Great piece in Forbes about the Apple-Samsung ruling: Why the Apple vs. Samsung Verdict is a Big Mistake.
My favorite line in the piece:
People copy you, defects and all. Apple’s inability to deal with that should get us asking questions about its liberal arts credentials.
Very proud to announce the launch of Lexee, a new product within the Angel.com ecosystem of products and solutions that will enable businesses and entrepreneurs to easily build and maintain their very own Multi-Modal Voice Assistant. The vision: painlessly build your very own specialized Siri.
Here is a piece from Gigaom on the launch announcement.
We are targeting the GA release of Lexee in the fall. For more, go to: http://www.lexee.com
Good piece comparing Siri and S-Voice:
The most obvious difference between the two is actual recognition. Siri seems to interpret and understand queries correctly more often than S Voice, which forces you to repeat commands a number of times in some cases. For example, S Voice couldn’t open Google Play for some strange reason, even after repeated attempts. Siri can’t open apps under its current iteration, including Apple’s native ones, but it was better at understanding song titles, artist names and albums, whereas S Voice struggled and consistently asked to clarify the command.
Quoting the article:
Looks like Apple might be loosening its grip even more on voice recognition apps? Or, it simply just feels that the competition is not as good as its own native Siri. We’ve just gotten word from Netherlands-based developer Sparkling Apps that its voice-response app, Voice Answer — rejected by Apple for nearly three months — has been approved by Apple and is now live in the App Store, and usable on any iPhone, iPod or iPad running iOS 4.2 or later.
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After more than a year of a two-way litigation saga between Nuance and vLingo, vLingo has apparently fully bowed to Nuance’s relentless quest to buy it. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The announcement was a complete shock to most observers of the industry. Not only was the clash between the two companies bitter and at time venomous, but one would not have expected vLingo to fold so soon after its court victory last August over bullying Nuance.
But upon reflection, the move is completely a rational one for both entities in light of Siri, and lately of Google’s Majel (although I am sure the negotiations were started long before rumors over Google’s Voice Assistant project started circulating in earnest earlier last week).
For vLingo, the move is nothing short of a pure self-preservation play. Remember that vLingo had to make its $9.99 offering on the Android market free soon after the launch by Google of Voice Actions last summer. Then it had to do the same thing again — making its offering free — immediately after the arrival of the iPhone 4S and Siri in October. Then a month later — no longer waiting for any more shoes to drop — vLingo made its offering on the Blackberry free as well. That is, vLingo was a technology company with a compelling offering, but no business model. Worse, the emergence of general Voice Assistants that were tightly integrated with their native OS represented a serious erosive threat that was bound to shrink their user base to the empty set: why would anyone use vLingo when they can use Voice Actions or Siri?
For Nuance, the acquisition of vLingo will enable it to have a play in the Voice Assistant play. Whether that is a wise thing to do at this point remains to be seen. To be sure, the move will trigger movement from Apple to seek an alternative Speech Engine rather than rely on what is now a vendor-competitor — a position that Nuance seems to feel is a perfectly proper way to do business in the IVR world. This is a company that makes a good chunk of its money selling ports to Voice Solution providers and at the same time merrily goes ahead and actually bids on RFP Solution projects AGAINST their very clients, whose bread and butter is building, deploying and hosting such solution. How tacky,Paul Ricci, how tacky!
Either that or the vLingo acquisition was triggered by movement from Apple to shed off Nuance, triggering Nuance to move away from the ASR commodity model (at least within the mobile voice sector) and towards the Assistant App model. I for one would cheer mightily if and when Siri sheds Nuance off.
In any case, as we move forward in this Brave New era of the Voice Assistant wars, let’s pause to remember the immortal apt words of Dave Grannan, CEO of Vlingo, who said back in May, 2011
Competing with Nuance is like having a venereal disease that’s in remission. We crush them whenever we go head-to-head with them. But just when you’re thinking life is great—boom, there’s a sore on your lip.
No word yet on whether Mr. Grannan will stay with Nuance or move on to better things.
