October 14th, 2011
Apple’s digital assistant Siri, which ships with the new iPhone 4S, has gotten a lot of attention the last few days. Initially the reaction to Apple’s new flagship phone wasn’t that enthusiastic. This all changed when people actually got the chance to test this new user interaction technology. An experiment, feeding Siri awkward requests, showed that she(*) can provide smart and funny responses. Further, Wired gave the iPhone4S a raving review, with Siri as its main reason. Together with Google Voice, Siri was heralded as the voice powered artificial intelligence that is ‘shaping up to become the next-generation user interface’.
The adoption of Siri as the next generation user interface
The use of voice to control devices could indeed provide a whole new level of ease-of-use, beyond the intuitive user interaction multi-touch provided us. However, that heavily depends on how well the voice recognition (from audio to words in a sentence), the natural language processing (the meaning of the sentence) and the inference of context is (e.g. what is the current context in terms of time, place, current activity of the user and how does it relate to the request?). If one of these processing steps fail (to often), users won’t get the desired result, leaving them frustrated and abandoning the technology.
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Tags: Apple, artificial intelligence, business, innovation, semantic web, siri, user interfaces, voice control
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May 27th, 2010
I find it ridiculous that, after so many iterations of the Microsoft Windows operating system, we still need a service like Soluto (which won the TechCrunch disrupt 2010 competition) to be able to have a proper personal computing experience and to force the industry to change in the future. No offense intended here, Soluto just tries to lift the burden of all these Microsoft Windows users that have to use their ever slowing and destabilizing machines. However, in my opinion, it’s because of the bad design of Microsoft Windows OS(s) that 3rd party apps can claim resources in the way they do and interfere with stable operation of the system.
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Tags: innovation, Microsoft Windows, operating systems, OS design, rant, soluto, techcrunch disrupt
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February 1st, 2010
After the introduction of the Apple iPad most of the blogosphere filled with critiques and rants, specked here and there with some praising stories. I must admit that my very first reaction was also skeptical, but when I took time to view Jobs’s iPad presentation (‘the day after’) and thought a little bit about what this product was about, my opinion started to shift, … big time!
As usual, this post is quite long, so I listed URLs to the sections below for easy navigation:
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Tags: Amazon Kindle, Apple, blogosphere, business models, consumer electronics, digital media, eReaders, future trends, Google Chrome OS, industry disruption, iPad, lightweight computing, media industry, Steve Jobs, usability, user experience
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January 6th, 2010
The Google online store showing the NexusOne
I must be honest to say that I didn’t follow the whole Nexus One hype too much. Maybe that’s why I was surprised to read on the Engadet’s live blog of the Google Android press conference that Google is launching an online store where (in the future) you can buy more devices, with service plans of different operators.
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Tags: business model, Google, innovation, mobile, Nexus One, online store, open network, operators, strategy
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This is the blog of Freddy Snijder. Here I write about (future) web trends and other tech trends, news from the tech industry and new products & services.