SIRI and iCloud: Beta or Alpha?

SIRI

If all you compare SIRI to is the previous iteration of voice control on the iPhone it is leaps and bounds more useful in its overall capability. And yet fails epically if you have a weak or non-existed web connection. The casual english phrasing does seem to be a step out beyond the competition but once you get down to basic word recognition it seems to be on par with the likes of Google Voice or Vlingo. As a result, all that advanced context deciphering is useless if it is determined from the wrong set of words.

Negatives:

• Requiring a net connection for even basic capabilities the iPhone already possessed offline seems a needless reduction. Granted its not like the old off line assistant was in wide usage. However this to me is the best evidence that SIRI is almost entirely cloud based. If it was doing any kind of end to end interpretation of voice commands locally you logically would have included prior capability.
• Word recognition is improved but still ultimately hit or miss… and on the second tries I now I feel like I am the idiot who thinks talking louder and slower will translate english into another language. Real english phonetic overlaps definitely cause SIRI problems Purana:Pirahna/ G’s :Cheese are a couple of examples I found
• To helpful: there needs to be a basic override phrase or action that always stops SIRI cold. As is SIRI attempts to interpret and if it thinks it figured something out and it can do it then it acts. I had LOTS of attempted misdials when doing non-phone stuff because tying a contact to communication seems to be the lowest common denominator. Word of warning.. if you hit a point where SIRI is showing you a list of possible contacts that you didn’t want just say cancel instead of trying to repeat your previous command. At that point whatever else you say will get produce a ‘strongest match’ to the listed contacts.
• Not helpful enough: I sort of understand not being able to create new reminder lists, contacts etc… The ‘to helpful’ problem could be disastrous if SIRI had create/delete power. However I am struggling to understand why SIRI is not even allowed to launch various applications or at least the basic Apple provided applications.
• Basic word capture is still not ready. Its better that is for sure. But this is what everything else turns on. Kudos to the SIRI developers to get far enough along to try and do more advanced interpretation of language. If you are not sure what I am talking about go open up a note or pages document or something with the ability to take diction and actually try to dictate more than a short basic sentence. There is no automatic punctuation. Word accuracy seems to drop dramatically as longer phrases/passages are attempted. Doing each sentence individually is perhaps a solution but still awkward. Catch 22 because if SIRI can’t automatically determine sentence structure that means you still require some kind of voice prompt language to tell it… and the process of telling the machine to punctuate as you pontificate is the classic problem people have with voice recognition being ‘un-natural’.

Positives:

• Context interpretation is good. SIRI follows natural language progression of dropping proper nouns pretty well. This was and is a major sticking point on most voice interaction systems that had no capacity for following a conversational thread. It is often what made it seems so ‘stilted’. This is still fundamentally hampered by problematic basic word capture.
• Music control is impressive. Starting playlists, genres, artists etc… all seem to work pretty good so long as the words are correctly interpreted which was most of the time I played around with this particular capability
• Wolfram Alpha searches are impressive.
• The Alarm/Timer interface is genius. This may very well be the feature that keeps me coming back to SIRI while they are honing the other areas.
• Text/E-mail interface is the holy grail I think… but its in view, not accomplished. Had LOTS of problems doing this, and ended up random dialing of contacts a lot. May be more useful on the receiving end than the sending beyond basic stuff. In the positive section because once you understand its limitations it works well. Most of my problems came from screwing around with it.
• Meeting setups are similar to e-mail/txting. Fabulous when it works…. again, WHEN it works.
• Reminder list works well within its limitations… but lacking when it comes to such things as making a new list or trying to add things to a list with a name that is a bit overloaded. I tried I don’t know about many iterations of trying to add things to a grocery list and ended up with a list of nearby grocery stores far more often than I did with items in the list.

