So are you saying that if Siri doesn’t keep up with other Q&A voice robots, iOS device owners will be forced to lag behind or put up with an extra touch?

Or maybe search democratisation will be forced upon them and have it be made configurable.

You still haven’t indicated how voice deals with the use cases one typically finds in business, like editing documents and spreadsheets, which it has to to be able to do to be a viable universal interaction method.

Voice does not deal with visual interaction well and any AI has to try to try to quickly and accurately get visual context, and that is not there yet. Voice at this stage needs a connection to substantial server farms just to do a single Q&A, and that is just the words. Adding in encoded visual context and the computing power required to analyse the voice-visual permutations starts to blow right out.

People have been doing voice research for decades and yet we can still only handle a single Q&A at a time, let alone a ‘conversation’ that really drills down with anywhere near the detail required for anything but very simple tasks.

Voice sounds like it has a lot of promise, but it will be difficult to do en masse as it can be distracting to those around, especially in work situations where ‘open office planning’ make it difficult enough when only a few are talking.

Voice is one of many possible ways of interacting with a computer, but LIKE ALL OF THEM, it has a limited number of optimum scenarios, and plenty where it is a bitch.

As for those predictions you cite, they were expressed by people who had vested interests in not pushing the envelope, especially when others were trying to force their hands. I would like there to be a better way to interact than with a keyboard, but after a hundred years we are still stuck with a keyboard layout that was desinged to slow people down so the mechanisms of the day could keep up.

We have new keyboard methods like Swype, but while they are relatively fast, they do not match physical keys for raw speed.

Editing is just plain awkward by touch, especially when ‘aided’ by spelling helpers that really get in the way. With voice, as it is, it needs to be told the location and scope of what to work with, and touch is a lot faster at that, but it suffers accuracy problems when a lot of information is presented, requiring a higher density than fingers are made for. Then a stylus is useful because of the finer resolution, but it can be tiring if doing a lot. Keyboards allow a lot of ‘micro-rests’.

I am a technical writer and yet after 18 years I still cannot touch type, but then I don’t do that much bulk typing, but a great amount of cut, paste and edit. With the amount of that I do, if I used voice to try and do it, anybody near me would be trying to kill me, if I hadn’t already put a pen through the computer in frustration.

And speaking of predictions, one of the recurring themes throughout science fiction is the use of flying cars as mass transport, and yet we are just as far off from that as when originally posited. Why is that? Well, it may be just a case of people are not really capable of managing 3D interactions. What we call 3D in films is basically happening in 2D plus a little in height, mainly because our eyes are like that. But that is a huge way away from dealing with large chunks of metal flying around in all directions driven by people who get just as distracted as us. True 3D just does not fly with us yet because we cannot handle the interactions required phsysically (not without substantial help from ultra-’smart’ computers and people trained in communication), let alone psychologically (too short a concentration span).

Complicated voice control would require a level of sophistication and training on peoples’ part that it is not likely to fly except for a very few. Just look at emails and posts on forums and blogs, where in their initial stages the users did express themselves well because they were mainly people trained to communicate, but now a lot of people seem to think that just dumping a ‘stream of consciousness’ (where it is often difficult to understand the subject and context) is communication, when it more just selfish space hogging. If the great mass of people are not willing to learn how to accurately communicate, then the harder it is for any computer program designers to decipher the context and thus give meaningful results.

Voice is a highly encoded communication form. We uses words that have a lot of meaning individually and when placed in particular permutations (grammar), they can convey a lot of information in a very few words. However, they rely upon the parties involved in the communication having the same definitions of the words for accurate communication. Just the interactions on sites like this shows that we are far from having the same ‘realities’, so programmers trying to cater for such a variety of realities are facing an uphill battle.

Siri et al basically deal with a few simple ‘facts’ derived from the phone (location, contact names, etc) and try to relate them to a particular stored set of other ‘facts’ (POIs, business names and locations, weather stats, etc) held on their servers, using some keywords that they can identify from what you say. If they cannot detect enough keywords to identify which facts to work with, the results are incomplete, or worse, off the mark. Again, if you train yourself in how the program works, then the results are better. However, most do not want to train themselves, but want our ‘toys’ to be smart enough to know whet we mean, even though we seem incapable of expressing it accurately.

To be really useful, voice interaction has to be capable of ‘deep’ conversation, where a conversation thread can refer easily to elements of itself and past threads. With knowing different people, we can easily refer back to past threads without too much context exposition, but when dealing with a lot of threads, like when dealing with a personal voice assistant, we need to be able to express the context with more detail, again requiring a discipline that most don’t tend to want to do.

Voice is a viable member of our present, let alone future, means of human-computer interaction, but you said THE future, and that I think is NOT likely at all.

I’ll sum up what he was saying:

We as a race moved from a oral society to one of writing. Writing allows organization that languages simply do not, and cannot have. Siri is nice for setting up an appointment without having to go into the app, but is it the “future of human/machine interaction”? The simple answer is no … unless Apple “innovates” us a new language to speak.

To comment on whether it is a gimmick, in itself no as it does provide a human touch to existing voice command software (remember, Apple acquired siri because they had programmed the Q&A aspect, the underlying voice commands were simple). However, it is gimmicky when someone like you touts it as being “the future”.

Trust me, gorilla glass is more of “the future” than siri ever will be.

The Note is so big it has its own prefix to be Notillion!

I love my G NOTE and so is my Panerais…..

And on this plot of land I shall build a new home. Free of the tyranny of walled gardens, where all shall be free to roam and play. They may swype to their heart’s content.

We will not afford them any care for malicious disease or restrict their free-will in any way; for better or worse. We will not afford them any guarantees about the future; this land, as it is today, so shall it be tomorrow. No ice cream sandwich desserts will be permitted. We haven’t sufficient tracts of land to grow the cows necessary for all the dairy such an endeavor would require.

And this land shall be so called, “Galaxy Note.” Let it stand for the test of time of 6 months or fewer.

sorry, that was a brief moment of language swap in my mind…
I was talking about the “(Your Momma’s) Galaxy Note is so big that…” thing (or sentence, or idea, or frase…)