[Tyler]

The 15 Most Useful iPhone and Android Voice Commands
18 April 2016, 12:00 am

                    I'll be honest: Even though I'm supposed to be a technology expert, I've long resisted using Siri and my smartphone's voice commands. For the longest time, voice recognition on phones just wasn't that good.

TIME >> TechLink

Source: AI in the News

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[ivan.moony]

I like the part of answering questions. Some pretty impressive results were made there, like answering things about statistics in sports. I'm not sure to what extent the questions are analyzed. On the other side, chatbots also give impressing results, although they usually don't fragment questions by the rules of natural language grammar. I'd like to know what technology GoogleNow and Siri use.

[Don Patrick]

Siri mostly uses predefined keywords, similar to a chatbot. The difference is that Siri also takes previous context into account to increase its accuracy, and can learn new keywords. Some of Siri's keywords are set to trigger Yelp, the restaurant finding service, while some others trigger the weather service. Whatever Siri doesn't have keywords for, it passes on to WolfRam Alpha or Google. Sports are very likely to be one of those narrow domains that it has keywords built in for: There is a limited number of things you could be asking about, after all. You can bet the voice recognition uses some serious language A.I., but most of the time these virtual assistants are fairly shallow keyword interfaces to a number of online services.
I actually don't know about Google Now. I hear much praise about it, so I'd guess it works similar to Google itself, but at sentence level.

[ivan.moony]

Tx for the response, Don Patrick