Hey guys it’s Greg with Apple Explained,and today we’re taking a look at the History of Siri.
Remember Siri being introduced on stage alongsidethe iPhone 4s? It was an incredible moment that impressed not only the audience but alsotech critics like Walt Mossberg who called it a standout feature of the 4s.
But Sirididn’t evolve as quickly as most expected and now the same people who were praisingSiri back in 2011 are now asking why Siri seems so dumb! What went wrong with Siri andhow did it fall so far behind its competition? Well the answer can be found in examiningthe path Siri has been on since its development back in 2005.
You may not have known this, but Siri wasn’tmade by Apple.
It was built by the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center and they madeit available as an app on the iOS app store in 2010.
The signature voice for Siri wasprovided by voice actress Susan Bennett, and there were also British and Australian voicesavailable for Siri provided by Jon Briggs and Karen Jacobson.
After the Siri app had been live for two months,Apple acquired the company and integrated the voice assistant into the iPhone 4s.
Applethen removed the Siri app and limited the feature to the 4s even though the app hadsupported the iPhone 4.
It was clear Apple used Siri as the new shiny feature to enticecustomers to upgrade their devices, but we know the feature could’ve been made availablefor at least the iPhone 4 since Troughton-Smith, working with an anonymous partner, managedto hack Siri and enabled it to run on the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch.
Apple later includedSiri on the iPod Touch and iPad in 2012, the Apple TV in 2015, and the Mac in 2016.
Other tech companies jumped into the AI marketwith more than half a dozen Siri-like services launched in 2012 alone.
Samsung debuted S-Voice,a voice-controlled assistant.
Nuance, a provider of speech recognition software, released a“Siri for apps” called Nina.
Startups Evi and Maluuba each released virtual assistantapps.
IBM began working on adapting Watson into a turbo-charged Siri that could helpphysicians, farmers, Wall Street traders and students.
And Google followed Siri with itsown conversational assistant, Google Now.
The early versions of these voice assistantsoften performed worse than Siri and this positioned Apple as a leader in the industry.
But thischanged.
And it was because of a difficult decision Apple made that no other companyembraced.
Apple decided that they would not collect data on the inquiries users made withSiri.
They kept as much data on the local device as possible, and if inquiries neededto be sent to the cloud, Apple stripped the request of any reference to the User ID andassigned it a random request ID.
It was then encrypted and sent up to the cloud for morevoice recognition to identify the words, and for natural language processing to understandthe meaning and serve an appropriate response.
This is the same process Siri uses today andit’s a major reason why Apple lost its dominance in the AI market.
Apple’s competitors likelike Google and Facebook became more creative and aggressive about leveraging user dataand cloud computing to make their assistants more and more helpful.
This came with thebenefit of a smarter voice assistant, but turned their customers into products whoseinformation would be sold to the highest bidder.
After all, they’re advertising companieswhich means monetizing user data is their primary source of revenue.
Apple, on the otherhand, enjoys earning about 75% of their revenue from hardware and is in a much better positionto pass up the opportunity to monetize their users data.
But the way these tech companies were handlinguser data wasn’t fully understood until recently with the Cambridge Analytica incident,so from the users point of view, Siri’s progress appeared to be pretty stagnant comparedto Google Now, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana.
This contributed to an opinion inthe tech community that Apple was losing its ability to innovate.
Even the Wall StreetJournal wrote, “Apple is playing catch-up in a product category it invented, increasingworries about whether the technology giant has lost some of its innovation edge.”
Withthis mounting pressure from customers, journalists, and competitors, Apple could have easily cavedand began mining user data like every other company.
But they held strong to their beliefthat customer data should remain private.
But this position didn’t stop Apple frommaking improvements to Siri.
A year after its introduction, iOS 6 brought several newfeatures.
It could understand and answer sports related questions.
You could simply speakto Siri and get game schedules, scores, player info and team records.
Siri supported baseball,basketball, football, soccer and hockey including a number of sports leagues.
