Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose 'competitive threat' | Hacker News Reader

Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose 'competitive threat'

appleinsider.com

34 pointsevo_916 comments

That's a blatant lie.

In light of the recent monopoly hearings in the Senate, Mr. Schmidt is clearly trying to persuade Senators that Google is weak and vulnerable. But Google published findings that show that in natural language processing, it's really the quantity [1] that determines quality. Note in particular the discussion of "stupid backoff" (a smoothing/interpolation technique), which relies on the raw quantity of data. Who has a copy of the Internet's treasure-trove of text in its data centers?

Ultimately, NLP is something that's Google's to win if it truly desired. I'm not sure what powers Siri directly, but large data is Google's answer, and it's much more effective than Mr. Schmidt would make you believe.

[1] Large Language Models in Machine Translation: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/D/D07/D07-1090.pdf

I find it interesting that at this moment, your comment seems to be the most highly rated one, whereas my post,(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3201862) which makes much the same point using a famous literary metaphor, is currently at -2 :)

He made the point a lot better than you did :)

Keep in mind that Song of the South was consigned to the memory hole by Disney at least 20 years ago, if not more. I'd be surprised if anyone under 30 even gets that reference, or sees how it might describe Google's attitude.

It would be nice if the Uncle Remus cycle of stories only existed in that movie and could be so easily removed from cultural circulation.

It's important to note that Google has an incentive in this case to make it look like there is significant competition; the senators were investigating whether Google is a monopoly.

Pfft, all Google need to do is update Google Voice search on Android to more-or-less clone Siri functionality. Or alternatively they could integrate Siri functionality directly into Google.com search as a kind of contextual search feature where Google has a conversation with you to refine your search.

The winner in this game won't necessarily be the one with the best features, but the one with the most input/searches. i.e. more people use Google voice than do Siri, and so Google has more existing and incoming data to help improve the algorithm to make the "perfect" Siri.

I agree Siri isn't a threat for Google in terms of market share or features (Google beats Apple on their own game here, they own the whole stack of data/speech to text tech while Apple is cobbling together everything from numerous sources). I think it is clear Schmidt is just trying to downplay Google's dominance here, and highly doubt he is really afraid of Siri. But Siri can be dangerous to Google, because if personal assistant style search becomes the standard, it is going to be hard to sell ads. Currently, it is no big deal if you throw a few ads on the top or the side of a search page. In a Siri-like conversation, though, it is a whole new ballgame. It is more personal and direct, so it would be extremely off-putting to be pushed products by your "assistant".

I have my doubts about Siri taking off, but if it does, Google may have a problem on its hands.

Why you have doubts? Just look at how many articles are written about Siri in a daily basis. Most recent being bloggers writing about siri going down.

For me I use Siri everyday as it's a quicker way to accomplish many things once accomplished thru hunting and pecking to say do a google search. Obce you get to google you then have to type your query and then click to go website to read info. Siri you just ask her a question and she pulls up the info taking a five step process and turning into a 2 step process.

Any tech that simplifies and makes things easier usually becomes the norm.

I think Google may already have a problem, and it is not Siri, it is the migration to mobile. Mobile screens are small, you cannot show many ads without compromising search results. Pages are zoomed in to read, hiding contextual ads.

Computers have had microphones as a standard for years. Typing has clearly won over voice for search on desktops and laptops. On handheld devices, where the keyboard isn't as easy to type on, voice might win out. Might. You broadcasting what you're searching for every time you speak to search and you end up attracting people's attention.

Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose 'competitive threat'

Br'er Rabbit pleads, "but do please, Brer Fox, don't fling me in dat brier-patch

This is almost an insult to Apple. I read it as "Siri is so much not a threat that all the praise in the world will not help it." I also tend to agree. If you talk to your phone then you want it to talk back. Currently you input voice and then get back visual results. If you are in a voice only situation then you want to keep it in that context. If If I have the bandwidth to look at a screen and interface then I have the bandwidth to input a more specific search in the first place. Siri is a toy and Google is giving them lip service.

Uh? Have you seen any demo videos? The fact that it talks back to you and can interact only by voice is pretty much the only feature that sets Siri apart from previous voice control solutions.

You could argue that it's not complete yet, but they are doing exactly what you describe.

Google has the best combination of money, people and data (and control over Android) to make any potential Siri-killer. If anybody could do it, it'd be them.

Doesn't Siri, by default, USE Google to search for queries given to it? I've read that Google is just upset that they are cut out of the equation which results in their ads not being shown. However in this situation with Apple it seems like Google has the leverage so I would agree with other commenters that Schmidt seems to be trying to downplay Google's power to Congress.

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