Filip Brož "I am a humble personal assistant." One of the first sentences spoken by the virtual voice assistant Siri in October 2011 in Apple's auditorium called Town Hall. Siri was introduced with the iPhone 4S and it was a big deal at first. Siri had a personality from the start and spoke like a real person. You could joke with her, hold a conversation, or use her as a personal assistant to schedule meetings or reserve a table at a restaurant. During the last five years, however, the competition has certainly not slept and in some cases even completely overtaken the assistant from Apple.
Excursion into history
Until 2010, Siri was a standalone iPhone app with a brain and a personal opinion. Siri originates from a 2003 project led by SRI (Stanford Research Institute) to create software to assist military officers with their agendas. One of the lead engineers, Adam Cheyer, saw the potential of this technology to reach a larger group of people, especially in combination with smartphones. For that reason, he entered into a partnership with Dag Kittlaus, a former manager from Motorola, who took the position of a business liaison officer at SRI.
The idea of artificial intelligence was transformed into a start-up. In early 2008, they managed to secure $8,5 million in funding and were able to build a comprehensive system that quickly understood the intent behind a question or request and responded with the most natural action. The name Siri was chosen based on an internal vote. The word had several layers of meaning. In Norwegian it was "the beautiful woman who will lead you to victory", in Swahili it meant "the secret". Siri was also Iris backwards and Iris was the name of Siri's predecessor.
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Written responses only
Before this start-up was acquired by Apple at a price of around 200 million dollars, Siri could not speak at all. Users could ask questions by voice or text, but Siri would only respond in written form. The developers assumed that the information would be on the screen and people would be able to read it before Siri spoke.
However, as soon as Siri reached Apple's laboratories, several other elements were added, for example the ability to speak in several languages, although unfortunately she cannot speak Czech even after five years. Apple also immediately integrated Siri much more into the entire system, when the voice assistant was no longer cut off in one application, but became part of iOS. At the same time, Apple turned its operation around – it was no longer possible to ask questions in writing, while Siri herself could answer by voice in addition to text answers.
Labor
The introduction of Siri caused a stir, but several disappointments soon followed. Siri had huge problems recognizing voices. Overloaded data centers were also a problem. When the user spoke, their question was sent to Apple's giant data centers, where it was processed, and the answer was sent back, after which Siri spoke it. The virtual assistant thus largely learned on the go, and Apple's servers had to process a huge amount of data. The result was frequent outages, and in the worst case, even meaningless and wrong answers.
Siri quickly became the target of various comedians, and Apple had to go to great lengths to reverse these initial setbacks. Understandably, the users who were primarily disappointed were the Californian company who could not guarantee the flawless functioning of the newly introduced novelty, which it cared so much about. That's why hundreds of people worked on Siri in Cupertino, almost continuously twenty-four hours a day. Servers were strengthened, bugs were fixed.
But despite all the birth pains, it was important to Apple that it finally got Siri up and running, giving it a solid head start on the competition that was just about to enter these waters.
Google primacy
Currently, Apple seems to be either riding the AI train or hiding all its cards. Looking at the competition, it is clear that the main drivers in this industry are currently mainly companies such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft. According to the server CB Insights over the past five years, more than thirty start-ups dedicated to artificial intelligence have been absorbed by just one of the above-mentioned companies. Most of them were bought by Google, which recently added nine small specialized companies to its portfolio.
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Unlike Apple and others, Google's AI has no name, but is simply called Google Assistant. It is a smart helper that is currently only available on mobile devices in the latest Pixel phones. It is also found in the new version in a stripped-down version communication application Allo, which Google is trying to attack the successful iMessage.
Assistant is the next development phase of Google Now, which was the voice assistant available on Android until now. However, compared to the new Assistant, he was unable to conduct a two-way conversation. On the other hand, thanks to this, he learned Google Now in Czech a few weeks ago. For more advanced assistants, using various complex algorithms for voice processing, we will probably not see this in the near future, although there is constant speculation about additional languages for Siri.
According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the past decade has seen an era of better and better mobile phones. "On the contrary, the next ten years will belong to personal assistants and artificial intelligence," Pichai is convinced. Assistant from Google is connected to all the services that the company from Mountain View offers, so it offers everything that you would expect from a smart assistant today. It will tell you how your day will be, what awaits you, what the weather will be like and how long it will take you to get to work. In the morning, for example, he will give you an overview of the latest news.