This is also whenSiri’s AI engine became really good at understanding comparison inquiries like “who’staller LeBron or Kobe,” and respond with the right answer.
Along with sports, Siri also gained the abilityto understand movie related questions.
By tapping into Rotten Tomatoes’ database,Siri could now display movie reviews and ratings.
She could also supply movie listings basedon location or showtime.
Requesting information about a particularmovie also became possible.
Movie information was presented in a neat card that aggregatedall relevant information, and organized them into a compact view.
It included awards,cast members, ratings and trailers.
You could even ask Siri to play a trailer, which launchedin the movie player.
It also gained a number of new restaurantspecific features.
You could find restaurants based on cuisine, price, location and ratings.
Integration with Yelp and Open Table were also added, so you could see reviews, ratings,and photos of restaurants within Siri, and if you liked a place you could tell Siri totake you in to the OpenTable app to make a reservation.
It was integrated with Facebook and Twitterso you could use Siri to quickly post a status update.
And the ability to open apps withSiri was also included. A year later, iOS 7 introduced even more changesto Siri.
The most noticeable improvement was the user interface.
It took over the entirescreen rather than sliding up from the bottom and occupying only a portion of the display.
“What can I help you with?” appeared when Siri was activated, and a new waveform ranalong the bottom to give users a visual cue when Siri was listening.
Another major change was Apple’s decisionto ditch Google in favor of Bing for web searches.
But you could still access Google with Siriby saying “search google” before an inquiry. A common problem for Siri at the time wasit’s struggle with requests for trivial information, an area where its competitionbegan to excel.
Apple tried to remedy this by integrating Wikipedia with Siri, but itwas a clumsy solution since it only worked with general inquiries and the user had tosearch for information themselves on the Wikipedia page instead of Siri providing a specificanswer.
iOS 7 also gave Siri the ability to adjustcertain system settings like airplane mode, bluetooth, screen brightness, and do not disturbmode.
Apple also introduced a new male voice for Siri and made the female voice more clearand natural.
iOS 8 introduced the popular “hey siri”voice command so you could summon Siri handsfree.
It was also integrated with Shazam so youcould identify a song without opening the app by asking Siri, “what’s this song.”
Another interesting capability was purchasing iTunes content with Siri.
In iOS 9 contextual awareness was the biggestupdated made.
If you asked Siri to remind you to do something while looking at a messageyou’ve received, Siri would understand what you meant and add the event.
Siri also becamemore aware of location, so a very specific reminder like "Call mom when I get in thecar" was possible.
Siri’s smarts was brought to the search window with Siri Suggestionswhich included a list of people you speak with often, apps you might want to use dependingon the time of day, nearby venues like restaurants and gas stations, and relevant news.
Thissection was also contextually aware and offered different content based on the time of day.
With the announcement of iOS 10 in 2016, Appleopened up third-party developer access to Siri through a dedicated API that restrictedusage of Siri to engaging with third-party messaging apps, payment apps, ride-sharingapps, and Internet calling apps.
In iOS 11 Apple gave Siri improved male andfemale voices that were designed to more closely mimic natural human speech.
Apple said Siri'snew voice options were powered by deep learning for better pronunciation and a more expressivevoice.
It also got a new user interface and could translate phrases from English to Chinese,French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with more languages to come.
Siri also began usingon-device learning to understand more about your preferences and interests to better anticipatewhat you might want next.
And it would sync that information across all your Apple devicesso the Siri experience was the same regardless of what product you were using.
Despite these consistent updates Siri hasreceived over the years, it’s still lagging behind the competition today and has lotsof room for improvement.
Norman Winarsky, one of the creators of Siri,recently spoke about its current state, how far the
personal assistant has come, and howmuch different it is now than what he originally envisioned.
According to Winarsky, Siri wasoriginally meant to be a virtual travel and entertainment concierge.
The idea was if you needed something donerelated to these areas, Siri would take care of it for you.
So if you showed up at theairport and your flight was delayed, then Siri would automatically work on finding youa different flight.
