You know, I honestly don't know why people are saying that they're disappointed. For me, this is the first iPhone since the original that gave me a real 'Wow, the future has just arrived' moment. For the original phone it was the Minority Report UI. This time around it's the Star Trek computer that talks to you. When Apple start running TV ads showing off Siri, the average consumer is going to love it.
How many people ever tried using the Voice Control in the iPhone 4? Siri is one of those features (awesome technological achievement notwithstanding) that's great to demo but largely irrelevant (or even unknown) to most users. It's this generation's Carousel view.
How many people have tried using Siri? Until it's actually in our hands and put to the test in real world situations, it's hard for anyone to make any claims about how well it works.
It could be reliable, useful and effective; it could be sometimes useful given the right environments and inputs; it could be a complete flop. No one outside of Apple knows right now.
This is different though. Plenty of people have used Siri. The new version adds a few Apple app based intents, but we have been able to use what was essentially a beta of Siri for years. And the parent comment is right. In its current state, this is Facetime 2. Good demo, fun to play with, but ultimately inconsequential for the majority of people.
But when Siri was in app form, much (perhaps most) of the benefit that it has now wasn't possible.
Not only could app-Siri not do some of the things that people will most often do with iOS-Siri ("wake me up at 7 o'clock", "remind me to call my girlfriend when I get home", "note that I need to buy lettuce"), but you had to unlock your phone and navigate to the app icon before you could even do those things that you could do with it. If you're already using a touch/visual interface to do things, it's cognitively easier to just stick with touches to finish the job. If the interface is entirely spoken/audible, there are a whole other set of things that start to make sense to use voice for.
- Voice Over often just outright failed. The accuracy for speech interpretation was good, but not great.
- The tasks that it could actually do were simplistic (pause! play! call Bob! next track!) and often it was more work to turn on Voice Over and talk, and easier to just touch the device and be done with it.
- Voice Over had a very limited verb database that you had to learn. It wasn't so much natural language recognition as simply using voice to input a (very) limited set of commands.
Siri is (ostensibly) not subject to any of the above limitations, so if it works as advertised it really will be completely different from Voice Over.
My point wasn't that Siri wasn't any good (or even that Voice Control was bad — it worked when I needed it) but that users neither know not care about it. In fact, the only users who knew about it probably discovered it accidentally by holding the home button down!
As you say, time will tell whether it's a hit. I'm betting not.
I use voice control on my iPod touch when I'm driving with it hooked up to my stereo. That's the killer use case for voice control as far as I'm concerned.
It works about half the time.
"Play Machine Gun Fellatio"
*"BING! Playing songs by Marvin Gaye"
"ehhh, good enough"
It works slightly better if I put on a fake American accent.
Not that I necessarily agree, but I think his point is that they have overlapping use cases and that people aren't avoiding Voice Control because it sucks, they're not using it because they don't have a huge need to.
I missed that possibility, thanks for alerting me to it.
I still think that it's too early to dismiss it because of what we've seen with Voice Control, but I agree that there's definitely the possibility that the idea won't catch on. I suppose everything depends on the implementation and whether it can be made seamless enough and useful enough that ordinary people use it.
Thank you! I'm glad someone understood the point I was making.
For all the majority of iPhone 4 users know, Siri could have been in their device all along the they either didn't know or didn't care.
Let's think this through. The use cases for Siri are when a) you can't use the keyboard and b) it a situation where you can talk freely. It sounds awesome for when you're driving. Or if you have a disability. Or... No, I think I'm out of potentially useful situations. And to be honest, Voice Control worked pretty well for me on the one occasion I needed it.
