Slow is relative here: this isn't an overnight fix. It's very, very complicated.
> iOS […] is getting tired fast & it's highly visible to the consumer.
Really? What consumers? They're on track to sell 46m iPhone 5 units in this quarter.
When people bellyache about iOS it serves to remind me that the people who debate phone operating systems on the internet are categorically not the target market. If you happen to like it then great. If not, Apple doesn't give a shit: this is a mass market consumer device.
> Siri is still a gimmick
Siri is really, really useful when it works. It needs to work faster, and it needs to work more often (i.e. not garble my input), but I'm highly impressed by it.
> esp when compared to Google's voice offerings
Which are far less sophisticated
> & how fast they've reached par & exceeded it
Unless I'm missing a Google Siri beater, you're talking about Google's voice search in its iOS app. It's much faster than Siri, but it's also much less sophisticated. I asked this very question on Quora recently[1].
> Stil no APIs, no offline capability, slow response times when it's working
Apple is feeling this out. Don't expect APIs until they work out a way to do it really simply.
Offline capacity is a joke, right? We live in a world where we're online on airplanes and even on the subway (in London). Is it in Apple's interests to spend precious engineering resource on a solution to a problems which won't exist in a few years? And I bet a lot of Siri's usage is for online activities anyway. Or put it this way: what's the point in building offline mode for Siri when it's just for setting reminders (can't do geofencing: no signal), launching apps (which can't connect to the net) and writing emails and text messages which won't get sent.
You're totally right on slow response times. It's painfully slow. My guess is that performance is now Apple's top priority with Siri.
> Unless I'm missing a Google Siri beater, you're talking about Google's voice search in its iOS app. It's much faster than Siri, but it's also much less sophisticated. I asked this very question on Quora recently[1].
I believe he's talking about Google Now on Android, which has already surpassed Siri.
I just watched a load of videos about it (didn't know it was out, the only one I was aware of was Samsung's S-Voice thing). I think you need to qualify "surpassed", but my take was that it was much, much, faster in a lot of instances but a lot of the time it was not determining context but doing a web search.
It creates the impression of doing the same thing but the context is, I think, being derived largely from Google's web search backend (which already knows what I mean when I type "NY Giants scores"). It may be that this is a sustainable path for Google. Apple has to work out what you mean before it ties you into a solution. Largely Google Now didn't seem to be doing that. (Not criticising one or the other for that.)
That Quora thread you cite is just speculation and really isn't any sort of evidence. That's no basis for making a conclusion about the technical merits of Google's voice search.
> aware of Maps & fixing it, albeit slowly
Slow is relative here: this isn't an overnight fix. It's very, very complicated.
> iOS […] is getting tired fast & it's highly visible to the consumer.
Really? What consumers? They're on track to sell 46m iPhone 5 units in this quarter.
When people bellyache about iOS it serves to remind me that the people who debate phone operating systems on the internet are categorically not the target market. If you happen to like it then great. If not, Apple doesn't give a shit: this is a mass market consumer device.
> Siri is still a gimmick
Siri is really, really useful when it works. It needs to work faster, and it needs to work more often (i.e. not garble my input), but I'm highly impressed by it.
> esp when compared to Google's voice offerings
Which are far less sophisticated
> & how fast they've reached par & exceeded it
Unless I'm missing a Google Siri beater, you're talking about Google's voice search in its iOS app. It's much faster than Siri, but it's also much less sophisticated. I asked this very question on Quora recently[1].
> Stil no APIs, no offline capability, slow response times when it's working
Apple is feeling this out. Don't expect APIs until they work out a way to do it really simply.
Offline capacity is a joke, right? We live in a world where we're online on airplanes and even on the subway (in London). Is it in Apple's interests to spend precious engineering resource on a solution to a problems which won't exist in a few years? And I bet a lot of Siri's usage is for online activities anyway. Or put it this way: what's the point in building offline mode for Siri when it's just for setting reminders (can't do geofencing: no signal), launching apps (which can't connect to the net) and writing emails and text messages which won't get sent.
You're totally right on slow response times. It's painfully slow. My guess is that performance is now Apple's top priority with Siri.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Siri-software/Why-is-Siri-so-much-slow...