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AI Apple

Siri Co-founder is Surprised By How Much Siri Still Can't Do (qz.com) 86

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
In an interview with Quartz, Norman Winarsky, a founder of Siri, suggests that Apple may have given Siri an overly ambitious collection of responsibilities and hasn't made the feature reliable enough. From a report: And while vastly improved from its earliest days, Siri still isn't a sparkling conversationalist. "Surprise and delight is kind of missing right now," said Winarsky, now a consultant and venture capitalist. Winarsky acknowledges that some of this disappointment stems from the sheer difficulty of predicting the pace of major technological advancement, which Bill Gates once summed up as the human tendency to "overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10."

But part of it is also likely because Apple chose to take Siri in a very different direction than the one its founders envisioned. Pre-Apple, Winarsky said, Siri was intended to launch specifically as a travel and entertainment concierge. Were you to arrive at an airport to discover a cancelled flight, for example, Siri would already be searching for an alternate route home by the time you pulled your phone from your pocket -- and if none was available, would have a hotel room ready to book. It would have a smaller remit, but it would learn it flawlessly, and then gradually extend to related areas. "These are hard problems and when you're a company dealing with up to a billion people, the problems get harder yet," Winarsky said. "They're probably looking for a level of perfection they can't get."
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Siri Co-founder is Surprised By How Much Siri Still Can't Do More

Siri Co-founder is Surprised By How Much Siri Still Can't Do

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  • Siri has a "founder" (Score:3)

    by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @01:37PM (#56247761) Homepage

    Siri has a "founder"? Not a programmer? Do other apps have "founders", or just Siri?

    Really, Siri is just Hal by another name. They should have just called it "Hal-9000" and left it at that.

  • My guess is that the deep learning neural net that Siri is running isn't deep enough or neural enough. They just need to add more neurons and make the network deeper and the problem will be solved.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 )

      hahaha, nothing new in AI in the last couple of decades other than faster hardware. tell me what you think is new in AI and I'll tell you what decade in the 20th century it came from....

      what a farce, machines aren't going to be intelligent in the near future, artificial or otherwise....

      • We never had deep learning Neural Networks in the Cloud before. Now that we have the Cloud, AI will come. Musk and other thought leaders said so, so it must be true.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sebby ( 238625 )

      More neurons!

      MORE NEURONS!

  • Siri might have been able to point this link to the right article.

  • but she doesn't want any part of it.

  • As far as I'm concerned it can think of a really big number, double it, and fuck off that much.

    Do not want.

  • Siri's capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @02:04PM (#56247951)
    The problem is that the public has been led to believe that the capabilities of Siri (and its counterparts by other companies) wouldn't fall too short of those displayed by HAL 9000 and the Star Trek computer. When you start interacting with them under such expectations, you are bound to be sorely disappointed. Siri et al. remain gimmicks good for grins and giggles, and not really much else - just about anything they can do, people can do themselves, probably more efficiently. Plus, the things we would really want for them to do remain well beyond their capabilities. And the AI community still has the chutzpah (or recklessness) to carry on coming up with exuberant forecasts.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      I found this wrong information on the web, which I won't read to you.

      How many times do I need that to happen before I stop caring?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by starless ( 60879 )

      I find it faster to use siri (or google) to set an alarm when I'm cooking, or to check the weather quickly.
      But beyond that, not so much typically...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by arth1 ( 260657 )

        I find it faster to use siri (or google) to set an alarm when I'm cooking, or to check the weather quickly.

        My stove has a perfectly good timer that I just twist to set.

        And I can just glance out the window to check the weather quickly.
        If I need a weather forecast, there's really no way to avoid being blasted with them on all media. It never snows any more; now every snowfall is called a STORM, if not a snowcapolypse or bomb cyclone.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I don't need a kettle, I can just boil water in a saucepan over the open fireplace. Email? Pfft, I can just use the US Postal Service.