Rumor is rampant that Google is feverishly working on releasing its answer to Siri in the next couple of months — if not indeed in the next couple of weeks! The project, if not the product itself, is called Majel (as in Mabel), named after Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the name of the actress behind the voice of the Federation Computer from Star Trek.
This is exciting news, especially for a voice assistant enthusiast like myself. Indeed, having several assistants (let’s not forget Microsoft) get into a Rockem-Sockem kind of a match will only strengthen everyone involved, and can only spell good news for the user base. But a few remarks are in order.
First, let’s all pause to remember — before it is erased from our collective memory — that Google’s Andy Rubin, the man in charge of Android’s development, famously said that smartphones should not be perceived as assistants, but rather simply as tools for communicating with OTHER PEOPLE (my loud caps):
Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.
Clearly, the man was totally clueless and didn’t know what he was talking about, and Siri completely blindsided him and Google. And now, he and Google are eating their words and feverishly working on developing nothing less than an assistant that will help Android users to talk to their phones!
However, according Matias Duarte, Senior Director, Android User Experience at Google, Google is pursuing a different tack from Apple:
Out approach is different. The metaphor I like to take is – if it’s Star Wars, you have these robot personalities like C-3PO who runs around and he tries to do stuff for you, messes up and makes jokes, he’s kind of a comic relief guy. Our approach is more like Star Trek, right, starship Enterprise; every piece of computing surface, everything is voice-aware. It’s not that there’s a personality, it doesn’t have a name, it’s just “Computer.” And you can talk to it and you can touch it, you can interact with it at the same time as you talk with it. It’s just another way to interface with the computer.
Interesting, but probably telling in how Google, even as it dashes to give birth to Siri’s rival, still doesn’t fully get it: You cannot take the human out of human language. People cannot speak to a machine and listen to a machine without injecting into the interaction all of the rules of conversation that they have learned — because the only context within which they have learned those rules is the context of talking to another human being. Apple’s breakthrough move was to give Siri a voice, so that you can hold a conversation with your assistant. Google still thinks that it’s about the discrete actions and tellingly, thinks that voice interaction “is just another way to interface with the computer.” It really is not. It’s a special interaction because it borrows a medium that is at the core of what makes us human. All this time, with typing, and clicking, and swiping, and tapping, we have been using a language that we had to learn from scratch and that was dictated to us by the machine and the people who built those machines. In the case of human, natural language, it is radically the other way around: the computer is learning our language and how we use that language, and will have to adapt to it or fail.
Two interesting things to watch for as Majel emerges are: (1) What type of Natural Language will Majel use? and (2) What types of API enhancements will they provide to the developer base? On the first, the recent purchase by Google of Clever Sense, the company behind Alfred, a personalized restaurant and bars recommendations app, is a strong indication that Google is retracing Apple’s exact steps, except two years later. The engine behind Alfred will probably be broadened to provide assistance on several fronts, just as Siri’s was broadened to handle Calendar, SMS, etc. On the second — the APIs — I expect that Google will have a leg up over Apple, since Google already has published hooks to the Speech engine and the Text to Speech, and will only have to figure out how to expose its Natural Language processing to empower developers. If it does, it would be Apple’s turn to play catch up….
Last thing — the obvious: this is not the first time that Google will be playing catch up. It played catch up by releasing its Android phone a couple years after Apple released the iPhone; it is trying to play catch up to Facebook with its Google+ initiative; and now it is playing catch up with Majel. Indeed, one could say that Google is now the new Microsoft: a company so blinded by its business model that it can’t see beyond the next step, and so devoid of the capacity to generate its own strategic thinking that its “strategy” is now reduced to sitting back and letting the innovators innovate and then, thanks to the deep pockets, step in and start building stuff. Which, let us all note, is something that Microsoft has gotten real good at doing very smoothly and without a hint of embarrassment. Just watch how Microsoft will soon come out and reveal the name of its assistant, and not feel one bit sheepish about doing so.
I spoke yesterday for about 30 minutes on the phone with Alan Swann from CBR, and here is the resulting article. Enjoy!
Siri Notes 