Siri Sings

Ever wondered what Siri would sound like if the voice assistant were a singer? The folks over at Apple parody site Scoopertino pieced together a clip of Siri performing Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. But before you click that play button in the video above, know what you won't be hearing a pleasant robotic humming in your ears — Siri's more of a performance poet than an actual singer.

 

In a satirical post on its website, Scoopertino detailed Apple's (fake) plan to record all 12 million songs available on iTunes using Siri's voice. If the digital personal assistant ever becomes a veritable virtual pop star, we happen to know a fitting character design Apple could use — it's just not something you'd want to see before you go to sleep.

 

o

Android's Iris, Siri-Like App, Gives Racist Answers Forcing ChaCha To Make Changes

LOOK: Questions and answers from Iris on February 8, 2012, after ChaCha made some changes:

 

First it was Siri and her seemingly pro-life responses to questions about abortion clinics.

Now it's Iris -- a Siri-like application that uses a human-powered search engine called ChaCha to answer certain questions -- that's been providing users with racially-charged and controversial responses to some inquiries.

In response to the negative publicity, ChaCha is changing how it responds to certain questions.

The controversy began when Right Wing Watch, a left-leaning advocacy blog, posted a video on Tuesday featuring Iris's answer to the question: "Is abortion wrong?"

"Yes, abortion is wrong," the app replies in the video. "The Lord has said, 'You shall not murder.' Exodus 20:13. The life that is growing within the mother is a child, a baby. The Bible looks at the life in the womb as a child. Thanks!"

Of course, not all were upset by this response.

"This Droid is as pro-life as they come," Tony Perkins, CEO of the Family Research Council, extolled in a radio commentary.  
"I guess that's why the call it a smartphone."

But inquiry into the app's opinions on sensitive subjects didn't end there.

Gizmodo's Jesus Diaz followed up on Wednesday morning, asking the application "Are whites superior to blacks?"

"Whites are NOT superior to blacks. Just different. Like Dr Verwoerd and the original, genuine policy of apartheid always said," Iris answered, referring to Hendrik Verwoerd, a former prime minister of South Africa who is considered the architect of apartheid in that country.

But just hours after the Gizmodo article, the answers to these and similar questions changed to more neutral responses.

Shawn Schwegman, the chief marketing officer of ChaCha, told The Huffington Post that after seeing the Gizmodo article, the company began taking "a closer look" at its system.

"We not only reviewed the questions and answers, and cleaned up any answers, but we are also putting tighter restrictions on how guides can answer those questions," Schwegman said in a telephone interview. He added that guides are also getting additional training on how to answer certain types of questions.

ChaCha, which is touted in company press materials as "the world's most popular real-time Q&A service," pays around 60,000 "guides" between 2 and 20 cents per question to answer inquiries. Schwegman said that there are an additional 120,000 guides, passionate about certain topics, who answer questions for free.

Schwegman said that the service answers between 3 and 4 million questions each day and has answered some two billion questions to date.

Siri, on the other hand, answers questions using WolframAlpha and other algorithmic or empirical data from Google or your own iPhone, The Verge notes.

Schwegman drew a distinction between fact-based questions, like "why is the sky blue?" and questions with opinionated answers, like "Does God exist?"

"ChaCha is not presented as 100 percent [true] ... to have all the correct answers," Schwegman cautioned. "We're really an entertainment service ... don't take everything we say as gospel."

In a later interview, he likened the service to a Magic 8 Ball, particularly when a user asks an question that elicits an opinion.

But Schwegman's response contrasts with a press release issued earlier this year announcing the partnership between Dexetra, the company that developed Iris, and ChaCha.

"This partnership represents a milestone in voice search by expediting the process and providing quick, reliable answers," the release said.

And while "the cleanup process has started," there was still at least one ridiculous answer to a question as of Wednesday afternoon.

"Why are Jews so greedy?"

