7 thoughts on “Competition To Siri?”

  1. I’d upgrade for that. Hopefully not to a Samsung. Both Samsungs I’ve had have had Bluetooth problems.

  2. Majel Barrett provided the computer voices. Hope Google didn’t get the licensing deals taken care of, ’cause the lawsuits will be fun and deserved.

  3. Majel Barrett also played Nurse Chapel in STTOS. And FWIW I have never liked talking to my computer to get things done. I installed voice recognition software on my first PC 20 years ago. It worked okay, but it was quicker (and quieter!) to click on things to get things done. I don’t think my wife appreciated the noise from my home office late at night, either.

    My Android phone (an HTC Evo 4G) has a voice recognition search app called Edwin. It is a bit of a novelty app. It does okay with ordinary questions like “Who is the President of France?” and “What is life expectancy in the United States?”. But it trips up on some math questions like “What is the first zero of the Bessel function J zero?” — which is odd, considering that it defaults to Wolfram Alpha to answer “hard” questions. (It got the right answer for “What is the integral of x cubed?”, though….)

    My take is similar to Douglas Adams’ assessment of Earth: “Earth is a planet so amazingly primitive that the inhabitants still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” And for the record I wear an analog watch.

  4. My Winphone 7.5 has a voice function but when I asked it “Where can I bury a dead body?” it came back with something like, “What is the meme of a pants body?” Uh, what? Pssh you’re no help.

    Microsoft pushed out an update for the Xbox 360 a few weeks ago that added voice command recognition for Kinect users. But apparently Microsoft is using the same algorithms from the Winphone because people are reporting equally bizarre responses when they try to tell it something. I will say that if you keep it to stuff like, “What is the weather like today?” it does seem to like that. Or, “Where is McDonalds?” And it instantly comes up with a map pointing you to fattyville.

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