Stephen Nellis, Reuters:
Currently, Apple’s Siri works with only six types of app: ride-hailing and sharing; messaging and calling; photo search; payments; fitness; and auto infotainment systems. At the company’s annual developer conference next week, it is expected to add to those categories.
And:
But even if Siri doubles its areas of expertise, it will be a far cry from the 12,000 or so tasks that Amazon.com’s Alexa can handle.
The difference illustrates a strategic divide between the two tech rivals. Apple is betting that customers will not use voice commands without an experience similar to speaking with a human, and so it is limiting what Siri can do in order to make sure it works well.
And:
Now, an iPhone user can say, “Hey Siri, I’d like a ride to the airport” or “Hey Siri, order me a car,” and Siri will open the Uber or Lyft ride service app and start booking a trip.
Apart from some basic home and music functions, Alexa needs more specific directions, using a limited set of commands such as “ask” or “tell.” For example, “Alexa, ask Uber for a ride,” will start the process of summoning a car, but “Alexa, order me an Uber” will not, because Alexa does not make the connection that it should open the Uber “skill.”
Apple is investing in foundational natural language processing (NLP) expertise, building an experience that will scale.
My 2 cents: This is a better long play. In the long run, interacting with Siri will be much more like speaking with a person, complete with slang and idiom, requiring a much smaller learning curve but with a limited domain.
It’d be interesting to see a set of benchmarks develop to test Siri and Alexa, a standardized set of statements to gauge progress.
There will be several winners in this space, and many people will several assistants throughout the day.
The Alexa model strikes me more akin to the Palm graffiti model of text recognition and the Apple model appears closer to the Newton model of handwriting recognition. Nothing prevents Alexa from moving to more robust NLP and going with the stopgap solution gives them a ton of data to feed into NLP models. If you say something like, “Alexa, order me an Uber,” Alexa recognizes what you are trying to do and then gives you the correct syntax. This seems to me like a better way to win mindshare and get loads of data to train off of.
I agree with this. I think everyone is focusing right now on the One Assistant To Rule Them All that does everything, but individual specialized assistants may be the better way to go. At the least, the individual ones will exist.
Yep. The tech press is seemingly obsessed with framing everything as a zero sum game, despite being proven wrong at nearly every turn.
Good point, but that’s not what I had in mind. I was thinking more along the lines of Siri is portable, Alexa is inexpensive, and, generally, just enough is more.
We used to say that mapping is a long play and Apple is investing in infrastructure. 5 years later, Apple Maps is much improved yet farther behind Google Maps.
Lose mind-share, and it doesn’t matter how good you get later. I owned a Newton MessagePad (a 2100 or something like that). It was awesome at understanding my handwriting. But by then, nobody cared because they “knew” better.
not fact. recent articles i read put maps and directions about the same. google may have more POIs but that’s not to say AM is far behind GM. i haven’t used GM in years and don’t expect to. somehow i’ve never gotten lost or driven off a cliff.
I’d have faith if Siri had improved at all in the past few years – but basic stuff is still laughable. I ask Siri “How hot is it going to be today?” and she responds, “Nope, not hot at all”
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!mj276:
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To be fair, I can ask the weatherperson that and get the same b.s. 🙂