Nostrich

Why Siri Is (Probably) So Good

By 2007, Google knew enough about the structure of queries to be able to release a US-only directory inquiry service called GOOG-411. You dialled 1-800-4664-411 and spoke your question to the robot operator, which parsed it and spoke you back the top eight results, while offering to connect your call. It was free, nifty and widely used, especially because – unprecedentedly for a company that had never spent much on marketing – Google chose to promote it on billboards across California and New York State. People thought it was weird that Google was paying to advertise a product it couldn’t possibly make money from, but by then Google had become known for doing weird and pleasing things. In 2004, it launched Gmail with what was for the time an insanely large quota of free storage – 1GB, five hundred times more than its competitors. But in that case it was making money from the ads that appeared alongside your emails. What was it getting with GOOG-411? It soon became clear that what it was getting were demands for pizza spoken in every accent in the continental United States, along with questions about plumbers in Detroit and countless variations on the pronunciations of ‘Schenectady’, ‘Okefenokee’ and ‘Boca Raton’. GOOG-411, a Google researcher later wrote, was a phoneme-gathering operation, a way of improving voice recognition technology through massive data collection.

I don’t typically go in for tech punditry, but I read this this morning and it turns out to be pretty relevant. Richard Gaywood had what turns out to be a good hunch on what Apple’s huge data centre is for yesterday, and this quote from London Review of Books earlier this month seems to suggest he’s right. If anybody’s wondering why Siri is so good when the 4S comes out in a few weeks, this is almost certainly why. (I highly doubt the iPhone’s CPU isn’t capable of processing speech recognition on its own. And I just heard Gruber on 5by5 live speculating that the phone takes a first pass at interpreting the Siri command before sending it to the cloud, suggesting the cloud isn’t there for interpretation, having actually used it.) Pretty interesting—and, ultimately, unsurprising—that Google and Apple are responsible for what are probably the biggest advances in speech recognition in decades. Fuck your stupid iPhone 5 rumours, this is some insane future shit.