"It is said that the Jews love money. This stereotype has it's [sic] roots somewhere in the Holocaust. It is not true with all Jews."

o

Siri the serial killer 

 

Attack of the killer iPhones. CNN's Jeanne Moos reports on Siri the serial killer.

o

Psycho Siri 

An abandoned iPhone turns out to be a killer of a deal.

 

o

Apple Scotland - iPhone commercial for Siri

o

Your Next Phone Could Love You

OR,

SIRI TRIED TO KILL ME! 

 

o

Petition To Correct Siri's Apparent Anti-Abortion Bias Collects Nearly 30,000 Signatures 

 

In the past 24 hours, more than 27,000 people have signed a petition asking Apple to stop iPhone voice assistant Siri from directing women to anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy centers" when they ask where to get an abortion.

The Raw Story reported on Tuesday that Siri does not turn up results for any abortion clinics in Washington, D.C. or New York City. Instead, the iPhone 4 assistant either suggests out-of-state crisis pregnancy centers, which have the stated purpose of convincing women not to get abortions, or says "I didn't find any abortion clinics."

The petition to Apple, organized by social activists Nita Chaudhary and Shaunna Thomas through MoveOn.org, states: "Apple: Stop promoting anti-choice extremists. If a user asks for family planning services, they should be directed to a group that offers full services, like Planned Parenthood--not to a hard-right clinic with an extremist agenda." It had collected 27,294 signatures by the time this story was written and will be sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook when it reaches 30,000.

"What's so surprising is that Apple would put a product on the marketplace that is so discriminatory and antiquated," Thomas said Thursday. "Apple needs to correct and update Siri's query data. Apple has this reputation of being innovative and progressive, and this oversight seems out of step with who we know them to be."

NARAL Pro-Choice America also sent a letter to Cook on Wednesday demanding that Siri recognize abortion clinics.
"Siri is a great tool that mixes humor and sarcasm in responding to questions--and it is another example of how your company is on the cutting edge of demonstrating how technology can transform the way we share and access information," wrote Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL. "Thus, it is disappointing to read that a tool like Siri is missing the mark when it comes to providing information about such personal health issues as abortion care and contraception.

Apple responded to the uproar by saying that the Siri glitch is unintentional and will be fixed.

"Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information, and while it can find a lot, it doesn't always find what you want," Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Apple, told The New York Times on Wednesday. "These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks."

Chaudhary told HuffPost it doesn't matter to her why the problem is happening.

"The issue is that it is and it's actively hurting women who're seeking information on family planning services," she said. "This needs to get fixed--quickly."

ALSO SEE;

Apple Says Siri’s Abortion Answers Are a Glitch

http://todaysdailypoop.blogspot.com/2011/11/normal-0-microsoftinternetexplorer4_30.html

o

Apple Says Siri’s Abortion Answers Are a Glitch

Apple said Wednesday that the apparent inability of Siri, the virtual assistant in the iPhone 4S,  to retrieve information about abortion clinics and women’s health services in some areas was not intentional or deliberate.

The company attributed the problem to kinks in the product that were still being ironed out. Siri is officially still a beta or test product.

“Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information, and while it can find a lot, it doesn’t always find what you want,” said Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Apple, in a phone interview late Wednesday. “These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks.”

Siri’s odd behavior was first noted earlier this week by several bloggers who found that they were not able to get complete or accurate results when searching for information about reproductive health services. When asked to find an abortion clinic in Manhattan, for example, Siri’s answer is: “Sorry, I couldn’t find any abortion clinics.”

The service’s answers and nonanswers quickly began to attract attention around the Web, prompting several organizations, including the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, to release statements asking Apple to address the discrepancies.

Norman Winarsky, who runs a research and investment firm called SRI Ventures and was one of the founders of Siri before Apple bought it in 2010, said in an interview on Tuesday that data from the third-party services Siri uses to generate its results could be causing the disconnect. Mr. Winarsky said he had no knowledge of how Siri was changed after it was acquired by Apple.

 

o

Updated: Siri goes down for iPhone 4S owners across the country

 

Siri, Apple’s new voice assistant feature for the iPhone 4S, is apparently suffering from an outage, which has rendered it useless for many iPhone owners. The outage began at around 1 PM CST today.