Google's Assistant can even recognize and search through all your photos, and of course, it's constantly learning and improving based on how often and what commands you give it. In December, Google is also planning to open up the entire platform to third parties, which should further expand the use of Assistant.
Google also recently bought DeepMind, a neural network company that can generate human speech. The result is up to fifty percent more realistic speech that is close to human delivery. Of course, we can argue that Siri's voice is not bad at all, but even so, it sounds artificial, typical of robots.
Speaker Home
The company from Mountain View also has a Home smart speaker, which also houses the aforementioned Google Assistant. Google Home is a small cylinder with a beveled upper edge, on which the device signals the communication status in color. A large speaker and microphones are hidden in the lower part, thanks to which communication with you is possible. All you have to do is call Google Home, which can be placed anywhere in the room (start Assistant with the message "Ok, Google") and enter commands.
You can ask the smart speaker the same things as on the phone, it can play music, find out the weather forecast, traffic conditions, control your smart home and much more. The Assistant in Google Home is also, of course, constantly learning, adapting to you and communicating with its brother in the Pixel (later also in other phones). When you connect Home to Chromecast, you also connect it to your media center.
Google Home, which was introduced a few months ago, is nothing new, however. With this, Google responds primarily to competitor Amazon, which was the first to come up with a similar smart speaker. It is so evident that the biggest technology players see great potential and future in the field of smart (and not only) home, controlled by voice.
Amazon is no longer just a warehouse
Amazon is no longer just a "warehouse" of all kinds of goods. In recent years, they have also been trying to develop their own products. The Fire smartphone may have been a big flop, but Kindle e-readers are selling well, and Amazon has been scoring big lately with its Echo smart speaker. It also has a voice assistant called Alexa and everything works on a similar principle to Google Home. However, Amazon introduced its Echo earlier.
The Echo has the form of a tall black tube, in which several speakers are hidden, which play literally in all directions, so it can be well used for just playing music. Amazon's smart device also responds to voice commands when you say "Alexa" and can do much the same as Home. Since the Echo has been on the market longer, it is currently rated as a better helper, but we can expect that Google will want to catch up with the competition as quickly as possible.
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Against Google, however, Amazon also has the upper hand in that it introduced an even smaller Dot model to the Echo, which is now in its second generation. It's a scaled-down Echo that's also significantly cheaper. Amazon anticipates that users of the small speakers will buy more to spread out in other rooms. Thus, Alexa is available everywhere and for any action. Dot can be bought for as little as $49 (1 crowns), which is very nice. For now, like the Echo, it is only available in selected markets, but we can expect that Amazon will gradually expand its services to other countries.
Something like Amazon Echo or Google Home is currently missing from Apple's menu. This year in September discovered speculation, that the iPhone manufacturer is working on competition for Echo, but nothing is officially known. The new Apple TV, which is equipped with Siri, can partially replace this function, and you can, for example, set it to control your smart home, but it is not as convenient as Echo or Home. If Apple wants to join the fight for a smart home (and not just the living room), it will need to be present "everywhere". But he has no way yet.
Samsung is about to attack
In addition, Samsung does not want to be left behind, which is also planning to enter the field with virtual assistants. The answer to Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant is supposed to be its own voice assistant developed by Viv Labs. It was founded by the aforementioned Siri co-developer Adam Cheyer and the newly developed artificial intelligence in October sold just Samsung. According to many, the technology from Viv is supposed to be even smarter and more capable than Siri, so it will be very interesting to see how the South Korean company will use it.
The voice assistant should be called Bixby, and Samsung plans to deploy it already in its next Galaxy S8 phone. It is said that it could even have a special button just for the virtual assistant. In addition, Samsung plans to expand it to the watches and home appliances it sells in the future, so its presence in households could gradually expand rapidly. Otherwise, Bixby is expected to function as a competition, performing all sorts of tasks based on the conversation.
Cortana constantly monitors your activity
If we talk about the battle of voice assistants, we also have to mention Microsoft. His voice assistant is called Cortana, and within Windows 10 we can find it both on mobile devices and on PCs. Cortana has the advantage over Siri in that it can at least answer in Czech. In addition, Cortana is also open to third parties and is connected to a whole range of popular Microsoft services. Since Cortana constantly monitors the user's activity, it can then present the best possible results.
