Post reactions as they erupt from your brain!

(Launch event is starting in 15 min, check engadget.com)

iPhone 4S confirmed by Apple's Japanese site to be coming October 14th.

Also, do not check Engadget, their live updater is god awful.

http://live.thisismynext.com/Event/Apple_iPhone_5_event_live_blog

This actually uses AJAX and updates as they come in.

Meh, let me know when the Samsung Focus S comes out.

Well, that was easily the most boring and underwhelming iPhone announcement ever. A higher-spec iPhone 4 (basically the iPad 2 hardware), the already mentioned iOS5, and some voice recognition. Whoop de frickin' do.

yawn.

But you can make cards!

Yeah, most of the new iOS 5 features are things that Android and/or WP7 already do, so nothing really exciting there. Definitely nothing to entice me to switch back to iPhones.

http://postagramapp.com/

Ellis called it http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13346

Yeaup, pretty much. That was the first conference I remember where they spent more time just reviewing stuff than unveiling new things. Still gonna end up getting it probably, family is switching to Sprint and all of our contracts are up. I wouldn't mind grabbing the 4, but 8GB of data is a bit too little for me. Even though most of my music will be cloud based or streaming from Subsonic, I usually need at least 16GB.

The voice recognition DOES look pretty sweet, but I'll have to try it obviously.

I'm very glad it was a minor update. No nagging feeling of ... WANT.

I'd be interested in the Siri action of "read me my outstanding texts and emails" for my hour long drive home, but you know what - I can wait till I get home THEN read my texts.

It'd be nice if iOS 5 was ready now, but ne'mind.

I can't justify the cost of switching from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 5.

but it not the iPhone 5! its the iPhone 4S!

I can't believe they're once again introducing a new software feature that would most likely run just fine on their previous generation hardware, but they're restricting it to only the new hardware, and people will go out and buy it solely for that.

If you're going sprint, get the Samsung Galaxy S2 (Or as it's known on Sprint, the Epic Touch). Seriously, it's one of the best phones on the market period, and has an amazing camera. It'll even be cheaper than the iPhone 4S ($200, there are no "bigger" options, because it takes microSD).

Also, Voice Recognition has been a staple of Android phones for over a year now. While it's not quite as feature-filled as Siri's supposedly is (still need to get individual reviews on accuracy for it and limitations), it does do most things:

1. Make phone calls, both to numbers, contacts, and even businesses. It will reference Google's system for businesses to obtain said business numbers and call the closest one.
2. Set the Alarm clock (some phones have problems, like HTC, which remove this for their own alarm clocks).
3. Send a text message, completely with voice (name, message, punctuation, etc).
4. Send an email similarly.
5. Play a song, artist, or album on any music app on your phone (Spotify, Pandora, local music player, etc).
6. Bring up a map of a location, or get a route to it.
7. Navigate to a location. It will navigate to a contact, business, landmark, or address. This is similar to the map, except it launches Google Navigation for turn-by-turn directions as you go. Like a standard GPS app.
8. Go to a website
9. Write a note to yourself
10. Do a google search

While it doesn't integrate Wolfram Alpha directly or anything, this covers so much functionality that basically iPhone is just playing catch up. And as long as there's not other people talking over you, it's pretty crazy accurate, and learns as you use it. Note that it also adds voice to text functionality, so you can simply avoid using the keyboard if you want to.




Android can do that, actually, and has been able to for a while now especially with third party apps.

I'm very "Muh," about the upgrade (currently have a white iPhone 4). Definitely worth waiting for the next iPhone or getting the Galaxy S2 now. The Siri integration being only available on the iPhone 4S is an artificial requirement like disabling multitasking for the 3GS, especially when you consider low-spec Android phones having the same functionality. So I'm hoping the jail breaking community enables Siri for the iPhone 4 like they did multitasking for the 3GS.

What's really stupid is they won't even enable the voice stuff for iPad. I can't fathom their reasoning behind that one.

