Apple’s Roller Coaster Ride with Siri

Interesting perspective about the state of the industry with regards to speech recognition.

Apple has done a great job by bringing Siri to the market at a stage where it was not perfect. 

And of course speech recognition is not yet a perfect science.

With Apple fully committing to this technology and rolling it out on all  iPhone devices is great news for the technology.

By enabling them to collect massive amounts of data and working it into the acoustic models it will not take too long and Siri will be working just fine.

Source: Siri on iPhone 4S/ Apple

After its release with iPhone 4S last October 2011, Siri had a rough time since then. People expected that the company’s current-generation mobile phone will be the best handset yet, and the voice application will be one of its shining features. In fact, even hackers took advantage of manipulating Siri to their will. However, the app’s excitement wavered and disappointed users have filed a lawsuit against its creator.

The Embarrassing Siri

It also seems that Apple employees are not happy with the fact that Siri hasn’t matured yet into a digital assistant that everyone is expecting. As stated by a former worker to Fortune: “People are embarrassed by Siri. Steve would have lost his mind over Siri.”

How the late CEO would have reacted to the voice application’s evolution and its users’ complaints, only those closes to him would know.

In relation to this, there is an argument whether the general anti-Siri sentiment is justifiable or not. According to an email sent by Gartner analyst Brian Blau to Wired:

“Siri is a useful service if you form your queries correctly and understand what the service can do. But many people expect Siri to be more robust than it is. So for these types of voice services, there really needs to be some education on the part of the consumer.”

Limited Consumer Education, Limited Capabilities

However, the consumers’ education is limited to the Siri advertisements that they see on TV, which makes their disappointment reasonable. That’s why it no longer comes as a surprise that Apple was recently hit by a class-action lawsuit, pointing out that the voice application doesn’t actually perform like it does on the advertisements.

It was followed by the company’s application to dismiss the litigation, saying that the plaintiffs’ complaints were incomplete, vague and “highly individualized.” It is also a note worth taking that Siri is still in beta. This could mean that there’s going to be some varying user experiences.

Regardless, the voice application has been around for more than six months now, and users haven’t seen any major updates to its performance or capabilities. For a beta product, they would expect at least occasional tweaks and additions. Moreover, Siri didn’t make it to the new iPad, although there are a handful of reasons why it would be challenging to bring the application to a non-phone device.

 

Despite the user complaints, it’s obvious that Apple is committed with the Siri. Thus, it should be expected that the company will roll out updates to improve the voice application. But whether an upgrade will be available once iOS 6 becomes available or not, that remains to be seen.

google.com |by Maricris

◆

via http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-blog - Interesting perspective about the state of the industry with regards to speech recognition. Apple has done a great job by bringing Siri to the market at a stage where it was not perfect.  And of course speech recognition is not yet a perfect science. With Apple fully committing to this technology an ...