On the other hand, it has a roughly two-year lag against Siri, as it came to the market later. After this year's arrival of Siri on the Mac, both assistants on computers provide similar services, and in the future it will depend on how both companies improve their virtual assistants and how far they let them go.
Apple and augmented reality
Among the mentioned technological juices, and several others, it is necessary to mention one more area of interest, which is very trendy now - virtual reality. The market is slowly being flooded with various elaborate products and glasses that simulate virtual reality, and although everything is just at the beginning, big companies led by Microsoft or Facebook are already investing heavily in virtual reality.
Microsoft has Hololens smart glasses, and Facebook bought the popular Oculus Rift two years ago. Google recently introduced its own Daydream View VR solution after the simple Cardboard, and Sony also joined the fight, which also showed its own VR headset with the latest PlayStation 4 Pro game console. Virtual reality can be used in many areas, and here everyone is still figuring out how to properly grasp it.
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And there is no sign of Apple here either. The Californian virtual reality giant is either significantly overslept or hiding its intentions very well. This would not be anything new or surprising for him, however, if he only has similar products in his laboratories for the time being, the question is whether he will come to the market too late. In virtual reality and voice assistants, its competitors are now investing big money and collecting valuable feedback from users, developers and others.
But the question remains whether Apple is even that interested in virtual reality at this early stage. Executive director Tim Cook has already stated several times that he now finds the so-called augmented reality, which has recently been expanded by the Pokémon GO phenomenon, more interesting. However, it is not yet clear at all how Apple should be involved in AR (augmented reality). There have been speculations that augmented reality is to become an important part of the next iPhones, in recent days there has even been talk again that Apple is testing smart glasses that would work with AR or VR.
Either way, Apple is stubbornly silent for now, and the competing trains have long since left the station. For now, Amazon holds the lead in the role of home assistant, Google is launching activities on literally all fronts, and it will be extremely interesting to see what path Samsung takes. Microsoft, on the other hand, believes in virtual reality, and Apple should, at least from this point of view, immediately respond to a whole range of products that it does not yet have at all. Just improving Siri, which is definitely still necessary, won't be enough in the coming years...
I have to say that I didn't read this whole article, I skimmed it
the reason is obvious. I have been a professional AI for 10+ years and this is such a shallow, amateurish and naive article that if you were my child I would slap you and I have never slapped my child
if you are already writing about something you have no idea about (or an idea as superficial as you show in this article), then for the love of God and for the well-being of all visitors to this website, do not publish it, and let it sit on your local drive. Thanks
best regards
kk
So how is it? I would be interested in your point of view.
from publicly available information (that is, we take the author's claim that Apple is definitely making some progress in AI but does not tell anyone about it, which is unusual because companies that do AI and invent new things publish scientific studies, .. yes, with some time lag, but they publish , and apple didn't do anything like that then)
so if we can evaluate it only from publicly available information. Google Assistant and Cortana, for Google and Microsoft, are peripheral aspects of their AI research. for apple, SIRI is their entire AI research. these three companies (and we can add IBM, Amazon, Baidu...) are incomparable. Apple AI research compared to them, it's just not.
I especially dislike the marketing crap in the article that doesn't match reality. eg>
""Siri had a personality from the start and spoke like a real person. You could have joked with her, had a conversation..." < of course siri doesn't have a personality, all the jokes and bullshit are pre-scripted like in any PC game (normally I wouldn't mention it because it's obvious to everyone, but here it's an AI and theoretically it can have a personality , so it should be taken for granted that siri is not an example of this) ""a complex system that quickly understood the intention behind the question or request and responded with the most natural action"" < nonsense, siri translated speech to text, it tries to understand what people are interested in from the text (by extracting key words), and if it has a script and a database for that, it will also answer. it definitely does not respond to the most natural action and does not distinguish the user's mind (after all, people often do not even know when someone asks them something, why the person asks it) ""Google also recently bought the company DeepMind, which deals with neural networks, generate human speech. "" < it's not recent, it's been 2 years, which is a long time in IT. and saying that deepmind deals with neural networks is like saying that google deals with informatics. yes, it is clear that google did not buy the agricultural cooperative. neuronove site works where who, deepmind makes algorithms for deep learning. its use is universal, including, among other things, improved speech both recognized and generated, but also photo recognition, etc. (simply optimization of neural networks for more complex tasks) ""Amazon is no longer just a "warehouse" of all kinds of goods. In recent years, they have also been trying to develop their own products. "" < maybe the last 10 years? that's like saying that apple doesn't just make ipods anymore in recent years. amazon is not and has never been a warehouse, it is an IT company, someone calls it a modern day IBM. to say that amazon used to be a "warehouse" is a slap in the face (which the author should give himself)
However, I still don't understand why you have such a strong need to slap? It's nice that someone writes an article. At least on this server. Discussions are about expressing yourself and adding your experience. The cleverness of the author should be in the fact that he takes important lessons from your comments and achieves that he enriches our experience and also his own. But your form is so arrogant and noisy that I can hardly hear the interesting content you want to tell us here. I think that with such an approach people will start to ignore you on principle. I have been following your posts for some time now and I still see more arrogance, superficiality and mutual insults in them than something constructive, which is definitely deep inside you. Think man and start contributing. Stop insulting and being aggressive.