Yeah... around ten years ago, the error rate for speech recognition bottomed out at 20% (by using statistical methods and first/follow sets.) You can get a better result if you limit the language. I'd believe Siri found some interesting approach to limiting the language, but Apple can't afford to throw enough money* at the problem to make any foundational advances.

(* yes, I know they are the largest tech company. This means what you think it does.)

Yeah, I really don't understand that one. Especially since how many people use iPads for work, Siri would make it somewhat of a virtual secretary.

I'm fairly sure Siri is just looking for keywords. The reason it seems more impressive is because it has a somewhat larger database of "verbs" and associated keywords to work with. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Google followed suit with similar "natural language" functions soon, just by stripping out all the extra words in a query.

I straight up prefer iOS over Android. Every time I've used an Android phone, I cannot say that I have enjoyed it that much. I just do not like the interfaces, at all. I've used a wealth of them. But what it comes down to is that I'm heavily invested in apps already, and I just straight up prefer iOS over Android. iOS fills exactly 100% of phone needs. I'm sure Android would as well, so at that point it just comes to what I prefer, and I prefer iOS. I'm sure it makes me retarded or something that I prefer one interface to another.

I do agree with you though that voice-recognition is awesome on the Android. My officemate at work uses it all the time and it seems to work pretty beautifully. I don't think I'll be finding a use for it unless Siri is astonishingly good. I'm upgrading because 1. My contract is up 2. I have tons of apps and those I'm close to are heavily invested into apple hardware (in specific AppleTV2) 3. My 3GS battery is about to die. The voice thingy would just be an add-on regardless of what phone I'd be upgrading to.

The only complaint I have with what you said is "invested in apps". That doesn't really matter with Android, as most apps are free or ad supported.

NLP is almost a non-problem compared to speech recognition. It's relatively easy to extract some semantics from an English sentence, and maybe one way of doing it is to isolate keywords (this is questionable - the sentences "I'm going to sleep with my wife" and "I'm going to sleep with a wife" have the same keywords but very different semantics.) Speech recognition is a step below this process, where you are attempting to transcribe a vocalization into some intermediate representation (maybe text.)

Both of your suggestions would work very poorly for this problem.
We can measure if a person is more or less likely to say a certain word* between some others, maybe because of grammar, or ease, or comfort. Modern speech recognizers use this probability to guess what word the person said. Maybe it's counter-intuitive, but if we remove the 'unnecessary' words it's actually much harder to recognize what a person said. It's also not immediately clear how to isolate these keywords from spoken text - humans have, for lack of better words, very expensive dedicated hardware for doing this.
It's a lot more difficult if you increase the size of the vocabulary, too. One problem is numerical: as the number of words gets bigger, the probability that any one of them will occur in an arbitrary sequence gets very small, and with limited precision these small numbers are indistinguishable. Another problem is computational: with one first word and one follow word your table has a size in O(n^3) where n is the number of words in your vocabulary, but this is really imprecise - for high accuracy you need a lot of words in your first/follow sets, perhaps arbitrary numbers. Increasing the size of the vocabulary quickly becomes untenable.

(* I'm pretty sure they don't use words, they probably work at the phoneme level, but it's easier to think about this way.)

Right, perhaps I was using the wrong terminology, but I mean as far as the intermediary (the result of the conversion of speech to text/etc). It's easily visible to see that Siri is first translating it into text before performing the query. I'm mostly referring to how it analyzes that query and creates a proper response.

I was "invested in apps" to the tune of about $200 or so while I had my iPhone, still didn't stop me from ditching it for WP7.

Sunk costs vs opportunity costs.

(I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I think that's right)

Chip is a good way of putting it. We don't even know the real usefulness or accuracy of the thing yet, except on an on-stage quiet performance. Keep in mind Apple seems hell-bent on keeping all voice recognition off of the iPad for some reason, as well.

Haha, whoops.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-a5-nehalem-processor-ipnone-4s,13622.html

The Nehalem die does look a lot cooler than the A5 die.

True. I think the hilarious part is they used two Nehalem dies in the picture, when the A5 is a single die.

If artists knew what all of that opalescent **** did, they wouldn't need to be artists.