> Apple: Lets innovate here and add Siri > Google: Voice?
> To control a phone? Lets do that!
> It seems that when Apple innovates, Google copies.
Face it: everyone takes good ideas from wherever they're found and builds on them. Treating Apple as if it's some divine font of innovation that everyone else can only copy is absurd.
Apple usually gets away with waiting 2 years before they release an alternative to something Android has, but they get a pass because "they waited to make it better". While Android doesn't get the same defense even if they waited a few months. Do you really think they've started working on this just 2 months ago? A Google X employee said on Reddit that they've been working on AI that can beat the Turist test for a long time - and it already beats 93% of the Turing tests.
http://androidandme.com/2011/12/news/more-info-on-googles-ma...
iOS has had voice control since iOS3. The point of Siri is that it's not voice control, it's that it's 1. better at recognizing speech and 2. stateful/context-based, in that it can take "followup actions" within the context of the previous command
I'm getting sick of this fight of always trying to find who “invented” something. Innovation is not just inventing new concepts, that just doesn't happen that much, it's also using old stuff in new ways or applying it somewhere it hadn't been used before, or twisting it in some other way.
What's conceptually different between Siri and Eliza or the Emacs Doctor? Nothing, but nobody else put it in a phone as a way to control it when everybody was using just voice commands. That's innovation – which Google dismissed, by the way http://gigaom.com/apple/googles-andy-rubin-doesnt-think-siri....
Secondly, voice recognition and conversational AI is not a new product that was invented by Apple. You seem to overestimate the importance of Siri in terms of the originality it brings. It indeed seems awesome to have and interact with, I have not done that yet. I have an Android, and I am not even waiting for something similar because I find it unnecessary to have one and it might be intrusive to use in presence of others. So probably for the few who are like me, it is not a killer feature - not even close.
I am also an Android user. This feature isn't something I need.
Like I said in my original post, it probably isn't how it seems. The fact remains though that Apple saw an opportunity with voice commands on its mobile platform. Google may have been working on voice technology before hand but was it for Android?
Google is doing great on other things. Chrome, Chromebooks (maybe released a few years too early but they took a risk on it) and driverless cars.
With Android, I have yet to see it really innovate by itself. I should say that I do not follow Android development. I am just an Android user who casually looks at an iPhone from time to time to compare the two.
In my experience, it essentially looks the same as voice actions, except with a much higher success rate. The least socially intrusive action is whatever lets me transition back to the conversation the soonest, and voice actions win in terms of speed for a lot of use cases. Also, if you absolutely have to turn to your phone with someone else around, it's kind of courteous to telegraph exactly what you're doing.
If I "had to" interact with my phone in the middle of a conversation, it might be different, but that's a fringe case I very rarely encounter.
"Now searching for taco bears in Bell, Michigan"
Example: Nokia 5500, launched in May, 2006: http://europe.nokia.com/support/product-support/nokia-5500-s...
Apple got there first. Good for them, and they fully deserve the advantage on having a functional version while others are still working on the beta. But let's not now extrapolate that and claim nobody would have got there if it wasn't for Apple.
There was also GOOG-411, where you dialled a phone number then interacted with google search by voice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
Siri isn't innovative in the sense of being a new concept, it's just much better than what came before.
So Apple invented voice search? No they didn't. Google had that telephone thing ages before.
I think it's more like: Google has been researching conversational voice control for several years; Apple releases Siri; Google says "Oh dear they've beaten us to it, we'd better rush a release now even though we have only implemented 30% of what we planned."
When was that?
It probably isn't like this at all but this is how it comes across. It seems that when Apple innovates, Google copies.
Bringing out your own version of insert item here is fine but it would be nice if Google didn't come across as plainly copying someone else. Apple has Siri, 3 month's later: "Introducing Siri for Android! I mean Majel!"
Would be nice if the next version of Android has its own killer feature people could shout about instead of waiting for someone else to invent it first.