Could SIRI be used in Desktops?

[Chris Harlan]

[Walter Soyka] “If we couple Siri with our iSight webcams, then we can edit like producers:

“Cut… NOW!”
*waves arms and snaps fingers*

Alternately, producers could replace editors altogether.
“

Ah, Siri as Preditor! I cain’t wait to see what she does with “Make it sassier, but a little more withdrawn. I mean, hold it back a bit, but really–give me some salsa.”

[Steve Connor]

[Chris Harlan] “Ah, Siri as Preditor! I cain’t wait to see what she does with “Make it sassier, but a little more withdrawn. I mean, hold it back a bit, but really–give me some salsa.””

Nearly choked laughing when I read that!!!

“My Name is Steve and I’m an FCPX user”

[Craig Seeman]

[Walter Soyka] “”Cut… NOW!”
*waves arms and snaps fingers*
“

So i have this vision of an edit session with the Producer, Director, Art Director arguing loudly. After three hours you play back the results.

[Andrew Richards]

I think Siri points to some future features from Apple in its other products, but not with voice recognition. Here’s why.

Siri was acquired by Apple, but Siri was licensing its voice recognition from Nuance. So what did Apple actually buy? Semantic search. Siri was born out of a DARPA-funded AI project at the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center. The technology that project produced is similar to the technology in IBM’s Watson. Semantic search is also what makes Google so good at knowing what you mean when you search.

Apple reportedly had a lot of negotiating to do with Nuance in order to actually use Siri in iOS as the voice-controlled assistant it was as a third party app. Nuance’s voice recognition is what turns speech into text, Siri’s own tech is what interprets that text and “understands” what you mean when you use plain language to ask it questions.

Apple would need to license much more from Nuance to bring its speech recognition to more than Siri (and maybe it has), but the cool thing that Apple owns in Siri is semantic search. Semantic search holds powerful potential for any application that has a lot of metadata to search. What you might see more likely than voice controlled editing, is semantic search in FCPX and/or other Apple products. Maybe it even becomes part of the CoreData API.

Maybe voice controls will take on a more significant role for accessibility for OS X in general and FCPX in particular, but I’m much more intrigued by the semantic search angle, where searching your content won’t have to happen with syntactically correct search terms, but natural language.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Chris Harlan] “Make it sassier, but a little more withdrawn. I mean, hold it back a bit, but really–give me some salsa.”

“Can you make that cut faster?”

“Faster than one frame? No.”

“Can you make it cut harder?”

Best,
Andy

[Jeremy Garchow]

Can someone with a 4S ask Siri, When AVFoundation is going to be ready?

[Andrew Richards]

[Jeremy Garchow] “When AVFoundation is going to be ready?”

Aside from going public for OS X in Lion when it was released (after being a private API in 10.6.7+), what do you mean by “ready”?

Best,
Andy

[Chris Harlan]

Thank you for that. Very interesting tidbit!

[Gary Huff]

[Craig Seeman] So i have this vision of an edit session with the Producer, Director, Art Director arguing loudly. After three hours you play back the results.

And you think it looks like shit and the Producer says, “That’s great!”

[Joseph W. bourke]

This is an interesting discussion. These capabilities have been a reality since Windows Vista on the PC. I’ve done a couple of courses at our local library for people who have limited mobility as far as their hands and arms go.

I tested this “theory” out on both After Effects and Premiere, and, given the full featured capability of the voice commands, it works pretty well. There’s a feature called Mousegrid, which allows you to use the mouse just the way you would with your hands, by drilling down on a sector grid which appears on the screen when you say “mousegrid”. It can be as simple as saying “Mousegrid, 1, 10, 5, double-click”, and you’re running your software from the desktop, or say “Premiere Pro, Run”, and it’s there.

While I wouldn’t switch to editing with it, I can see some very real, and very helpful capabilities to the editing public. I know several editors who’ve ended up with carpal tunnel; this would allow them to continue with their work, albeit a bit slower, in some cases.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com