And if that didn’t work, Siri would find you a nearby hotel room totry and accommodate your needs: Winarsky said, “were you to arrive at anairport to discover a cancelled flight, for example, Siri would already be searching foran alternate route home by the time you pulled your phone from your pocket—and if nonewas available, would have a hotel room ready to book.
It would have a smaller remit, butit would learn it flawlessly, and then gradually extend to related areas.
Apple launched Sirias an assistant that can help you in all areas of your life, a bigger challenge that willinevitably take longer to perfect.”
Today, Siri is something that goes beyondtravel and entertainment, and it’s easy to say that the development process that Winarskyhad originally envisioned (to make Siri work perfectly in a couple of areas first, andthen expand from there) is not something Apple is really following.
Siri tries to do a lotof things, some of those things it can do well enough, and others not so much.
Winarskysays that Apple’s efforts are exceptionally hard as the company has to deal with a lotof customers out in the real world, but adds that Apple may be working for a “level ofperfection they can’t get”.
But I should mention that based on its latesttests, Siri was capable of recognizing 95% of a users speech, putting it on par withAmazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana.
issues arise when considering how Siri responds toour inquiries.
Sometimes it doesn’t give us quite the information we were asking for,and this is the area where Siri’s shortcomings are revealed.
Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Vice President ofiPod, iPhone and iOS Product Marketing said “From the beginning, Apple wanted Siri tobe a get-stuff-done machine.
It drives me crazy that people compare virtual assistantsby asking trivia questions, which always makes Siri look bad.
We didn’t engineer this thingto be Trivial Pursuit!” So, not like Trivial Pursuit, and more likea digital personal assistant meant to help users get something done.
Which, all thingsconsidered, Siri does accomplish fairly reliably.
So how often do you use Siri? Some friendsof mine never use it while others push its capabilities to the limit.
I typically onlyuse Siri for making calls, sending quick texts, and setting timers.
Let me know how Siri hasbeen working for you and if you enjoyed the video, don’t forget to leave a like.
Thanksfor watching, and I’ll see you next time.
Remember Siri being introduced on stage alongsidethe iPhone 4s? It was an incredible moment that impressed not only the audience but alsotech critics like Walt Mossberg who called it a standout feature of the 4s.
But Sirididn’t evolve as quickly as most expected and now the same people who were praisingSiri back in 2011 are now asking why Siri seems so dumb! What went wrong with Siri andhow did it fall so far behind its competition? Well the answer can be found in examiningthe path Siri has been on since its development back in 2005.
You may not have known this, but Siri wasn’tmade by Apple.
It was built by the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center and they madeit available as an app on the iOS app store in 2010.
The signature voice for Siri wasprovided by voice actress Susan Bennett, and there were also British and Australian voicesavailable for Siri provided by Jon Briggs and Karen Jacobson.
After the Siri app had been live for two months,Apple acquired the company and integrated the voice assistant into the iPhone 4s.
Applethen removed the Siri app and limited the feature to the 4s even though the app hadsupported the iPhone 4.
It was clear Apple used Siri as the new shiny feature to enticecustomers to upgrade their devices, but we know the feature could’ve been made availablefor at least the iPhone 4 since Troughton-Smith, working with an anonymous partner, managedto hack Siri and enabled it to run on the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch.
Apple later includedSiri on the iPod Touch and iPad in 2012, the Apple TV in 2015, and the Mac in 2016.
Other tech companies jumped into the AI marketwith more than half a dozen Siri-like services launched in 2012 alone.
Samsung debuted S-Voice,a voice-controlled assistant.
Nuance, a provider of speech recognition software, released a“Siri for apps” called Nina.
Startups Evi and Maluuba each released virtual assistantapps.
IBM began working on adapting Watson into a turbo-charged Siri that could helpphysicians, farmers, Wall Street traders and students.
And Google followed Siri with itsown conversational assistant, Google Now.
The early versions of these voice assistantsoften performed worse than Siri and this positioned Apple as a leader in the industry.
