Siri’s original developers, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, left Apple in 2011 and took a bunch of their team with them. Since then, they’ve been working on a new artificial intelligence system, Viv, that is going to get it’s first public demonstration Monday.

Right now there is a lot going on in the intelligent digital assistant world. While Apple was early to this game, Microsoft and Google are right behind and it’s clear there’s a lot of resources from a lot of big companies being thrown at this problem.

Most surprising to me has been the utility of the Amazon Echo. I have been using Siri for years but nobody else in my family does. I think it has something to do with the slight delay that exists between activating Siri and stating a command combined with the sometimes indecipherable syntax you need to use in order to make it work. There is also that thing where Siri will perform a complicated instruction perfectly only to botch things up entirely when you ask it to tell you the weather five minutes later. All of this has improved over the years but there still is enough resistance that my non-nerd family members are not interested.

The Amazon Echo on the other hand has no such resistance. I frequently witness my family turning on the lights, checking the weather, and otherwise interacting with Alexa. To me this is the closest glimpse we’ve had yet to a future with reliable intelligent digital assistants.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about why the Amazon Echo is “stickier” for the non-techies in my house than Siri. One argument is because the Echo is always on and listening (which is kind of creepy). You don’t need to push a button to get it started. I’m sure that’s part of it, but I believe the real reason is because it’s both easier to talk to and more responsive.

Amazon’s Echo does a better job of parsing the question and giving you useful information. Too often, Siri gets confused because you don’t ask the question just right. Also, the Amazon Echo has never done that thing where it seems to understand me perfectly only report it can’t answer my question because of some mysterious problem out there on the Internet … somewhere. Either way, in the Sparks household the Amazon Echo has been a clear winner for my wife and children.

So getting back to where I started with all of this, we’re getting our first demonstration of Viv on Monday. Your guess is as good as mine over what the long game is for Viv’s developers. Maybe they want to wow us so some big company throws large sums of money at them. However, they already did that with Siri.

I suspect they are more interested in making something that they can develop without the limitations that come with tying their wagon to a large corporation. Keeping Viv independent allows them to make deals easier with third parties so it’s easier to add functionality. It also lets the developers be, generally, more nimble. The downside is that it’s going to be harder to activate. One of the big attractions of Siri is that it is everywhere on iOS. If I have to go open an application to get a digital assistant working for me, I’m much less likely to use it. (I downloaded Microsoft’s Cortana app and I still only launch it for the purpose of testing Cortana.) I think members of my family would be even less likely to launch an app for a digital assistant.

Either way, I hope that Viv is a smashing success. I want there to be a lot of competition in this space and I want these big companies to duke it out. It feels like we are on the cusp of having useful digital assistants in our lives and the sooner that comes, the better.

This week, John Gruber wrote a post about how Siri is becoming more useful to him. I think John’s right, Siri is a lot better. Although I am definitely looking at this from the vantage point of a Siri fanboy. I liked it from the beginning. I dictate often and like to think I’m pretty good at it. I’m actually dictating these words right now in Drafts on my iPhone. I’ve watched Siri grow up to a certain extent. Those people who gave up on it at the beginning are missing out. You should understand that like some other Apple terms (iCloud, for instance), Siri has several components.

Siri Dictation

This is the easiest bit. You speak and Siri returns your words as text. With iOS 8, Siri dictation got the ability to return your words as (or very shortly after) you say them. This was the single biggest improvement to Siri yet. With pre-iOS 8 Siri, you’d dictate your words and, only after you finished, would the recording grind through Apple’s servers and return words, at least theoretically. Sometimes it would just blink and silently mock you. Even if you have no interest in asking Siri how to bury a dead body, tapping the little microphone button and speaking to your iOS device (or Mac) to make words appear can be liberating. I recommend trying it for three days. It’s a game changer.

Siri the Intelligent Assistant

Then there is the entirely separate Siri that you ask to do something, like set a timer. This version of Siri has two jobs: 1) figure out what you just said, and; 2) figure out what you want it to do. Even if Siri gets all the words right in step 1, it still has a new and unique opportunity to fail in step 2. I think Siri has improved at phase 2 as much as it has improved at phase 1. I also think this improvement could only have come from Apple shipping Siri and letting millions of people bang up against it. While Siri is hardly perfect, it is damn useful.

Siri on the Mac

Apple has put dictation on the Mac with recent version of the Mac OS. It is, in some ways superior than Siri dictation in iOS, in that it no longer requires an Internet connection, assuming you enable enhanced dictation. However, Apple has yet to bring the Intelligent Assistant to the Mac. Dan Moren thinks they should and I agree. As someone who spends a lot of time behind a Mac, I’d love to be able to ask about the weather, set a timer, or do a simple web search with my voice. As Home Kit gets legs, it’d push more than few of my buttons to also be able to turn down the lights are start a playlist with my voice. I particularly agree with Dan’s desire for hypothetical Mac Siri to let users set the custom trigger phrase. Using “Hey Siri” leads to way too many hijinks as it is. If instead I could set my own unique phrase, I could make it something less likely to go off unexpectedly. For those of us that give our Macs names, it would also let us have a little fun. “Good Day Thelonious, What’s the weather going to be tomorrow?”

I’ve talked about my simple (yet essential!) Siri task to help me not screw up tea on the Mac Power Users. (“Set a Timer for 4 minutes.”) Listener Bob White, wrote in to explain that he sets these timers as alarms. Specifically, you can set the alarm name with Siri syntax. “Set the Oolong Tea Alarm for 4 minutes.” The phone will create a new alarm in 4 minutes called “Oolong Tea”. The advantage of doing them as alarms over timers is that you can set multiple alarms at once but just one timer, as The Doctor explains. Indeed, going back and reading Dr. Drang’s post I realize he also explained how you can name the alarm with Siri. Hmmm.

As a complete aside, if you are interested in tea, I recommend the end of MPU 168 where I talked at some length about how I make tea and Katie Floyd was stone-cold silent. Never has a silence been so judgmental. It might be one of my favorite segments of the Mac Power Users.

Dr. Drang, that consummate multi-tasker, one-upped me today showing how to set multiple timers with Siri. Even though I rarely run multiple timers, Dr. Drang’s method of using reminders is better than mine so I’m going to try it out.

It is interesting to see which parts of Siri people use. While Siri certainly is not that end-all-be-all solution that the hype implies, using it intelligently can up your game.

∞
 

Lex Friedman’s got an article at Macworld demonstrating useful Siri phrases. With respect to Reminders, I’d add lists. I’ve got several, such as “Groceries”, “Home Depot”, and (of course) “Apple Store”. I can say “Add spicy carrots to my grocery list” and Siri does the rest.

Maybe it’s a lawyer thing but I quite frequently need to calculate dates. For instance, I need to figure out what day is 30 days after I serve documents on somebody or how many days elapsed between date X and date Y. 

I was thinking this would be really convenient if I could do it with Siri but the Siri documentation doesn’t say anything about calculating dates. After a little experimentation, however, I stumbled upon the necessary syntax:

“What is X days from Y date.”

For example,  “What is 30 days from June 1, 2013.”

It also works in reverse.

“What is 30 days before June 1, 2013.”

Figuring out days between dates also requires a specific syntax.

“How many days between June 1, 2012 and July 1, 2013?”

As you can see, this search returns a Wolfram Alpha page, which isn’t as pretty but includes more details. Once you internalize the syntax, you’ll find there is no faster way to calculate dates than with Siri.