          We get it, you're old and technophobic. You don't need convenience devices, that's kind of the point, so arguing against them on that basis is obviously moronic.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          And I can just glance out the window to check the weather quickly.

          You're forecasting the weather for the day by looking out the window? You do realize the weather changes over the course of the day right? And that you can't see the temperature? But yes if there's snow on the ground it's probably pretty cold.

        • For the weather, looking out the window might help, but the the last six months here in Canada, looking out the window in the morning it's just dark and snow covered. We've had an unusually long cold winter, many days below -20C, and the odd day it will swing anywhere up to 0C. Turns out it's real convenient to just ask for this information.

          As someone who has worked (a long time ago) with natural language processing, Alexa does a pretty good job of impressing me. I know the limitations and difficultie

    • Siri is hardly just 'grins and giggles', but as it stands now it functions as a macro system for integrating sets of apps that support it. It's really useful to be able to call people using it when the sun washes out the iPhone display, or to navigate to addresses hands-free, playing directions over the car audio.

      But it's a long, long way from being the existential threat to humanity that Elon Musk has in mind.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No, the problem is that it hasn't been improved in any noticeable way since it arrived 7-ish years ago.

      It STILL interrupts you on a pause and cannot stop and listen to the rest of what you're trying to say without interrupting you.

      It STILL starts slow. It STILL keeps asking Do-you-mean-so-and-so when you specify just a first name, even when your first name is "Deputy director of the CIA" and you've called that person 10 times in the past week and there's no one else in your contact list with that first nam

  • Digital Assistants suck in general. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @02:13PM (#56248001)

    In general this technology, is just the command line interface all over again, with some rudimentary natural language parsing, with a default fail over of googling the question.

    The problem with All the Digital Assistants is that it doesn't really get context. So it comes up with silly answers to questions, because the context of the question isn't place in concern.

    • It is almost as if they aren't intelligent at all, and just voice recognition and speech systems hooked up to back end search engines.

      • There's certainly no AI there. These kinds of apps are currently just expert systems with manual tweaks and a search fallback.

        • Well thats a relief. I was under the impression that AI was going to take over the planet next week.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by arth1 ( 260657 )

            Well thats a relief. I was under the impression that AI was going to take over the planet next week.

            Nah, it will take over the Boring Company next week. The rest of the world doesn't have to worry for another few centuries.

    • Re:Digital Assistants suck in general. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zak3056 ( 69287 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @02:38PM (#56248145) Journal

      The problem with All the Digital Assistants is that it doesn't really get context. So it comes up with silly answers to questions, because the context of the question isn't place in concern.

      SOME things it has context for it and gets right in a downright scary fashion. Siri (and Google in the Samsung phone it replaced) know when I usually leave for work, or leave to go home, and pop up a notification with route, traffic, and anything else. They know that on Monday I take my daughter to Girl Scouts, that I leave work at a different time on that day and take a different route. The know that on Friday I drive to my Girlfriend's house, but that I have a doctor's appointment first, and that my ex-wife picks my daughter up on that day so I don't need to drive to school (except on those weekends I have my daughter, when I DO need to drive to school). That stuff (while, as noted, is REALLY freaking scary) is pretty useful.

      Almost EVERYTHING else, it's just downright shit for. As another poster put it, "I found this wrong information on the web, which I won't read to you."

      • " Siri (and Google in the Samsung phone it replaced) know when I usually leave for work, or leave to go home, and pop up a notification with route, traffic, and anything else. They know that on Monday I take my daughter to Girl Scouts, that I leave work at a different time on that day and take a different route."

        Wow, that is amazing stuff. It is almost like they log all that into a database and use information about what you were doing last Monday to predict what you are doing to do the next Monday. Truly

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

          Wow, that is amazing stuff. It is almost like they log all that into a database and use information about what you were doing last Monday to predict what you are doing to do the next Monday. Truly cutting edge.

          Yes, that was the "context" I was getting at and why I referred to it as "truly scary." I don't think it's magic, I understand where it's coming from.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      The problem with All the Digital Assistants is that it doesn't really get context.

