It's not "just" playing catch up. It's partly playing catchup, and partly expanding on it. And to be fair, the credit should go to the Siri team more so than to Apple as a whole. They innovated and Apple bought them and added polish.
So why are some Android users less than impressed at the gushing over Siri? Because we've been able to do many of the things you see in the video demonstrations for a long time now. Some examples:
"Navigate to <local restaurant name>"
"Text <person> <some message>"
"What is the weather in New York?"
"What is the time in Paris?"
Siri integrates more features in a polished way and also adds context to the queries. By context, I mean that the interpretation of the next request can depend on the previous requests.
While little has been released on the actual technical constructs of these systems, I would imagine that they work somewhat similar to this:
1 Translate voice to list of text interpretations.
2 Guess an intent based on each text interpretation, combining the translation and interpretation score. Pick the action of highest score.
The intents need to be hand coded. Siri likely modifies the second step by allowing intent inference to be based on the last command or couple of commands in addition to the current request. That is the innovation, and I use the word innovation lightly as I'm sure the idea has been thought of in academic circles.
A lot of people seem to think "you can throw anything at it" and I seriously doubt that is true. The library of intents might be large enough to fool some people, though. It isn't revolutionary, it's a well executed incremental improvement on what we already have. It's worth mentioning that there are also other applications such as Vlingo that try to expand the capabilities already present on current day systems.
None-the-less, Apple's excellent marketing team seems to have convinced people that this is revolutionary and that Apple should be credited with yet another huge world changing innovation. The media needs it's heros and there can't be heros unless the valuable contributions of the many people whose work led to this point are forgotten, marginalized, or simply reattributed.
That is the innovation, and I use the word innovation lightly as I'm sure the idea has been thought of in academic circles.
Just a quibble. Innovation is, according to the dictionary, the "introduction of new things or methods". This is quite different from invention, which is "an act or instance of creating or producing by exercise of the imagination, especially in art, music, etc".
Invention can be done in academic circles, but innovation needs someone to actually roll up their sleeves and introduce the damn thing - in this occurrence, introduce it to the vast, chaotic, challenging consumer electronics market.
Apple certainly takes no credit for inventing voice recognition, or any of the concepts used in Siri - in fact, Apple invents very little. However, they should get full credit on the innovation side. As an easy example, tablets were invented for decades before the iPad, but they were not effectively introduced to the consumer market until the iPad. That's innovation - turning ideas into realities - as opposed to invention - coming up with new ideas. Both are essential.
I would not consider this a "catch up", no one knows who develop this tech first. Google probably heard about Apple's plan and is able to bake it into Android first. Look at Google TV. Google get it into the market first, but it was a half cooked product.
So why are some Android users less than impressed at the gushing over Siri? Because we've been able to do many of the things you see in the video demonstrations for a long time now. Some examples:
"Navigate to <local restaurant name>"
"Text <person> <some message>"
"What is the weather in New York?"
"What is the time in Paris?"
Siri integrates more features in a polished way and also adds context to the queries. By context, I mean that the interpretation of the next request can depend on the previous requests.
While little has been released on the actual technical constructs of these systems, I would imagine that they work somewhat similar to this:
1 Translate voice to list of text interpretations. 2 Guess an intent based on each text interpretation, combining the translation and interpretation score. Pick the action of highest score.
The intents need to be hand coded. Siri likely modifies the second step by allowing intent inference to be based on the last command or couple of commands in addition to the current request. That is the innovation, and I use the word innovation lightly as I'm sure the idea has been thought of in academic circles.
A lot of people seem to think "you can throw anything at it" and I seriously doubt that is true. The library of intents might be large enough to fool some people, though. It isn't revolutionary, it's a well executed incremental improvement on what we already have. It's worth mentioning that there are also other applications such as Vlingo that try to expand the capabilities already present on current day systems.
None-the-less, Apple's excellent marketing team seems to have convinced people that this is revolutionary and that Apple should be credited with yet another huge world changing innovation. The media needs it's heros and there can't be heros unless the valuable contributions of the many people whose work led to this point are forgotten, marginalized, or simply reattributed.