reason I'm concerned about this label is that it limits or even eliminates human responsibility. I am concerned that if designers are successful in convincing the users that computers are intelligent, then the users will have a reduced sense of responsibility for failures. The tendency to blame the machine is already widespread and I think we will be on dangerous ground if we encourage this trend. As part of my work, I collect newspapers articles about computers, some of which bear the headlines "Victims of Computer Error Go Hungry," "IRS Computers Err on Refund Reports," and "Computers That 'Hear' Taking Jobs" -- all of which seem to absolve human operators by implicating the machine.

Finally, I have a basic philosophical objection to the "intelligent" label. Machines are not people, nor can they ever become so. For me, computers have no more intelligence than a wooden pencil. If you confuse the way you treat machines with the way you treat people, you may end up treating people like machines, which devalues human emotional experiences, creativity, individuality, and relationships of trust. I know that many of my colleagues are quite happy to call machines intelligent and knowledgeable, but I prefer to treat and think about machines in very different ways from the way I treat and think about people.

[...]

+ Natural-language interaction seems clumsy and slow compared to direct manipulation and information-visualization methods that use rapid, high-resolution, color displays with pointing devices. Lotus HAL is gone, Artificial Intelligence Corp.'s Intellect hangs on but is not catching on. Although there are some interesting directions for tools that support human work through natural-language processing (aiding human translators, parsing texts, and generating reports from structured databases) this is different from natural-language interaction.

+ Speech I/O in talking cars and vending machines has not flourished. Voice recognition is fine for handicapped users and special situations, but doesn't seem to be viable for widespread use in office, home, or school settings. Our recent studies suggest that speech I/O has a greater interference with short term and working memory than hand-eye coordination for menu selection by mouse. Voice store and forward, phone-based information retrieval, and voice annotation have great potential but these are not intelligent applications.

[...]

The guy this post is about just came from Google, where he lead on the stuff you're praising. He can push these efforts in the right direction, and help make other strategic hires..

Isn't this exactly what you want?

Apple is a 40 year old company, and they're still raking in the dough from their original product category.

Is it? Is the $30 puck better than the Home assistant or does it just suck that much more in French than it does in English? (Not being snarky, genuinely asking)

It doesn't understand followup commands, the Hue integration is rotten bad, and the commands definitely have to be rigid. Things like "What were my meetings on the 12th of December" aren't understood.

Also having to say "OK google" and not being able to change that is so bad. At least "Hey Siri" is natural.

Apple could probably become as good as Google at its own game, but it would take a lot of effort and I don't think Tim Cook et al have the vision to move in that direction like Microsoft did.

I feel Apple will become more and more irrelevant as years pass. With a bandwidth singularity end user hardware will be irrelevant in 10-20 years from now and other companies like Google and Microsoft are slowly catching up in making great end user experiences.

Their current B people do hire the best of the best ... of B people. It like my current BigCo (we are straight C people) feels no talent shortage even right now in the Bay Area while also supposedly hiring only the best people - there is no shortage of C people. We enjoy our work/life balance while of course we can't even dream of producing anything even just slightly resembling Siri.

Even their Maps are late, 7 years later since the first apology of Apple Maps they still aren't anywhere close to Google Map.

Siri is nowhere near the competition.

If it’s just clever marketing, you have to wonder why marketing is working so well compared to the innovation that other companies are presumably doing.