Was a bit disappointed in this. She needs more interaction with 3rd party apps and better ability to pull stuff of the web.
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Siri can't "Check the score of the Ravens' game."
- Thread starter joshuarobi
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It will come. It's not like Apple was burning up phone lines telling companies about this prior to launch and setting up partnerships. Everyone will want their results being displayed to tens of million of iOS 5 users. It's still beta, give it time.
The only 3rd party source of information currently built into Siri is Yelp, Wolfram-Alpha and Google. Hopefully more will come with time. Here's hoping it can become more tightly integrated with Google so it can deliver the "intuitive" results of Google (i.e. http://www.google.com/search?q=flight+status+of+aa+293).
i'm also disappointed to hear that Siri can't answer that ... not only should siri be able to answer that, but if you say "what's the score to the ballgame?" it should know what city you're in and tell you the score(s) for any professional sports teams from that city who played/are playing that day. Seems obvious and straightforward. Hopefully this is just a limit of the "beta" siri.
It is. There's no ESPN/SI integration. The only third party sources it can check right now are Google, Yelp, and Wolfram Alpha.
Well that is part of the cool thing with a lot of what Siri does being on the server side. I would assume Apple will be keeping track of what people ask and then build additional functions to meet the need. No need for a iOS upgrade, just build the new functionality into the server farm!
Yeah, all the reviewers drooling over it in their reviews of the iPhone 4S equals beta....
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)
Try setting a 2 PM reminder for a doctor's appointment at 4 PM; it cannot be done. I may be violating the intent of Reminders, but still, no matter how you word it, Siri cannot parse a time into the subject of a reminder.
Also, it seems, Siri is not capable of amending a misinterpretation of your wording in Reminders. For example, "Siri, change 'file clean' to 'file claim'", or "change 'clean' to 'claim.'" Siri CAN amend calendar entries, whether by title or time (a great thing!), but cannot amend reminders.
It IS nice that I was able to dictate this post for the most part, and add punctuation afterward!
Try setting a 2 PM reminder for a doctor's appointment at 4 PM; it cannot be done. I may be violating the intent of Reminders, but still, no matter how you word it, Siri cannot parse a time into the subject of a reminder.
Also, it seems, Siri is not capable of amending a misinterpretation of your wording in Reminders. For example, "Siri, change 'file clean' to 'file claim'", or "change 'clean' to 'claim.'" Siri CAN amend calendar entries, whether by title or time (a great thing!), but cannot amend reminders.
It IS nice that I was able to dictate this post for the most part, and add punctuation afterward!
I have many years of experience in the area of speech recognition technology and I suspect the issue is one of vocabulary and training for their grammar engine. Specifically, modern speech recognition is based on statistical modeling ... from the acoustic models (matches the audio waveforms) to the language grammars (If I say president barack _______ what is the probability that "obama" is the next word.) It is entirely possible that the "ravens" and "steelers" are not well represented in the grammar. Of course, it could also be the back end is not integrated with a source for fetching football scores or the back end does not have the concept that "ravens" could be a football team and not a flock of birds or that "steelers" are not people who "steal" stuff.
Speech recognition technology has come a long way since I started working on telephony based information retrieval back in the early 90's. Be happy with what it does do well. It's not the HAL of 2001 A Space Odyssey, but it could turn out to be a really useful tool for input to your iPhone. Since this is a back-end supported system, they are probably monitoring the ways that people are trying to use the system and will add/modify the statistical aspects as needed to improve the success rate. One of the big lessons learned over my years is that some of what people say is seasonal ... like "what day of the week does Christmas fall on" is more likely to be spoken between September and December than in February. Likewise, asking about NFL football scores is likely to occur only during football season. If Siri/Nuance collected samples during other times, they might have missed some of the vocabulary and spoken request structure. Obviously, one can also "tweak" the statistical probabilities based on seasonal likelihoods. (Hum ... I wonder if someone patented that one?)
Siri is almost a good enough reason for me to upgrade from a 4 to a 4S, but I am still on the fence.
Speech recognition technology has come a long way since I started working on telephony based information retrieval back in the early 90's. Be happy with what it does do well. It's not the HAL of 2001 A Space Odyssey, but it could turn out to be a really useful tool for input to your iPhone. Since this is a back-end supported system, they are probably monitoring the ways that people are trying to use the system and will add/modify the statistical aspects as needed to improve the success rate. One of the big lessons learned over my years is that some of what people say is seasonal ... like "what day of the week does Christmas fall on" is more likely to be spoken between September and December than in February. Likewise, asking about NFL football scores is likely to occur only during football season. If Siri/Nuance collected samples during other times, they might have missed some of the vocabulary and spoken request structure. Obviously, one can also "tweak" the statistical probabilities based on seasonal likelihoods. (Hum ... I wonder if someone patented that one?)
Siri is almost a good enough reason for me to upgrade from a 4 to a 4S, but I am still on the fence.
Indeed, that it is the big payoff. I'll take others' word for it that Siri, if not revolutionary, is at least quite a bit better than any other mass marketed "intelligent assistant". If Apple can aggressively leverage the usage data of the tens of millions who will be using it, then the improved result may be truly spectacular.
I actually googled that to make sure it wasnt a great sports app I was missing out on
Honestly though, I have yet to find a properly good sports news app.