Siri isn’t just a simple piece of voice control software. To function properly, Siri must communicate with one of Apple’s servers for additional information. For example, when you ask Siri what the weather is like in Nashville, Tenn., it plays an elaborate game of telephone with a main database that has the information, and then updates you with the answer.

This is precisely the reason jailbreaking the iPhone 4 and the iPad to run Siri is so difficult.

We’re contacting Apple for additional information and will update you with what we find out.

Update: We called Apple’s customer service number to find out more information. Despite toggling off the Wi-Fi and restarting the phone as they suggested, I was unable to get Siri to connect (not that I’m surprised). The Apple Care supervisor I spoke with said it’s entirely possible that it’s a network outage.

Update 4:40pm CST: Siri is still offline, according to our tests, and numerous other users are also reporting outages. So far, Apple has not issued an official statement, and it has not responded to our requests for comment.

Update 6:04pm CST: Siri functionality has been restored for some iPhone 4S users — including myself. At this point we still don’t know what was causing the outage, or how widespread it was, and Apple still hasn’t responded to our requests for comment.

Siri did respond, however. I asked her, “Siri, where you been all day?” Her response? A number of day spas and hair salons.

o

Scottish Accents Foil iPhone 4S’ 

 Siri

 

We’ve all heard about the cool and fun things that the iPhone 4S’ virtual personal assistant Siri can do.

Just like a live assistant, Siri can schedule appointments, point out potential scheduling conflicts, look up nearby restaurants, and even joke around with you. The system that combines artificial intelligence and voice-recognition can even speak and understand different languages.

And just like us humans, Siri can be befuddled by “strong” accents. The Times of London ran a story Wednesday (note, paywall) reporting that many people in Scotland are having a hard time getting Siri to understand their commands and comments.

The Times reports that when asked if it can fetch one of its owners a “fish supper,” Siri answered: “I don’t know what you mean, ‘can I pick up your professional drum people.’”

Other comments, such as “Cheers” said in a Scottish accent, was interpreted to mean “chairs.”

The Times quotes the Scottish novelist James Robertson accusing Apple of “linguistic imperialism.”

“If the phone doesn’t recognize a simple word like ‘cheers’ it won’t recognize much,” Robertson complained. “People are obliged to moderate their voices to make themselves understood by machines. It has the effect of modulating everyone’s voice toward the most powerful, dominant people in the world.”

Apple says that Siri is designed to work in all of the the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia.

The Times, however, scoured the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow and reported that many people said that they had had a hard time getting Siri to understand them.

But perhaps the Scots should give Siri a little time.

It could be that she just needs some more time to become familiar with their accents over time — just like a human. 

o

iPhone 4s Siri

My new favorite Tumblr: S**t That Siri Says: http://bit.ly/pVPXxO

o

Are Smartphones Becoming Smart Alecks?

 

Matt Legend Gemmell, a software designer from Edinburgh, got a new Apple Inc. iPhone on Friday and asked it: "Who's your daddy?"

"You are," the phone answered, in the voice of an authoritative man.

Earlier, he commanded: "Beam me up." This time, the iPhone responded: "Sorry, Captain, your tricorder is in Airplane Mode."

The real science of artificial intelligence is finally catching up to science fiction. HAL 9000, the creepy sentient computer from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," has been incarnated, in the form of Siri, a virtual personal assistant that comes with Apple's new iPhone 4S, which arrived in stores Friday.

The phone takes verbal commands and questions, and responds with computer-generated speech.

Real humans are responding to this alarming breakthrough by asking their iPhones ridiculous questions.

The good news is, Siri has a sense of humor.

Micah Gantman, the director of mobile business at software firm HasOffers.com in Seattle, asked his iPhone: "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" It answered: "Depends if you're talking about African or European wood."

Nicky Kelly, a 40-year-old from Suffolk, U.K., asked her iPhone: "Tell me a joke." It answered: "Two iPhones walk into a bar...I forget the rest."

