Does anyone remember the stupid Office paperclip assistant? And how successful that was?
Yosemite Siri? Apple might plonk chatty assistant on your desktop - report
A newly granted patent has revealed Apple's plans to free its mobile assistant Siri from the iPhone and unleash it upon desktops. In a lengthy patent entitled "Intelligent digital assistant in a desktop environment", the fruity firm outlined its plans to get fanbois talking to their computers. To activate the desktop Siri, …
COMMENTS
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Monday 11th August 2014 13:32 GMT Anonymous Cowherder
It doesn't like my northern English
I have siri on an iPad which I occasionally use in the kitchen to display recipes and play music whilst cooking. I have tried to use siri here as I can press the home button with a knuckle whilst I have all manner of chicken innards or other kitchen things on my hands and ask it to set timers or reminders with varying degrees of success.
If I try to use it for anything more complex it really struggles with my Mancunian accent which gets very frustrating and ends up with my just insulting siri, repeatedly.
Google now on the other hand is more than able to cope and understands me most if not all of the time. I'd much rather have a desktop google now (I'm a neckbeard so the latest google updates don't really work on my linux desktops.) than a desktop siri on my machines.
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Monday 11th August 2014 13:38 GMT Dan Paul
Or like original Star Trek?
Just curious but don't the various scenes in the original version of Star Trek of people speaking to the computer(s) and food processing machines constitutes prior art? Especially on desktop computers? Not to mention the earlier comments on Dragon Naturally Speaking and others.
Does the Roddenberry Foundation care to comment? http://roddenberryfoundation.org/
Seems to be in their mission statement to foster technology that would aid the disabled. I would think they have the most rights here as their conceptions predate all of the current technologies.
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Monday 11th August 2014 13:58 GMT 142
Re: Or like original Star Trek?
The patent's not for using speech recognition to give the computer orders, etc.
It's specifically for invoking it with a gestures:
The claim is that it's "A method for invoking a digital assistant service, comprising: at a user device comprising one or more processors and memory: detecting an input gesture from a user according to a predetermined motion pattern on a touch-sensitive surface of the user device; and in response to detecting the input gesture, activating a digital assistant on the user device. "
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Tuesday 12th August 2014 02:49 GMT Fluffy Bunny
Re: Or like original Star Trek?
But windows gestures are a decade old. Touch sensitive regions nearly as old (trackpads on laptops that autoscroll the current document). You can't say, "just like everybody else does, but works with my special...."
There needs to be some sort of intellectual value in a patent and this doesn't seem to have any.
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Tuesday 12th August 2014 09:23 GMT Tim Bates
Re: Or like original Star Trek?
"But windows gestures are a decade old."
But none of them invoked a digital assistant. There was a gesture usually given during the closing of the Office Assistant, but that's as close as it's been in the Windows world.
Although I do wonder if double clicking on the system tray icon for something like Virtuagirl would count as prior art... That's a gesture. And it technically is an assistant... A single purpose assistant, but the patent didn't mention how many purposes it needed.
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Monday 11th August 2014 14:19 GMT Identity
Some years ago...
Apple had a speech command system (which remains today as the Speech preference pane), which put up an avatar that would execute certain canned commands when addressed by name. They based their avatar on TV personality Connie Chung and called her Connie. You'd have to say something like, "Connie, open Word."
When they were initially trialling it at the Boston Apple Center, it didn't quite work. One tester could not get a response and asked an Applenaut, "Is Connie turned on?"
To which, that worthy replied, "That's an awfully personal question!"
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Monday 11th August 2014 15:09 GMT Sarev
Presumably processed in the cloud...
I'm guessing the Siri function would be passing your audio (or some representation thereof) to the cloud in order to calculate what you've actually said, giving the potential for Apple to be tracking what you're asking Siri to do. I imagine that's just another seam of personal data to be mined.
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Monday 11th August 2014 19:48 GMT Michael Thibault
Re: This sounds so wrong...
Considerate of you to think of Siri's emotional well-being, but it's much too early for that. Eventually, though, you'll have to preface every command/request/activation with a "Siri, may I touch you?" or a "Siri, do you mind if I put my finger(s) right here?".
I expect that voice control is inevitable, and it will improve iteratively, eventually evolving into a portable personal AI-like assistant you can invoke from any computing device (bearing the relevant logo, anyway). The one thing I'd like to see guaranteed--in the near-term at the very least--is that that Siri, or its descendant agent, neither tolerate, nor resort to, uptalking.
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Tuesday 12th August 2014 04:02 GMT jimbo60
Claim 1. A method for invoking a digital assistant service, comprising: at a user device comprising one or more processors and memory: detecting an input gesture from a user according to a predetermined motion pattern on a touch-sensitive surface of the user device; and in response to detecting the input gesture, activating a digital assistant on the user device.
Sure sounds like clippy to me, except for the part about a touch-sensitive surface. Unless a mouse counts as touch-sensitive. Let the lawyers have fun with that.
Or, more recently, the Kindle Fire Mayday assistant (a real human!)
Sorry Apple, 15 years too late...
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Tuesday 12th August 2014 15:58 GMT thesykes
Claim 1. A method for invoking a digital assistant service, comprising: at a user device comprising one or more processors and memory: detecting an input gesture from a user according to a predetermined motion pattern on a touch-sensitive surface of the user device; and in response to detecting the input gesture, activating a digital assistant on the user device.
Boiled down to... making a computer program react to user input.
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Tuesday 12th August 2014 16:57 GMT JLV
instead of working on the patent, how about working on the hottie avatar bit?
Apple is really lagging behind on the 'hottie' bit of Siri.
Check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/12/cortana_in_windows_threshold/
Cortana is... fetching all right. Whether or not I would want to have a chatty assistant is uncertain, but at least she doesn't look like a paperclip. In fact, the Cortana avatar is one bit of synergy MS can show between its XBox division and the rest*. Lots of $ later, but hey.
So, Mr. Cook, where's Siri's avatar at?
How about striking a deal with Dan Simmons and using the persona from Remembering Siri in the Hyperion books? She's a surfer girl on a planet called Maui Covenant who becomes their PM by the end, so no scatter brain. Plus, surfer girl has a lot of avatar sexiness potential, methink**. And Simmons can use the cash, having been on a downtear in his more recent books.
* on the flip side, Halo I, which I loathed as a game, came from Bungie, which once upon a time, had really nifty games like Myth. A great loss for gaming, Bungie => MS.
** Let's not focus on the PM bit of her career, she's aged considerably by relativistic time debt by that point - methinks a Lady Thatcher hottie avatar calls for mind bleach.