But thischanged.
And it was because of a difficult decision Apple made that no other companyembraced.
Apple decided that they would not collect data on the inquiries users made withSiri.
They kept as much data on the local device as possible, and if inquiries neededto be sent to the cloud, Apple stripped the request of any reference to the User ID andassigned it a random request ID.
It was then encrypted and sent up to the cloud for morevoice recognition to identify the words, and for natural language processing to understandthe meaning and serve an appropriate response.
This is the same process Siri uses today andit’s a major reason why Apple lost its dominance in the AI market.
Apple’s competitors likelike Google and Facebook became more creative and aggressive about leveraging user dataand cloud computing to make their assistants more and more helpful.
This came with thebenefit of a smarter voice assistant, but turned their customers into products whoseinformation would be sold to the highest bidder.
After all, they’re advertising companieswhich means monetizing user data is their primary source of revenue.
Apple, on the otherhand, enjoys earning about 75% of their revenue from hardware and is in a much better positionto pass up the opportunity to monetize their users data.
But the way these tech companies were handlinguser data wasn’t fully understood until recently with the Cambridge Analytica incident,so from the users point of view, Siri’s progress appeared to be pretty stagnant comparedto Google Now, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana.
This contributed to an opinion inthe tech community that Apple was losing its ability to innovate.
Even the Wall StreetJournal wrote, “Apple is playing catch-up in a product category it invented, increasingworries about whether the technology giant has lost some of its innovation edge.”
Withthis mounting pressure from customers, journalists, and competitors, Apple could have easily cavedand began mining user data like every other company.
But they held strong to their beliefthat customer data should remain private.
But this position didn’t stop Apple frommaking improvements to Siri.
A year after its introduction, iOS 6 brought several newfeatures.
It could understand and answer sports related questions.
You could simply speakto Siri and get game schedules, scores, player info and team records.
Siri supported baseball,basketball, football, soccer and hockey including a number of sports leagues.
This is also whenSiri’s AI engine became really good at understanding comparison inquiries like “who’staller LeBron or Kobe,” and respond with the right answer.
Along with sports, Siri also gained the abilityto understand movie related questions.
By tapping into Rotten Tomatoes’ database,Siri could now display movie reviews and ratings.
She could also supply movie listings basedon location or showtime.
Requesting information about a particularmovie also became possible.
Movie information was presented in a neat card that aggregatedall relevant information, and organized them into a compact view.
It included awards,cast members, ratings and trailers.
You could even ask Siri to play a trailer, which launchedin the movie player.
It also gained a number of new restaurantspecific features.
You could find restaurants based on cuisine, price, location and ratings.
Integration with Yelp and Open Table were also added, so you could see reviews, ratings,and photos of restaurants within Siri, and if you liked a place you could tell Siri totake you in to the OpenTable app to make a reservation.
It was integrated with Facebook and Twitterso you could use Siri to quickly post a status update.
And the ability to open apps withSiri was also included. A year later, iOS 7 introduced even more changesto Siri.
The most noticeable improvement was the user interface.
It took over the entirescreen rather than sliding up from the bottom and occupying only a portion of the display.
“What can I help you with?” appeared when Siri was activated, and a new waveform ranalong the bottom to give users a visual cue when Siri was listening.
Another major change was Apple’s decisionto ditch Google in favor of Bing for web searches.
But you could still access Google with Siriby saying “search google” before an inquiry. A common problem for Siri at the time wasit’s struggle with requests for trivial information, an area where its competitionbegan to excel.
Apple tried to remedy this by integrating Wikipedia with Siri, but itwas a clumsy solution since it only worked with general inquiries and the user had tosearch for information themselves on the Wikipedia page instead of Siri providing a specificanswer.
iOS 7 also gave Siri the ability to adjustcertain system settings like airplane mode, bluetooth, screen brightness, and do not disturbmode.
Apple also introduced a new male voice for Siri and made the female voice more clearand natural.
iOS 8 introduced the popular “hey siri”voice command so you could summon Siri handsfree.