never heard "you should spank"?
it's an emphasis on the fact that someone is doing something stupid that they shouldn't be doing
and the author, on a partially educational website, spreads falsehoods
and I don't want to sell interesting content to anyone, I was just responding to the question of what is wrong with that article (and there are many things wrong, they were examples)
and my neighbor says "go outside the door and slap yourself, don't save yourself, you're doing it for yourself"
so next time straight constructively and without slaps, it will be fine. without flame.
so he did.
I will try to be almost without jokes, and I will hope that the author will try to write only about what I understand
I definitely thank you for your opinion and expert view, especially since it is your field of livelihood. In any case, I agree with Tomáš (see the fourth post upwards), there is no need to show your ego in full fire at any cost and flaunt paternal attitudes, which only cast a negative light on your person. I take your opinions (without flame) and agree with them. On the other hand, the principle of journalism is not to be an expert in everything, but to form an opinion in a short time, to study as many available (foreign) sources as possible and, based on that, to compile some meaningful text that will provoke a reaction and spark a discussion. I dare say, or at least I try to, that I am an expert on Apple as such. This article meant a great challenge for me in the form of orientation to the competition and studying the sources.
Anyway thanks for the opinion, I'll keep that in mind. Alternatively, if you want, you can easily write something yourself, after an agreement it would certainly be possible to agree on some kind of publication... if it has something to do with Apple :-)
This didn't read badly. How about a full article on the issue? Many people would welcome it.
Is there something specific that interests you?
if you are interested in AI a little deeper, why not read the textbook?
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig (best to choose the latest version available)
a basic introduction to AI (although it would guarantee you an equal job in some IT company), although some things should not be used, everyone expects that if you do AI, you know this book, and with such an assumption, they also write the last work, i.e. in order to progress further, you need to know this a book
after reading this, you'll be able to pick up almost any specialized book or study on AI topics and know what it's about
Kk = kokot?
Lord yes, I would be really ashamed of a dad like that as his child. Having a dad who doesn't write anything constructive and just throws up emotionally. As Petr Stejskal writes, send your opinion here or directly to the editorial office, father. I will read it and compare it very soon.
Unfortunately, I misclassified the posts for you, kk. Hopefully you'll find them, and maybe not, it's probably a no-brainer :-)
Thanks for the interesting article. I especially liked the summary of what is currently on the market. The attached video links were also great.
Interesting article, but do you take this warning into consideration? http://www.dsl.sk/article.php?article=19084
Apple is sleeping not only in the field of artificial intelligence.
It's likely that Apple is up to something since it already blasted "WiFi products". So it can be expected to come with something similar to what Google introduced, but it will be 5x more expensive and do half the things, but it will be nice, but I expect it won't replace the aTV4 for example.
For kk:
Well, according to your posts, you are not an "AI expert" as some here call you out to be. Or maybe your uncontrollable need to troll and hate Apple won out.
After all, my comment is also confirmed by the news from NIPS 2016 in Barcelona regarding Apple. Surely as an expert you attend this regular conference or at least follow it :-)
Dear editor, you can't know everything, no human being. But there are plenty of public resources about Apple and AI (even if AI is too encompassing a discipline) and it's not much work to find out the real state of affairs.