Final verdict : Solid Beta. I think Apple made a good call in pushing this out to 4s owners only. Early adopters are generally far more forgiving of new feature warts than the general masses. SIRI definitely has warts. Knowing that Apple tends to pride itself on shipping complete features I surmise that the key factor in improving SIRI at this point is crunching through massive amounts of data only possible with a large varied real world audience. The next couple of generations of this technology could cross a tipping point and finally make voice a solid form of interface instead of a flaky side show. It will be interesting to see if Apple gets there first as this could easily be the next tipping point in device preference.

iCloud:

I shied away from any specific review of iCloud in my 4s take because unlike SIRI it is iOS 5 dependent rather than 4s dependent. Apple fumbled its last major cloud initiative (mobile me) and it marks one of the few black eyes Apple took under Jobs second tenure. What made it even more remarkable is that it is a black eye Apple never really healed. They tried a couple of major revisions and never really got it even to ‘good enough’ state. iCloud is ultimately a clean slate re-build.

Negatives:

• PhotoStream has some major flaws. Flaw number one is that it is either on or off. That is either ANY picture you take is flying around to all your devices or NONE of them are. Removing photos is also an all or nothing process and is one that must be done on each device. Translation… have one photo up there you don’t want you have to reset photo stream on iCloud.com and then reset the photo stream on all devices. How they shipped with this basic problem for something as potentially embarrassing as photographs is beyond me. Serious miss. Also not sure why you can’t access the photos from the iCloud website as that would seem to be one of the most useful capabilities. I could keep going… how about being able to share to others photo streams? (parents taking pictures of their kids with separate iTunes accounts for example) Or allowing others access. Granted not having these capabilities is what lets apple get away with horrendous ‘undo’ control of what gets into the photo stream. But it is those types of uses that will make it most use full in the long run.
• iWork on the Mac has been left out in the cold which seems to be a fundamental flaw. You have to upload/download from the site only for these applications and there is no update to bake the ability in. Of course this is fueling even more speculation that iWork is finally about to get updated to a new version.
• E-mail sync is for apple mail only. Thats great if you use it but most don’t want to shift e-mail addresses just for this feature. My problem with this is that note syncing is tied to e-mail. Notes should be free players able to cross device sync on their own like reminders.
• No general file sync option. Having a folder on your mac that is synced with the cloud ala Dropbox with some granular control on the website for external access would have been killer. Many have been saying that Apple should buy Dropbox. Here is another vote. Either buy them and integrate into iCloud or sherlock the idea and implemented on your own but DO IT. If iWork were the basic means of office document work then this would be less of an issue. But Office still rules and you need this kind of capability to sync Office documents or any other kind of non-mac but highly common/standard file type (pdf, txt, rtf, csv) etc…

Positives:

• iCloud sync breaking the cable (or new wireless) tie with a desktop running iTunes is long over due and other than initial growing pains of MASSIVE traffic looks to be the major bright point of this new service.
• iWork on the mobile side seems to be well implemented. Just seems to be half a solution without the desktop version along for the ride.
• Cross device app synching is nice… but I am already seeing a problem where I want more granular control than sync all of them or none of them. Example… games going to my personal and work phones that are both tied to my personal iTunes account. Sure, I could create an iTunes account for the work phone but then I would have to pay for lots of productivity apps twice that my company does not provide.

Final Verdict : Alpha and Beta. App sync, mobile iWork etc… seem polished and only troubled by massive initial traffic encountered with the roll out of iOS 5, they represent the beta quality points. Lack of granular control of distribution to multiple devices may seem to be an ‘ease of use’ decision but I think Apples refusal to address the intermixed nature of device use is what keeps hosing them on the cloud. Simple things like shared libraries between spouses are a long known issue. Also on the horizon are new issues like work/personal phones or even individual dual purpose phone use. These are the areas Apple is going to have to get better at. Competitors are finally starting to figure out the whole integrated hardware/software angle and they are looking to leapfrog on these particular issues. Final nail in the coffin is no basic file directory content syncing with the cloud. Apple may want to push everyone into a world where we no longer root around in the file system… but it just isn’t going to happen. At least not any time soon.

iCloud and SIRI type technologies are the next generation of uberness for folks in the business of selling computers and mobile devices. It is one of the final links in integration of computers into our lives. To go beyond these two capabilities will require physical interfaces (i.e. brain/nerves to computer). These could easily lead the next 20-30 years of computer advancement. An always on/connected/interconnected frame work tied to natural language interaction is conceptually huge and while nothing new… the possibility that the technology is finally available to make it a reality is exciting.

