A Siri design flaw

By -
One of the most annoying things about Siri is that the system tends to work very quickly, or fail very slowly. If Siri is going to get roughly what you're saying, the text usually pops up very quickly. (I use the system mainly for dictation, so I am waiting to see text on screen.) But when Siri is going to fail to get anything out of what I spoke, that failure often takes 20 or 30 seconds.

This behavior is the exact opposite of what I want. Of course, I am happy with a fast success. But I wouldn't mind waiting a while if that is what it took to actually get my words "typed." On the other hand, if the system is going to fail, I'd like it to fail right away, so I can start typing while I still remember what I was saying.

Would it be possible to fix this? I am not privy to the technical details of the system, but the failures seem to occur mostly when my network connection is weak. The fix that occurs to me is to immediately do a rough check on the connection strength and a quick estimate of the likelihood of success. If the probability of success falls below some threshold, just fail immediately, rather then repeatedly trying to do the voice recognition for 30 seconds, only to fail in the end anyway.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more