      Well, they're still short on a lot of human context.. but they've made strides on linguistic content. Like if you ask who's POTUS, that's simple enough. But you continue to ask questions like how old is he, what party does he belong to, when is he up for reelection it'll understand that it's still in the same context. If you're told Trump is a Republican and follow up with asking if they have a majority in Congress, it'll understand the context switch to asking about Republicans.

      In general this technology, is just the command line interface all over again

      Yeah... how many in the gene

      • Well lets just try out your claims. I just asked Siri "Who is the president of the united states?" and it said "Donald Trump". So far so good. So I immediately asked "What party does he belong to?" and it came up with a wikipedia page for "Party Leader". So, yeah, total BS.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      It's a bit like the uncanny valley: the closer we get to a computer system like the one depicted on Star Trek TNG, the more we'll focus on how it falls short.

      The thing about that Enterprise computer is that it could easily pass a pretty unconstrained Turing test. Used in a wide variety of tasks, it actually understood what the person was trying to do and could anticipate what they might want -- unless the writers required otherwise.

      At the extreme opposite end of the spectrum is the late 1960s AI program S [wikipedia.org]

    • In general this technology, is just the command line interface all over again

      Have you tried
      ls, -lr, ~, |, grep, comma.*usage?

  • Data science is about shaping databases to better match phenomenon - often VERY badly, but good enough to work for business or solving some immediate problem at hand with the resources at hand. I've worked at it, and it's powerful and amazing in its own ways - but it's not neuroscience, at all.

    Siri has some lovely canned responses, shaped to match common human inputs, and improved based on what new common inputs come in, largely by adding more human inputs rather than really dynamically generated content.

    Data science can help you shape an estimate to match previous responses better, can shape a curve to match an exponent better - but it isn't neuroscience.

    ELIZA and her informational descendants like Siri aren't immitating humans - they're selecting from a data set of mixed repeating inputs and canned responses, with a few lexical alterations for effect.

    They're not systems fooling humans - they're humans fooling humans using sliced up prerecorded clips.

    Almost all of artificial intelligence and even business intelligence is like that - focused on satisfying expectations to some percentage, not on actually modelling absolute truth. As long as customers are indicating improvement, managers give the thumbs up, it continues.

    It's very much more stage magic than anything else - under the hood, it's ugly framework and empty air, but dressed up to show the illusion just where it can be seen.

    Which makes sense - if you're spending millions, and millions, and millions on it - you expect some stagecraft, I mean "modern professionalism" painted on top to pretend every dollar was spend with perfect wisdom.

    Siri-ously though - it's a cool extension of previous technology, and a neat way to present it to cell-phone users and the like. But it's also cheesy use of such tools, and shouldn't be taken as more than window dressing to other tools as it is. The promise of 'virtual assistants' from the mid 90's is nowhere closer with this. Wolfram Alpha might be closer - but they're mostly in the same bag of oddball interfaces.

    Ryan Fenton

  • Siri's intelligence (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quasar1999 ( 520073 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @03:00PM (#56248255) Journal
    Actual conversation I had with Siri.

    "Siri, what is my relationship status?" ... "I can't answer that"
    "Siri, what is my marital status?" ... "I can't answer that"
    "Siri, phone my wife" ... proceeds to phone my wife.
    "Siri, where is my girlfriend?" ... "Your wife is right beside you."


    That last one has me confused. Did Siri know that I am married and thus girlfriend means spouse? Or did she try to warn me that my wife was right next to me.

  • Siri solved hard problems, then bungled easy stuff (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MorePower ( 581188 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @03:08PM (#56248307)

    All my life, we've been expecting voice recognition "real soon now". And it always flopped. You had to shout really slowly and carefully to get the system to recognize maybe half the words you said.