iPhone 4s: Apples 5th iteration of the phone

**Just FYI, I have not been hands on with a 4s yet. I normally wait before posting my thoughts on a phone/gadget but feel relatively comfortable posting this now due to the iterative nature of the release. Will revisit this as needed once I have used it for a while (10/12/2011)** ***moved SIRI to its own article that also includes thoughts on iCloud***

Following the Oct 4th announcement by Apple of the details of its new iPhone 4s all critics seemed to predict nothing but doom and gloom.

- No Steve Jobs at the keynote, we find out just a couple of days later it is because he was literally on his death bed, but no matter the reason it is a cause for panic. Apple is no more. Even before Jobs was officially no more. Sheesh. Talk about vultures. Though can’t say I blame them. Apple is no longer the plucky quirky underdog so its no longer cool or unexpected to pick them to succeed. Nope the pendulum has officially swung and now the journalistic preference seems to be predicting the giants fall. Thats what happens when your market value is second to one and causes shifts in the weighting of an entire stock exchange due to its unbalanced level of impact when your stocks values jump around a bit.

- They didn’t call it the iPhone 5. It is not perpetually powered by ambient light, able to double as a 4 inch chefs knife and serve as an eco friendly alternative transport method that will free us from foreign oil. Its just a much improved iPhone 4…. the horror! This is more of the same looking for something to tear down Apple with. If Apple had called this an iPhone 5 they would have derided them for the lack of external design change etc… All in all its just a name. This phone brought some serious updates to the table. Single Core to Dual core chip with a serious graphics capability update. In fact this is essentially the brains of an iPad 2 stuffed in the frame of an iPhone 4 and yet with all the increase in computing/graphic power it still cranks out significantly better battery life that its predecessor and is pushing into iPad territory on some fronts. Pretty frickin impressive stuff. 1080p video, 720p wireless mirroring, 8Mp camera that starts up and shoots faster than some dedicated point and shoot cameras. It hits the ground running with the newest iteration of iOS which brings a completely wireless existence. No more tethering with iTunes required. How long have the critics been screaming for that? And yet they seem to simply complain it hasn’t come sooner.

After all the doom and gloom Apple promptly sold over a million phones in less than 24 hours. For the conspiracy nuts that always seem to claim around now that Apple deliberately shorts their supplies for launch take a second and realize that having more than a million units available for the pre-order launch represented an almost 100% increase in launch stocks over the last release which sold out on day one with ~ 600k units. Nobody else hits these kinds of numbers for product launches. NOBODY. If the off contract cost of the hardware is ~800 bucks then over 1 million sold is approaching 1 billion in sales in 24 hours. This just doesn’t happen.

The bottom line here is this. For the past 5 years Apple has clearly put in place the most consistent performing line of smartphones available which have been tied to the wildly successful App store for the past 4 years. Android handsets from various sources can and probably will catch up on both fronts. But due to the proliferation of devices it is simply going to take time for it to consolidate its commodity position in the market. But that day is not now. Apple continues to take the best of available technology and weave it together in the best overall package. Nothing about this iPhone or any that proceeded it was revolutionary in and of itself. The odd thing about the iPhone wasn’t the presence of the device. It was the fact Apple was making it and that they managed to buck the common wisdom of the time for how to sell phones. What was revolutionary is that Apple figured out how to make such a device appeal to the common user instead of just the geeks. It is what they continue to do better than anyone. Which is another reason why so many of the tech elite are turning on it in my opinion. They keep waiting for the unicorn moment from Apple and instead keep getting better and better mousetraps that appeal to more and more people.

