Posts in Linked

Siri and the Suspension of Disbelief→

Julian Lepinski has a thoughtful response to last week’s story by Walt Mossberg on Siri’s failures and inconsistencies. In particular, about the way Siri handles failed queries:

Apple’s high-level goal here should be to include responses that increase your faith in Siri’s ability to parse and respond to your question, even when that isn’t immediately possible. Google Search accomplishes this by explaining what they’re showing you, and asking you questions like “_Did you mean ‘when is the debate’?_” when they think you’ve made an error. Beyond increasing your trust in Siri, including questions like this in the responses would also generate a torrent of incredible data to help Apple tune the responses that Siri gives.

Apple has a bias towards failing silently when errors occur, which can be effective when the error rate is low. With Siri, however, this error rate is still quite high and the approach is far less appropriate. When Siri fails, there’s no path to success short of restarting and trying again (the brute force approach).

The comparison between conversational assistants and iOS’ original user interface feels particularly apt. It’d be helpful to know what else to try when Siri doesn’t understand a question.

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Remaster, Episode 20: The PlayStation VR Review→

The PlayStation VR is finally out. Federico, Myke, and Shahid share their views on the hardware, the experience, and the launch lineup.

Sony’s PlayStation VR platform launched earlier this week, and we’ve been playing with several launch titles for the past few days. On the latest Remaster, we discuss our impressions of the hardware, the gaming experience, and its future potential. You can listen here.

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Google Photos Adds Four New Features→

Google Photos has introduced four new features:

  • Google Photos uses faces in your most recent photos to suggest older photos with with the same person in them;
  • If you take a lot of photos of the same subject, like a child, Google Photos will create a card of the best ones from the past month;
  • Animations, which Google Photos already creates using photos, are also generated from videos now; and
  • If Google Photos detects that there are sideways photos in your collection, it will present a card with the photos that it thinks should be rotated.

This is what Google Photos does best. It finds connections and photos that would be like searching for a needle in a haystack if you did it manually with a big photo library.

Each of the new features are available on iOS, Android, and the web.

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Todoist Launches Native Amazon Echo Integration→

Since moving back to Todoist, I’ve been looking for a way to easily add tasks using the Amazon Echo, which has become a staple in our household for a variety of voice commands. Today, the Todoist team has rolled out a native Amazon Echo integration that lets you create tasks and manage your todo list just by talking to Alexa.

Nathan Ingraham, writing for Engadget:

It works much like you’d expect: you can ask Alexa to add items to the various lists that you have in your Todoist account, and you can also ask it to tell you everything that’s on your to-do list for that day. And Alexa works with Todoist’s natural language processing, so you can ask it to add things to your list “tomorrow” or “next Wednesday” and it’ll know just what you’re asking it for. It’s not clear if you’ll be able to tell Alexa to add items to specific projects or to-do lists in your account – they probably get added to whatever your default list is for you to sort out on your phone or computer.

The Todoist blog has more details on how the integration works:

Over the past months, we’ve worked closely with Amazon as part of a limited participation beta of their Alexa integration platform, and we’re thrilled to be able to share the results with you today.

And:

When dictating a task, Todoist’s smart date recognition will automatically recognize and add any due date you say. For example, saying, “Alexa, add pay the rent every first of the month to my to-do list,” will automatically add a recurring task to “Pay the rent” to your Todoist, due on the first day of every month. The task will disappear from your Alexa To-do list until the day your task is due.

Essentially, Todoist can now sync its Inbox list with the Echo’s own todo list; the Echo’s built-in shopping list also gets recreated inside Todoist as an ‘Alexa Shopping List’ project. This allows you to say “add task to my todo list” instead of using a specific Todoist terminology. There are some caveats (you can’t specify Todoist projects, for instance), but this looks like a solid first step.

I configured Todoist with my Amazon Echo earlier today, and everything was up and running in less than two minutes. The Amazon Echo’s excellent voice recognition helps Todoist understand natural language queries for due dates, and I’ve been positively impressed with the speed and consistency so far. I think I’m going to be using this very often.

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Lessons Learned from the Demise of the Next Keyboard→

The Next Keyboard by Tiny Hearts made a big splash when it launched. Funded by a successful $65,000 Kickstarter campaign, it grabbed a lot of press, including from mainstream news outlets like CNBC. At it’s peak, the Next Keyboard made almost $20,000 in a single day, but like most apps, it rode a steep slope down after the initial spike.

