Nuance Launches Nina

Quoting article:

Nuance, the company that powers a large number of tools that use voice recognition (including Apple’s Siri) launched its own Siri-like voice-powered “virtual assistant” today that developers can add to their mobile apps. The Nuance Interactive Natural Assistant (Nina) uses the company’s speech recognition technologies and combines them with voice biometrics and an understanding of natural language and the user’s intent to “deliver an interactive user experience that not only understands what is said, but also can identify who is saying it.” At its core, Nina is something akin to a “Siri for apps” and iPhone and Android developers can now start integrating it into their own apps.

Virtual Bank Teller Lola Launched…..

SRI has partnered with BBVA to launch a conversational assistant named Lola (after a real human agent apparently) specialized in helping clients with banking chores, from simple ones such as providing a customer’s available balance, to complex ones such as making a monthly mortgage payment.  However, it looks like the application is web based and is not available (yet) on mobile devices.

On the Comically Absurd Lawsuit Against Apple….

Great piece by Joe Wilcox on the senseless lawsuit against Apple for “deceptive advertising”.  Just like Mr. Wilcox, when I learned about the lawsuit, I was confused.  As Wilcox put it:

Why didn’t Fazio return the phone? The lawsuit reads: “Promptly after the purchase of his iPhone 4S, Plaintiff realized that Siri was not performing as advertised?” Eh, what does, Bud? Stores have return policies for a reason. Did he not keep the receipt? He hasn’t heard of eBay? Where iPhone 4S commanded top dollar last November. If Fazio knew “promptly”, why didn’t he get a refund promptly?

Yes indeedy!  The only way I can explain the motivation behind the filing is to suggest that Mr. Fazio had a genius  idea on how to self-promote.  And it is indeed genius: his name is going to be famous.  Let’s see if the judge receiving this will throw the case away or whether he will be tempted to jump on the quest for his or her 15-minute-of-fame bandwagon.

Smart Sometimes, Dumb Other times

In my previous post, I noted how Siri seems to be informed by the interactional context to resolve the meaning of an imperfect Automated Speech Recognition output: the ASR returned “David Bully” instead of “David Bowie,” but the post-processing was smart enough to correctly guess my intent by noting that “David Bully” was “close” to “David Bowie” (not sure if the distance calculated is the phonetic distance, or simply character distance, etc.)

Which I thought was pretty impressive and a step in the right direction compared to what I had observed last month in a video, where it was not able to guess that the mis-recognition “Walk” should be mapped to “Work,” given that the other option was “Home.”  I confirmed the behavior independently after watching the video.

Yesterday I tried the experiment again, and to my disappointment, it still behaves the same:

So, it doesn’t seem that Siri’s context leveraging is  across domains.  In the case of Music, it seems to have the smarts.  In the case of Voice Dialing, it doesn’t — which is strange, given that Voice Dialing the problem seems to be easier….

What is interesting is that I tried very hard several times to say “Walk” when I was prompted to select between “Work” and “Home,” and the closest rendering Siri gave me was “Walck” (see above).  But when I am off context — i.e., I just bring Siri up — and say “Walk,” the ASR gets it perfectly every time.

So, the ASR is definitely taking context, but it’s puzzling why context is not constraining it in the right way (privilege the offered options).

More Downplaying of Siri: Microsoft and Google

Two new quotes, one from Microsoft and one from Google, to illustrate the degree to which some people are in denial about how much of quantum leap Siri has been.  The first one is from Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft.  Speaking with Forbes’ Eric Savitz last week at the Techonomy conference in Tucscon, Mundie shrugged off the advent of Siri as nothing more than a “Marketing” coup by Apple.  According to Mundie:

You could argue that Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced.

Was there something for Microsoft to learn from the Siri phenomenon?  Another shrug from Mundie: “We can learn something on the Marketing side”:

Many people were disappointed with the newest phone because it wasn’t a completely new thing,  so the only thing they really had to hammer on was that feature.

And there you have it: a revolution reduced to a “feature”.   Not the very first time that Microsoft completely misses the bigger picture.  Let’s not forget that Microsoft did not grasp how monumental of a revolution the Internet (no less) was.  Pick up the first edition of Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead and you can read this:

today’s Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway

But immediately after the book was written, Gates realized that the Internet was a far bigger phenomenon than he had recognized and immediately started working on a revision of the book to give the Internet a central road in his story about the road ahead.  So much for being a visionary.

As for Google, here is what its Vice President of Mobile, Andy Rubin, had to say:

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.

This is coming from a company that has invested quite a bit in both speech recognition (the Android has had API hooks to speech recognition since 2009, something that Apple has yet to have) and natural language processing.  That and the basic fact that people don’t consider their mobile devices phones any more, but personal — very personal — assistants.  Astonishing!  I wonder if they will maintain this line about the phone being only for people talking to people when they come out with their clone of Siri — coming to an Android near you very shortly, I am sure.