Android Chief Says Your Phone Should Not Be Your Assistant | Hacker News Reader

Android Chief Says Your Phone Should Not Be Your Assistant

allthingsd.com

16 pointsdavidst29 comments

It's not a phone.

It's a constantly-connected computer that happens to be billed through what used to be phone companies.

I'm surprised that someone in charge of Android has such a regressive perspective on things.

His comment reminds me of that old adage that when trucking took over, railways would not have gone bust if they had known they were in the shipping business rather than the railway business.

Feature phones are communication devices that just happen to have basic computing features. Smartphones are pocket computers that just happen to have phone functionality. At least based on my own anecdotal observations of my friends, who primarily use them for apps, games and messaging and only rarely to make a phone call.

IMHO, If I were to take the various form factors of todays computers and rename them according to observed, contemporary, use case it would be more like:

smartphone -> personal computer

tablet -> family computer

laptop -> work/study/office computer

desktop -> room/workstation computer

Trucking didn't take over and the freight railways didn't go bust, so I'm not sure where that adage came from.

It's called poetic licence, this is why I never comment on here, it's tedious backing up every little comment with 10 pages of pseudo-factual internet trivia.

Trucking ships more ton-miles per year than rail and by value is an order of magnitude larger. (http://www.bts.gov/press_releases/2008/bts058_08/html/bts058...)

Trucking became cost competitive with rail in the 1910's and took off in earnest with the construction of the interstate highway in the 1950s. It's approximately 1/5th the cost of rail.

The quip about rail companies forgetting they are in the "shipping" business is largely a reference to Penn Central which went bankrupt in 1970, the largest bankruptcy in American history at the time. The private sector failed to revitalize the company and it was nationalized along with 11 other lines in 1976.

From the wikipedia entry: "Facing continued loss of market share to the trucking industry, the railroad industry and its unions were forced to ask the federal government for deregulation. The 1980 Staggers Act, which deregulated the railroad industry, proved to be a key factor in bringing Conrail and the old Penn Central assets back to life."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_Central_Transportation_Com...)

Andy Rubin: "We’ll see how pervasive it gets."

And then we'll shamelessly copy it.

This kind of thinking is the reason why you will never be an innovator Andy, always the follower.

I don't know if this is true. I would never want to talk to my phone and have it do a bad job of reading me my schedule. I would want to run more than one application at once, however, which Android did years before iOS.

Google was in a hurry trying to catch up to Apple by implementing half-baked, poorly-planned, poorly-implemented features. Most of them copied from the iPhone, BB, and with ICS, Windows phone 7. Btw, how many times did your Android phone crash/freeze today? got any virus/malware/spyware today? how's your battery life? you like that shitty app you got from the android market? don't try to answer these questions (they're rhetorical).

Maybe you should program Siri to remind you to take your meds...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c3e49548-088e-11dc-b11e-000b5df106...

2007: Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

Now, nearly 5 years later, Apple's Siri begins to deliver on that, so Google says "Oh, but not on your phone! Your phone is for talking to people."

https://market.android.com/ <- fuck this then, eh Andy?

He didn't say "ask the question out loud", he said "ask the question". When you ask Google what 2 + 2 is, it returns 4. Schmidt is talking about that for harder problems.

Google is amazing bad at communicating strategy — for starters even though Eric Schmidt has left the CEO role he still seems to throw a curve ball every other week. And when I hear something like this which flies in the face of the fact that Google is ahead of the curve with voice recognition I just shake my head.

Larry Page doesn't just need to clean up the product line: He really needs to focus on cleaning up the messaging about the brand. This is even more critical than ever given that they're in the anti-monopoly zone and that there is an eco-system of companies that depend on Android.

They can't communicate because they shoot from the hip. They shoot from the hip because they're running behind but are trying to convince everyone they've already lapped their competitors.

They wouldn't want Android to do what the iPhone 4s does, even if they thought about it first!

This confuses me, maybe because of lack of additional context. “Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”

He just doesn't like talking as a medium of communication with your phone? Tons of apps that require input do not have the end result of communicating to someone else. Maybe he wants a neat segregation of 'phone' and 'computer' tasks and voice is a line for him? But then, I can not explain the voice features currently on Android.

This isn't the only complete asinine quote Rubin's dropped lately [1]:

“I don’t think there should be apps specific to a tablet...if someone makes an ICS app it’s going to run on phones and it’s going to run on tablets.”

What is going on at Google?

[1] http://thisismynext.com/2011/10/19/andy-rubin-i-apps-specifi...

