Tellme Conversational Voice VS Siri

[Rhody#WP]

From all the videos I have seen on youtube, it does VERY well and just keep on moving. It does mess up and fail, of course it is software, but damn tellme is not usable to me. I would like to get my truck off my third shift and text my wife hands free, but I can't unless i say a two word text or something. Sad....

I agree with you that Tellme is not usable. However, I am also skeptical about Siri. Of course the videos online look great. People absolutely worship Steve Jobs. I'm serious, it has become like a religion. One guy made a huge portrait of Steve Jobs out of apples. This is kooky worship behavior. So I wouldn't put it past iSheeple to post videos using only examples that work, leaving out the examples that don't work.

To me, Siri looks like a big improvement over Tellme, but still more like a magic 8 ball than true AI.

 

[SanityFM]

I played with an Iphone 4s on release and gave Siri the once over. It is indeed a moderate step forward with regard to conversational understanding. However it is clearly a beta and, from my point of view in the UK, unreleasable tech. World phone indeed! I'll go further and say, if Steve Job's had still been CEO, Siri would not have been released in its current state. Its simply proof of concept from Apple.

On my WP7 I can say "find local pizza" or "indian" and it will do just that, and direct me to the location, turn by turn, That doesnt work outside the US with Siri.
Siri understood what we said about 70% of the time, which is no better, if not worse than my WP. I also didnt like the British Siri voice, its a posh bloke. It was amusing to play with though, asking it "open the pod bay doors please" and things like that, but overall its not as good as WP implementation for actually usefullness. It feels a bit like a toy.

Voice control on a phone is useful in certain cercomstances. I can call and text when driving on WP7 and it works great. If My WP pings indicating a new message when Im lying in bed I can say read, I can dictate a reply, and say send, and it just works, most of the time. Overall though I dont see people wanting to control ther phone with voice all the time. Theres background noise and other people to consider and the constant beeping prompting you to speak, so it a little ineligant. I can just imagine being sat in a coffee shop with every one babbling to there phone, clearly and noisily. I think it will be more use in the home. I can imagine getting home and touching a tablet by the door and saying: "lights 50%, oven 200 degrees C, switch the music on in the kitchen" etc ala StarTrek.

So yeah, I do think its a step in the right direction from Apple, but its currently in beta and is buggy, as shocking as it is to hear Apple releasing functionality that doesn't "just work" hehe. I was a little disapointed as I expected it to "just work"

Its not a revolution, that is clear, in fact most of the features of IP4s and IOS5 did not wow me enough to move from Windows Phone, especially with Iphones dated GUI that looks like its from 2006.
It seems the new features Apple have introduced like the message centre, wifi syncing, cloud, and others, we on WP and probably Android too, have been using for months. So its nice to see Apple playing catchup. Competition is good and imitation is one of the nicest form of praise.

So I will continue to take Steves advice, ironically, and "Think different" with my Windows Phone.

Regards

 

[fifthGear]

Tellme sucks balls. I didn't know mango got alot of the features (missed them) but I have tried to use Tellme and it can't do a simple text unless I baby it. No long sentences or anything. Pathetic. No I am not hailing Apple, but Siri works well from the videos of real world use. Tellme needs a GOOD LONG code redesign in recognition and ****, copy Apple's commands, they copied a couple things on the 4S.

I like Windows Phone, but this type of crap makes me wonder if MS will actually make the OS worth staying with.

EDIT: And we shouldn't have to wait till Tango, I would think.

I absolutely love TellMe. It extremely accurate for me. I have complete text conversations with friends while driving. Down side is that I have to hold the phone close to my face for it to hear me. But I speak with a normal voice and it takes dictation usually without error. There are a few things I can think of that may make TellMe speech understanding less accurate:

- The quality of the mic and A-to-D hardware used in a particular phone.
- A strong spoken accent (I speak what's often called, Standard American English, like Tom Brokaw).
- Not holding the phone close enough to your mouth (or perhaps too close).

 

[Coffee]

The guy who sits near me at work has Siri, he treats it like a fun app but that's about it. It's never faster than using touch, he has to repeat himself probably almost half the time, and admits it's really more for just when he's driving (as I use WP for texting).

Plus, it's not necessarily a question of how good Siri is, but how people use devices. You're trying to force a paradigm where you'd prefer to interact with a device through speech, when speech is slower than touch, even if it works the first time. This naturally pushes people to only use it in certain situations, and I don't see that changing.

It's a parlor game, something you show to friends and then rarely use.

I agree with Sanity in that there is a future for voice interaction, but it's more in/at home than mobile. And I'm glad to see Siri out there and hopefully improving. I can't imagine someone moving to iOS just for that one feature.