It was also integrated with Shazam so youcould identify a song without opening the app by asking Siri, “what’s this song.”
Another interesting capability was purchasing iTunes content with Siri.
In iOS 9 contextual awareness was the biggestupdated made.
If you asked Siri to remind you to do something while looking at a messageyou’ve received, Siri would understand what you meant and add the event.
Siri also becamemore aware of location, so a very specific reminder like "Call mom when I get in thecar" was possible.
Siri’s smarts was brought to the search window with Siri Suggestionswhich included a list of people you speak with often, apps you might want to use dependingon the time of day, nearby venues like restaurants and gas stations, and relevant news.
Thissection was also contextually aware and offered different content based on the time of day.
With the announcement of iOS 10 in 2016, Appleopened up third-party developer access to Siri through a dedicated API that restrictedusage of Siri to engaging with third-party messaging apps, payment apps, ride-sharingapps, and Internet calling apps.
In iOS 11 Apple gave Siri improved male andfemale voices that were designed to more closely mimic natural human speech.
Apple said Siri'snew voice options were powered by deep learning for better pronunciation and a more expressivevoice.
It also got a new user interface and could translate phrases from English to Chinese,French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with more languages to come.
Siri also began usingon-device learning to understand more about your preferences and interests to better anticipatewhat you might want next.
And it would sync that information across all your Apple devicesso the Siri experience was the same regardless of what product you were using.
Despite these consistent updates Siri hasreceived over the years, it’s still lagging behind the competition today and has lotsof room for improvement.
Norman Winarsky, one of the creators of Siri,recently spoke about its current state, how far the
personal assistant has come, and howmuch different it is now than what he originally envisioned.
According to Winarsky, Siri wasoriginally meant to be a virtual travel and entertainment concierge.
The idea was if you needed something donerelated to these areas, Siri would take care of it for you.
So if you showed up at theairport and your flight was delayed, then Siri would automatically work on finding youa different flight.
And if that didn’t work, Siri would find you a nearby hotel room totry and accommodate your needs: Winarsky said, “were you to arrive at anairport to discover a cancelled flight, for example, Siri would already be searching foran alternate route home by the time you pulled your phone from your pocket—and if nonewas available, would have a hotel room ready to book.
It would have a smaller remit, butit would learn it flawlessly, and then gradually extend to related areas.
Apple launched Sirias an assistant that can help you in all areas of your life, a bigger challenge that willinevitably take longer to perfect.”
Today, Siri is something that goes beyondtravel and entertainment, and it’s easy to say that the development process that Winarskyhad originally envisioned (to make Siri work perfectly in a couple of areas first, andthen expand from there) is not something Apple is really following.
Siri tries to do a lotof things, some of those things it can do well enough, and others not so much.
Winarskysays that Apple’s efforts are exceptionally hard as the company has to deal with a lotof customers out in the real world, but adds that Apple may be working for a “level ofperfection they can’t get”.
But I should mention that based on its latesttests, Siri was capable of recognizing 95% of a users speech, putting it on par withAmazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana.
issues arise when considering how Siri responds toour inquiries.
Sometimes it doesn’t give us quite the information we were asking for,and this is the area where Siri’s shortcomings are revealed.
Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Vice President ofiPod, iPhone and iOS Product Marketing said “From the beginning, Apple wanted Siri tobe a get-stuff-done machine.
It drives me crazy that people compare virtual assistantsby asking trivia questions, which always makes Siri look bad.
We didn’t engineer this thingto be Trivial Pursuit!” So, not like Trivial Pursuit, and more likea digital personal assistant meant to help users get something done.
Which, all thingsconsidered, Siri does accomplish fairly reliably.
So how often do you use Siri? Some friendsof mine never use it while others push its capabilities to the limit.
I typically onlyuse Siri for making calls, sending quick texts, and setting timers.
Let me know how Siri hasbeen working for you and if you enjoyed the video, don’t forget to leave a like.
Thanksfor watching, and I’ll see you next time.
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