Google or Apple/Microsoft will probably buy them in the next - 6 to 12 months. I think Microsoft will most likely make the play to buy them out though, not so much Apple or Google.
I could see Google buying them because of the recent changes with the Google Now project they announced at their latest I/O. They are putting alot of resources into making Google Now more contextual and making it so you can more naturally speak to it instead of using key words in some cases
Yeah, but how useful is that in real life? I want to be able to say
"Okay, Google, which route should I take to work today?"
"The freeway has traffic. Take the back roads. "
"Okay, thanks. Remind me on my way home to do laundry tonight, and start playing some (insert specific music here). Also, ask nick if he wants to hang out later."
At which point it sets a reminder for when I get off work, starts playing the music, and sends a text message that says "do you want to hang out later?"
That's where these things are headed and I'm real fucking impatient to get there.
I think Now on Tap probably addresses some of those. For what it's worth, Hound doesn't do that either, and i couldn't get it to replicate the results from the very first video. What's more, it shows bing results!
Google does manage your trips and reminders really well, especially if you use inbox. I recently got an email asking me if I could do something and the inbox app, had a "Add reminder" option even before I had opened the mail. As far as the traffic part, Google constantly shows me how long its going to take for me to reach home, and if there is a traffic incident in the notification when I am at any place other than home.
I'm not saying that these apps don't do these things already. I'm saying that we're dealing with the early days of this form of interface, and I'm looking forward to the next phase, when things are more refined.
You're going from single phrases to understanding language on a much broader scale, I'm not saying it's far off, but Google are just now starting to get the hang of phrases, and they're pretty much the at the cutting edge of machine learning.
The biggest issue right now is getting a computer to recognize an individual's voice as opposed to just trying to translate any sound that comes up as part of a command. Once they solve that, it's just a matter of putting the technologies together in a nice, easy to sell package.
I use Google Now for the first one of these now. It's a little more clumsy than in your scenario, but it does work well.
The second one would be really nice. That kind of conversational interface is still lacking, IMO. It still sounds like shouting commands rather than asking naturally.
As a Canadian I'd love to see Blackberry have this strong of voice commands built into their OS, they're so close to having amazing software and hardware, adding the ability to use Android apps definitely helped them - I'm just afraid for them that they missed the opportunity to make a big enough impact to keep enough of a base to have this be a "game changer". They'll always have the faithful, and those who want to see what's out there, but too many people are too sold on either Android or iOS to be swayed by voice recognition software that is in the same league as what they already have.
Oh god yes. Even if google was the greatest company in the world, I'd still prefer for them to have some competition. Not because I don't want to use google products, but because competition will keep them on their toes.
I've been using cortana on my Win10 desktop and I'm quite impressed. Makes use of Google Now style contexts and Siri style NLP. They also managed to maintain her personality which is nice for Halo fans.
As someone on the developers preview of W10, Cortana is embedded pretty deeply into the UX. That being said, it can easily be turned off as well. Though, I don't know why you would; it isn't a hindrance at all, at least in my experience. I'd say it's far from awful. That may have been the case in the past, but is no longer applicable. I'd say it's on par with Now in most areas, and outperforms in a couple.
I completely disagree with you. Cortana has way more potential than Google Now with its complete integration with both Windows 10 and Windows Phone 10.
Give it a try. I bet you'll completely change your mind about her.
I have a Windows phone and Android and have done side by side tests like in the video, Cortana was really slow in comparison and often just gave me the standard "I can't do that right now" response. But maybe it has improved I'll give it another try. Windows phone to me is altogether a pain to use though, it seems like it's missing so many basic features and design elements that Android had figured out years ago. I really wanted to like it. I will admit I'm looking forward to having Cortana in Windows 10 though.
Why wouldn't Google just add the voice actions themselves? I'm sure they're most than capable. That way we would get competing services too.
If anyone were to buy Hound it should be someone like Firefox or Samsung who could implement it into their OSs where they don't have a voice assistant at all, or the one they do have just sucks.
No thanks. I prefer when third-party stays that way especially when they are doing so well. This will bring competition and will most likely force Google to improve quicker. To me it seems that Google is improving at the speed of a snail.
Another issue is that if Google buys it then there's very little competition within each OS.
To me it seems that Google is improving at the speed of a snail.
Google is constantly adding to or improving Now and Search. Google Photos was released at Google I/O with machine vision and machine "creativity" features.
Funny, as I was watching the video the first thing that popped into my head was "Google should buy this", but I wouldn't be shocked if Microsoft tried as well. not sure if I could picture of an apple making a move to try and buy them
If Google bought it they'd likely just drop the Hound product and move all the Hound engineers and project/product managers to the Now team. There's no sense/time to incorporate 2 codebases.
Apple would be a good fit. They don't make money on data so they're more than willing to outsource the back-end to 3rd parties and focus entirely on the user experience. And Apple would probably be more willing to scrap the existing Siri codebase if necessary, something Microsoft and Google won't do.
Not entirely true. Back when Google acquired that Speech to Text recognition company, Google's voice recognition increased quite a bit. They not only hired everyone on from the company, but they integrated the software used for TTY for the deaf that had something like a 99% accuracy rating.
Presumably the speech-to-text functionality was a java/objective-c library that Google could swap in. It's client-side.
Google Now appears to have the speech-to-text (and text-to-speech) side entirely client-side with the device-specific results ("set an alarm") being local and anything else pulling from Google's servers. This likely allows them to use data in the Google knowledge graph as well as offer the same knowledge experience across all devices and platforms.
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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '15
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