If that were true I think we'd all be happily using BlackBerries. They are fine communication tools. If he's correct then everyone using todo applications or calendars (which Google builds into Android) or listening to music (which google builds into Android) are using their devices incorrectly? Even Android's rudimentary voice control system is outside the scope of his definition of a SmartPhone. Obviously he was just put on the spot and had to do some spinning. He cannot possibly believe that. He just can't admit that Google got caught a bit flat footed by Siri.

I think a phone could make a good assistant... but I am perturbed at these attempts to give a robot personality. Every screencap I've seen of Siri is people asking it "What is the meaning of life" or "I love you". Perhaps it's just a novelty and people will actually start using it for its intended purpose but at this stage I really don't give a shit what a bunch of algorithms thinks about some philosophical question.

There's a couple reasons for the screencaps you're seeing. The first is that anything you talk to will be perceived as having a personality. It's either robotic and boring, or it does something else. The second, and more important reason, is that people don't take many screencaps of when Siri provides them relevant information for their particular situation. It's not easily captures, you miss context. With a silly thing like asking it the meaning of life, all the context is there, you can quickly see that it understood and responded accordingly.

I guess I just don't see the outrage over how people are using Siri. I couldn't care less how other people are using it, or what they're choosing to get screencaps of.

Honestly I don't really give a shit about how the weather is outside or what my co-workers are doing over the weekend either but small talk is pretty important to communication with other human beings. The artificial personality responses of Siri serve the same purpose. It's a brilliant way to lure people into using Siri and break the ice of talking to your device. Also by giving it a proper name and natural language recognition it totally breaks the barriers down. You can have a one sided conversation with Siri and the people eavesdropping on you would not think twice about it.

I have no doubt that giving Siri personality is a great adoption strategy and makes it more pleasant to use. What I am perturbed by (and not outraged as the other commenter above you suggests) is the end-result of making technology "too approachable".

I really don't want to sound like a Luddite because I think technology is often wonderful, but it seems with every new iteration of hardware/software we are moving further and further away from communicating with each other and instead having the machines do it for us.

Here’s how I see that progression taking place:

1) Telephony enabled us to speak to each other without actually being in close proximity.... ok that’s pretty convenient I guess

2) E-mailing, texting & other forms of messaging allowed us to remotely communicate long-form, pre-composed thoughts without even using our voice ... ok I guess still good

3) Siri now does the typing and the sending, you just tell it what to do and it’ll act an intermediary between you and your friends…. Hmm I dunno if I like where this is going

…

4) Future AI will “liberate” us from the stress of even thinking about when or what messages need to be sent but will do it for us based on how we programmed it to manage our life… hell, just kill me now

I think 4 is a bad interpolation!...Lets imagine that everyone had a highly intelligent MIT grad as an indentured slave who will do everything you say..Everyone will still choose to send their own messages.

Tangential to the point, but does anyone know what happened to the Wildfire virtual assistant? I was fascinated with it back in the late nineties, early two-thousands when it was circulating, but I can't seem to find it, which would indicate that it died somewhere along the way. Did someone purchase the company? Is there a spin-off product?

It appears that Wildfire is currently owned/sold by Virtuosity. The original wildfire.com domain is currently owned by Orange, though.

Wow. Talk about being put out to pasture. The Virtuosity website looks like it hasn't been updated since 1995, and a peak at the source code confirms it... MM_preloadImages()!

I develop a little for the Android platform and yet I guess I'm not following the "Android Chief". Is he really saying a network-enabled, geo-aware, 64-GB-of-memory, dual-core computer in your pocket should be designed primarily to make phone calls?

I would be quite thrilled if it could actually make phone calls!

The rhetoric of sour grapes.

yeah i am surprised too that someone like the "Android Chief" would make a baseless and opinionated statement like that....But I will give him the benefit of doubt...It is very likely that the reporter quoted him out of context!

Regarding Siri: I talked to my Nokia phone years ago already. I spoke the name to call and it dialed the number. It worked quite good but: 1. People around me thought I am stupid talking to my phone 2. Dialing with the keys was easier and faster

Siri and Google voice actions do quite a bit more than dial people in your address book. In fact, they are probably worse at that than at other tasks because name pronunciation is difficult. I'd suggest looking at some demos.

As for your latter two points, yes, people may think you are silly if you speak to your phone in company. Also, background noise such as people next to you speaking can really confuse these systems. However, I've used it many times (the google version) to write short text messages and most of all to ask for directions. Why? Because it's much faster thank keying in all that information, especially for directions to intersections or restaurants. For the latter, the system gives a huge added bonus in that it will actually look up addresses for you just based on a store name.

Siri gives one extra feature over google voice actions as well: speaking back and context. While speaking back may be somewhat of a gimmick, there are lots of ways to report information, using the previous action to fill in contextual information in the current action looks to be quite useful.

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