Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
My greatest fears have been confirmed; people are becoming more and more helpless. "Remind me I need gas at 9 am tomorrow"?? Dude, the fuel gauge on the car should tell you that you need to refuel, you really need your phone to tell you this stuff? More importantly, you really needed the capability of a voice command processor to do it for you? Some of this just seems so damn trivial. "What's the weather going to be like?" Click the weather icon. "What am I doing tomorrow?" Click the calendar icon. This just seems like such a ridiculous gimmick to me.
I mean, I get some of the benefits of voice recognition; I have voice prompts that allow me to have texts dictated to me and allow me to answer them while I'm driving, but as far as I'm concerned, that's an extension of the capability of hands-free.
Honestly, who wants to have a conversation with their phone? The unfortunate thing is that - because Apple made it - Siri is going to catch fire and everyone will be scrambling to make similar AIs for their devices.
The interfaces on phones have advanced so that everything was quickly accessible with one or two clicks at the most. Now you have to spend five seconds actually speaking aloud what you want the phone to do? The most common defense will be "Well how else am I supposed to do this while driving?" How about just paying attention to the road?
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So what you're saying is you've been using Siri extensively, and this is the opinion for your particular use case that you've come to? Or are you just deriding something you haven't used?
The accessibility that this technology provides to low-vision or motor-impaired users
alone should be enough to move Siri out of the gimmick category in anyone's books.
On a broader scale, providing multi-modal access to the data and functionality that the iPhone offers is important - not every situation lends itself to hands and eyes on a screen.
Similarly, people process about the same information differently when working on it visually or audibly. In this regard, its an important step forward in human-computer interaction (not revolutionary - it's been around a long time, but never to the masses like this, and it also appears to be quite good even in its early development compared to previous efforts).
Finally, calling out Apple on discontinuing the free Siri offering a dick move is just silly. They bought the technology fair and square. Siri had no paying customers prior to acquisition, so Apple owes them nothing. It happens all the time in the tech industry, and I bet I could easily come up with a list of 10 or more good technologies that were bought and either pulled off the market entirely, or rolled into for-profit products in the past couple of years.