Case in point, there is one feature that even the most cold hearted, blood thirsty, want to see the giant tumble for all the stories they can tell about its fall journalists are all seeming to agree might be a game changer. The integrated SIRI voice controlled assistant. Voice control isn’t new. Its been around since a computer could crunch the signal from a microphone. Its been on cell phones in some various guise or other for almost a decade if not more at this point. Its been on PC’s, Macs and of course everyone hated enemy the automated voice control answer service systems. As such the last thing SIRI could be considered is revolutionary. It simply looks to be the first such system that works easily enough that it will be more than a useless ‘feature bullet’. The revolution is not the technology. Its the fact it works. If Apple keeps building better and better mouse traps they are going to dominate this market for a LONG time.

I tend to wait and post my reviews after I get hands on. But as I mentioned before this phone is in well documented territory. I have an iPhone 4 thanks to work so the Retina Display is nothing new for me. Extra snappiness is extra snappiness. Video reviews I have seen show this phone to be visibly quicker than its predecessor. Still… I will revisit the following bullets if needed once I have a few weeks of hands on time and see what needs changing.

The Good:

• Sharp Retina Screen still impresses even if its not the largest screen available.
• Poo the identical form factor all you want but sometimes if it ain’t broke it don’t need fixin. Exactly how much smaller do you want your phone to get? Besides this means there is already a HUGE amount of ready to go accessories with no wait for nice cases etc… Defiantly a mark in the + column despite the mobile phone fashionistas insisting anything new must look different.
• No More tether requirement with iOS 5 and the iCloud connection. Apple is starting to get serious about their Post PC vision. iPad 3 is going to be interesting.
• Better battery life? I mean seriously. For the longest time it seemed a given that the next generation of smartphone did 10 times as much and ran out of battery life 20 times as fast. Apple continues their trend of upending that notion and praise the lord the other manufacturers are following suit.
• 8Mp with quality optics looks to finally make this a camera on a phone without any need for apologies. Fast access tweaks very welcome. 1080p video overdue but also welcome none the less.
• Graphics boost hinting at things to come. Retina display needs pixel pushing power but you can only do so much fine detail that can be appreciated on a ~4 inch screen. The long term goal here is pushing video externally. Untethered device that can drive 1080p wired and 720 wirelessly? Curious. I expect wireless 1080p from Apple TV version 3.
• *SIRI needs its own article… * (updated 10/15/2011)

The So So:

• Still no SD slot? Really? Least they bumped the max capacity up to 64Gb. But as a new member of the parenthood club I am looking at the 64Gb onboard limitation to support music, photos and 1080p video as a poor match.
• No micro USB slot able to support charging? Dongles don’t count.
• Air Play is still half baked. Almost nothing supports it and the accessory market just isn’t heating up for it. Still this might be the best shot in the arm for the Apple TV yet. iPad 2 video mirroring was a dubious ability at best simply due to the large screen on the iPad itself. iPhone mirroring brings some interesting possibilities. Controller and game screen anyone?
• Double glass case. I have no problem with the overall design not changing. But the double sided glass be it gorilla stuff or not has made the 4 somewhat more prone to breakage. Remember seeing some concepts with ceramic or metal backing. Think it would have been a better call. May consider doing this 3rd party if I can find a warranty friendly solution.

The Ugly:

• Lack of official support for 3rd party app stores. Apple should be able to compete with the free market when it comes to apps delivered onto the phone. I withdraw this concern if they would stop censoring app submissions and judge them only on technical/security/privacy merits rather than moral or anti-competitive ones. Prurient content is an obvious example of one such form of censorship… but more importantly Apple often blocks or even co-opts apps that compete with their own offerings. Sooner or later I think it is going to get them into hot water for ‘unfair practices’ similar to the myriad of suits brought against Microsoft in the last decade and a half.


• Apple needs to flex their muscle with the phone companies again regarding unlimited data plans. And they need to figure out cost effective joint plans for multiple devices (iPad, MacBook Air etc…). iCloud is going to eat up 2Gb limits for breakfast lunch AND dinner…. or they need to just buyout a major cellphone telco and turn it into commodity ISP service like they should already be and force the race to the bottom. Bandwidth cost is the ‘oil’ of the information economy. Pricing for data plans are currently like paying 100 dollars a gallon to drive a V8 muscle car. AT&T better not get any crazy notions about separating me from my grandfathered in unlimited plans.


• Buehler? Buehler?