    Then along came Siri, and finally there was a commercially available system that was good enough with normal speaking tone and pace (mostly) and... it dropped the ball miserably at doing simple stuff with the recognized speech.
    I haven't tried Siri in ages, so maybe they've improved it recently, but I already gave up on using it because of how dumb it was. For example:

    I could ask Siri for directions, say to my hotel, and she would understand fine. But if I asked for gas stations along my route, or restaurants near my destination she wouldn't do it. My old Tom-Tom could do that fine, you had to push the touchscreen as it had no voice capabilities, but it did it great. Siri could understand my voice, but could not do what my Tom-Tom could. To add insult to injury, Siri's canned response indicated that she understood what I was asking for (to use my route or destination as a search location instead of my current position), she just wouldn't do it.

    Another time, I wanted to call my wife from a rental car (my regular car has its own voice recognition that works better for this). So I asked Siri to call [wife's name]. She didn't understand, fine, my wife has a weird foreign name. So asked Siri to call [our last name]. She found 2 people with that last name in my contacts (myself and my wife ) and asked me which one I wanted to call. Great! I responded "[wife's name]" Siri then asked "what do you want to do with [wife's name]?" Siri you just asked me which of 2 people I wanted to call! Oh well, I responded "Call her". Siri didn't understand what "Call her" meant and looked up websites related to "Call her". Now even back in the '80s when playing Infocom text adventures like Zork, you could type commands like "hit troll" have the game respond "what do you want to hit the troll with?" and answer "axe". The game remembered just fine that it asked you to fill in some info, and was ready to plug in the new info into what you were doing a few commands ago. But Siri couldn'do that, 30 years later.

    • Awhile back, I tried to phone my mom. She has ONE number listed, and an easy name, but Siri still couldn't do it right. If I'd actually been driving instead of parked, I probably would have crashed into something while yelling obscenities at the phone. I ended up taking the phone out and dialing the number manually.

      • What I love is how Siri has built in logic to detect swearing and tell you not to use such language, but it can't do basic things like keep the context of the question that it had literally just asked you a moment before. Brilliant way to spend your programming resources Apple... Make sure Siri has a witty comeback if I use profanity because of how crappy it is at not understanding context that it literally created by asking me a question.
    • It has flopped because there is NO AI. There are no systems that have any comprehension of your context, your experiences or your insight. That is AI. Everything else is a "parlor trick" to try and make you believe it's intelligence.

      • I don't think SIRI needs AI to be more useful. Once it does the 'hard part' of converting speech to text, it just needs to use existing (non-AI) technology to make it more useful.
        The two examples I gave were already on the market technology (the second one for over 30 years) that Apple could have trivially copied, but didn't.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by martinX ( 672498 )

      I listen to one album on my daily motorbike ride. Morning and evening, it's the same. I ask Siri to play it.

      "Siri, play Beach House"
      I get one of these responses:

      >>> "Hmmm. I'm having trouble finding that. If you're not on wi-fi or 4G please connect." (You'd think Siri would know my network status, and it *is always* connected when she says this).

      >>> Plays Led Zeppelin

      >>> Nothing

      >>> Starts playing from where the album left off.

      >>> Plays the album from the beginnin

  • I suspect that the Siri founders painted a vision where all these capabilities were just 6 months away, with "hockey stick" revenue curves and smattering of the usual lies that startups use to inflate their valuation. Now they act surprised that Apple can't make it do all these things...

    A.

    • This isn't surprising. The 90% is the easy part. It is the last 10% which is the hardest and takes a long time to get right (or is even impossible to do).
  • Because true AI is generations away from current technology architecture?
    Task programming (ie, the "task" of converting speech to text) is in no way, artificial intelligence. The ability to recognize patterns (when an algorithm is designed to recognize patterns) is in no way, AI either. Don't let parlor tricks fool you. We have nothing that approaches AI today. Nothing.

  • I'm not an Apple guy, but I was pondering making my long (8 hour) drive more pleasant.

    Would love to be able to speak to a device and get it to read back web pages to me, basically browse via voice. Could be quite useful.

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