Tiny Hearts recently announced that it is discontinuing work on the Next Keyboard and pulling it from the App Store at the end of next week. Robleh Jama, the founder of Tiny Hearts, explores what went wrong:

When we built Next Keyboard, we were amongst the first to experiment with Apple’s custom keyboard functionality. Unfortunately all third-party iOS keyboards — including Next Keyboard — were never truly stable because of Apple’s API. There’s a surprisingly poor user experience around using third-party keyboards (such as setting up a new keyboard). Even Google’s Keyboard, Gboard, has issues today, a full two years after third-party keyboards were announced.

It’s hard to turn any app into a sustainable business, but the Next Keyboard faced greater challenges than most. Third-party keyboards are hard to build, limitations in the Apple APIs mean they cannot match the system keyboard feature-for-feature, and big companies like Google and Microsoft entered the market shortly after the Next Keyboard was launched.

The experience was a costly and disappointing one for Tiny Hearts, but not without value. As Jama explains:

Even though it was an expensive lesson, things worked out. There are things we wished would’ve turned out differently. We let our users down, and we don’t feel good about that. But we came out stronger and smarter for it, we’ve learned an unbelievable amount, and we will still bet on iOS, messaging and conversational interfaces. If you don’t play, you’ll never win. It’s been tough for us to swallow, but we paid for one of the most important lessons: making money with an app is risky.

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Walt Mossberg on Siri’s Failures and Inconsistencies→

Walt Mossberg, writing for The Verge, shares some frustrations with using Siri across multiple Apple devices:

In recent weeks, on multiple Apple devices, Siri has been unable to tell me the names of the major party candidates for president and vice president of the United States. Or when they were debating. Or when the Emmy awards show was due to be on. Or the date of the World Series. When I asked it “What is the weather on Crete?” it gave me the weather for Crete, Illinois, a small village which — while I’m sure it’s great — isn’t what most people mean when they ask for the weather _on _Crete, the famous Greek island.

Google Now, on the same Apple devices, using the same voice input, answered every one of these questions clearly and correctly. And that isn’t even Google’s latest digital helper, the new Google Assistant.

It’s a little odd that Mossberg didn’t mention Siri’s new third-party abilities at all, but it’s hard to disagree with the overall assessment.

Like Mossberg, I think Siri has gotten pretty good at transcribing my commands (despite my accent) but it still fails often when it comes to doing stuff with transcribed text. Every example mentioned by Mossberg sounds more of less familiar to me (including the egregious presidential debate one).

Five years on, Siri in iOS 10 is much better than its first version, but it still has to improve in key areas such as consistency of results, timeliness of web-based queries (e.g. Grammys, presidential debates, news stories, etc.), and inferred queries (case in point). Despite the improvements and launch of a developer platform, these aspects are so fundamental to a virtual assistant, even the occasional stumble makes Siri, as Mossberg writes, seem dumb.

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Amazon Music Unlimited Launches in the US→

Amazon announced its long-anticipated streaming music service, called Amazon Music Unlimited, with a focus on Echo integration and pricing. According to Dan Seifert of The Verge:

…while Spotify relies on its intelligent music recommendation and discovery as a draw and Apple pushes people towards its service with major album exclusives, Amazon is touting Music Unlimited’s tight integration with its Echo devices and Alexa voice assistant as the real differentiator here. Not only do Echo owners have access to a discounted version of the service (though it’s only available on one Echo device at a time), they can request songs from Music Unlimited in a variety of ways just using their voices.

The service also differentiates itself from Spotify, Apple Music, and others with a feature called Side-by-Side that adds artist commentary to certain albums.

For now, Amazon Music Unlimited is available only in the US, but it is scheduled to be released in the UK and Germany later this year according to 9to5Mac. After a 30-day free trial, Amazon Prime members can subscribe to Music Unlimited for $7.99 per month. Non-Prime customers pay $9.99 per month (the same as an individual Apple Music subscription), unless they have an Amazon Echo, in which case the service costs just $3.99 per month. Amazon plans to offer a family plan that can be used by up to six family members for $14.99 per month, the same as Apple Music’s family plan, but it’s not yet available.

Music Unlimited looks like a great deal for Echo owners, but apart from the cost advantage and Echo integration, it remains to be seen how the service’s music selection, playlists, and other core features stack up against competing services.

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