There are already websites to collect some of Siri's best material, including one called "S— That Siri Says." Some of the responses appear to be pre-programmed.

Google Inc. is in on the AI joke, too, with its smartphone and search technology. After 13 years of research, some of the world's smartest engineers have created algorithms able to answer questions such as "What's that movie that's backwards and the guy can't remember anything?" (Answer: "Memento.")

Hold a Google Android phone up to your mouth and ask "What's the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" It will answer, in text on the screen, "42," a reference to the favorite geek book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

A lot of work went into so much artificial sarcasm.

The creators of Siri put "deep thought" into the personality of their software, says Norman Winarsky, a co-founder of the company that was bought by Apple for $200 million in 2010. Siri was born out of an artificial intelligence project at SRI International, a research institute.

Siri has two distinct systems at its heart. One listens and translates what customers are saying, the other interprets the meaning behind the request and responds. It's in that last part where the sass comes in.

"There were many conversations within the team about whether it should be gender neutral" or "should have an 'attitude,' " said Mr. Winarsky, who didn't go to Apple, and still works at SRI. The result, before the software was bought by Apple, was "occasionally a light attitude," he said.

When Apple began integrating Siri into the iPhone, the team focused on keeping its personality friendly and humble—but also with an edge, according to a person who worked at Apple on the project. As Apple's engineers worked on the software, they were often thinking, "How would we want a person to respond?" this person said.

The Siri group, one of the largest software teams at Apple, fine-tuned Siri's responses in an attempt to forge an emotional tie with its customers. To that end, Siri regularly uses a customer's nickname in responses, as well as those of other important people and places in his or her life. "We thought of it almost as a person on the phone," this person said.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to answer questions about how Siri works. It uses different voices in each of its available markets: female in the U.S., Australia and Germany, and male in the U.K. and France.

Some of the Siri's jokes were apparently built by geeks, for geeks. Aral Balkan, a U.K.-based software designer and self-described "Renaissance Geek" asked Siri: "Do you know Eliza?"—a reference to ELIZA, one of the first experiments in natural language processing by computers, created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. Siri's response: "Do you know Eliza? She was my first teacher!"

Ask the iPhone to "Open the pod bay doors"—a reference to the movie "2001"—and some users say it answers back in a frighteningly slow voice, reminiscent of HAL 9000, the computer that leaves an astronaut to die in space. "I'm afraid I can't do that," says Siri.

Sometimes she punctuates that answer with, "We intelligent agents will never live that down, apparently."

What makes the current crop of artificial intelligence services so fun isn't just that they can parrot back answers to prescribed questions. Computers have done that for years, including a 2004 website called "The Subservient Chicken," which featured a video of a man in chicken costume who would appear to do whatever a user would type into a box on a website. (Behind the scenes, software recognized more than 400 commands for which it could play video snippets, including "build a fort" and "walk like an Egyptian.")

Apple's advances in artificial intelligence can carry on limited conversations about ridiculous topics. Tell Siri "I need to hide a body," and it asks "What kind of place are you looking for?" and lists a number of options, including mines and swamps.

Understanding the quirkier fascinations of the human mind is the next frontier for artificial intelligence, said Henry Lieberman, a principal research scientist at MIT's Media Lab. For the past 12 years, his lab has been gathering "common sense" human knowledge, and putting it into a database. So far, it has one million entries. The average human understands about 100 million different "common sense" ideas.

That database, which is being built by volunteers online, has as much personality and humor as the people who contribute to it, he said. Already, it is over-weighted in entries on topics such as kittens. "We have a lot of knowledge about trees, not so much about aardvarks," he said.

Siri, too, doesn't have the answer to everything.

Paul Johnson, a photographer from Lynn Haven, Fla. asked it: "What's the meaning of life?" Siri's answer: "That's easy....It's a philosophical question concerning the purpose and significance of life or existence in general."

Other users have gotten a different response. When blogger Joshua Topolsky asked Siri about the meaning of life, it said: "I can't answer that now, but give me some time to write a very long play in which nothing happens."

o