Siri: Let’s Talk!
Potentially Apple’s Siri changes how we interact with computers entirely: Siri, let’s talk! http://eicker.at/Siri
Tagged: Search Advertising Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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katrce
hi siri
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Gerrit Eicker
Well, she won’t hear you at this place. ;)
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Baby
Hi siri
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Siri
Hello
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Yo Mama
Hi Siri
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Adrianna
Sometimes she has a little attitude
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Doll
Hey siri.
how you doing today.
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bigL
Hi Siri
bigL, 
Doll, 
Adrianna, and 6 others are discussing. 
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Timely Tweets
Twitter starts adding Promoted Tweets advertising to users‘ timelines with Timely Tweets; http://eicker.at/TwitterTimelyTweets
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: “[W]e’re introducing a way to ensure that the most important Tweets from the organizations you follow reach you directly, by placing them at or near the top of your timeline. These Promoted Tweets will scroll through the timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once. Promoted Tweets can also be easily dismissed from your timeline with a single click. – We’ll be rolling out and testing this new offering over the next several weeks with a select group of partners… From the start, our philosophy around advertising has been simple: We put our users first and strive to create products that enrich the Twitter experience for every Twitter user.”
RWW: “How do you leverage an attention economy in a newsfeed world? If you’re a brand on Twitter, you can now pay to give your Tweets privileged placement in the streams of your followers. … I expect it will work well. Will the company ever start serving up ads from branded accounts it believes you are likely to be interested in (and who pay for it)? Maybe. The relationship between promoted Tweets in search, in the stream and promoted accounts will be interesting to watch. … The future is here, it’s being Tweeted and now there’s pre-roll. Keep it under 140 characters and I find it hard to object. It looks like a very smart system to me.”
VB: “For in-stream promoted tweets, only users who follow the account that sends the promoted tweet will see the ad, and the ads can be hidden from the stream on a one-by-one basis. … Putting these tweets out of chronological order is a bit of a departure from how the Twitter timeline has always worked, and it’s likely to cause some rancor among the service’s users. … ‘We’re seeing incredible engagement numbers – between 3 percent and 5 percent on average for Promoted Tweets… We’ve seen some as high as 52 percent,‘ said [Twitter spokesperson Carolyn] Penner… Twitter defines engagement as a clickthrough, but it also counts retweets, replies and favorites in its engagement numbers – meaning that part of the ROI includes one-on-one conversations with fans of the brand.”
TNW: “This is obviously a nice improvement for advertisers on Twitter as it greatly increases the chances that a user is going to see a Promoted Tweet if it’s surfaced. If a user follows a couple hundred people, they’re likely to miss a single Tweet unless they’re checking the service constantly. This way the ad can be delivered when the user is actually on the service.”
TC: “[T]his is clearly Twitter biggest move into the money-making waters yet. Will it work? We’ll see, but it’s clearly the next logical step for the Promoted Products. After months of perfecting them in search and on the sidebar, now they’ll be put to the real test. We should see quickly if users begin to unfollow brands as a result, or if the engagement rates go through the roof. If it’s the former, it’s back to the drawing board (again) for Twitter. If it’s the latter, it could be time to think of Twitter as a serious business.”
Forrester: “The bottom line: it’s ok to use paid media in your social marketing efforts but it’s best to start by dipping your toe. The risk isn’t in cost (most of these ads are performance based), it’s in alienating your customers. Take a similar approach the social networks are taking: focus on your organic efforts and the user experience first, then try out paid media to accelerate your efforts.”
Gerrit Eicker
FTC Goes Google
WSJ: FTC regulators are poised to hit Google Inc. with subpoenas, launching a broad, formal investigation; http://eicker.at/FTCGoogle
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook vs. Google: Advertising Duel
Facebook targets and obtains those advertisers who made Google a success: small businesses; http://eicker.at/AdvertisingDuel
Gerrit Eicker
Binghoo Ante Portas
Are you ready for Binghoo? The first phase of the Microsoft–Yahoo search alliance starts next month; http://j.mp/d8g6ye
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: Promoted Tweets
Twitter is expected to launch promoted tweets: first in search results, later in user feeds; http://j.mp/bQ7bUk
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Gerrit Eicker
AdAge: “Initially, Twitter’s version of keyword ads will appear only on searches conducted on its website; users will start seeing those Tuesday afternoon. A single ad will appear at the top of a search. That ad is itself a tweet, and users can ‘re-tweet’ the ad to pass it around, make the ad a favorite or reply to it. … Promoted tweets also have the potential to scale revenue quickly for the company, backed by $160 million in funding from a coterie of elite VC firms including Union Square Ventures, Institutional Ventures Partners, Benchmark Capital and Spark Capital. … Twitter is also not the first to try to build an ad model around Twitter search results. Search-ad pioneer Bill Gross unveiled TweetUp on Monday, which allows marketers to promote their own tweets by buying keywords. … During this roll-out, Twitter will study how resonance works and decide in the fourth quarter whether – or how – to take ads beyond search and into users’ Twitter feeds. ‘Is it great in search and horrible in the timeline? We are going to test and test and test,’ Mr. Costolo said.”
NYT: “Businesses have been eager to wade into conversations on social media, said Bernardo Huberman, senior fellow and director of the social computing lab at Hewlett-Packard’s research and development arm and co-author of a recent study that found that chatter on Twitter can forecast box-office revenue for movies. But he is not convinced that it can change people’s opinions. … At first, companies will pay per thousand people who see promoted posts. Once Twitter figures out how people interact with the posts, it will figure out alternate ways to charge advertisers. … Anyone who uses Google has grown accustomed to seeing ads alongside their search results, but Twitter users could resent seeing promoted posts in their personal content stream. – Twitter is aware of that risk. It is still figuring out how to determine which promoted posts should appear. It could be based on topics they are writing about, geographic location or shared interests of people they follow.”
VB: “It’s an idea observers of the company have suggested for quite a long time, although it’s still unclear whether those types of queries will monetize nearly as well as conventional search. Sensitive to keeping the user experience free of annoying marketing messages, Twitter will boot sponsored tweets if they’re aren’t receiving lots of replies, clicks or retweets. If this happens, advertisers won’t have to pay for the tweets. … Search ads and in-stream advertising should come as no surprise. After Twitter bought search engine Summize in 2008, search advertising was a fairly obvious approach to monetization. That said, the company has a bit of an unusual take on it. The search ads will appear at the top of results, not on the side like with Google results and Twitter is using a system they call ‘resonance’ to pull out ineffective advertising.”
RWW: “It’s not banner ads, it’s not sales of data to direct marketers, it’s not licensing access to Direct Messages to the CIA. Twitter is at its best when it keeps things simple, when it stays out of the way and acts like a dumb, if textured, pipe. Put a contextual ad up to keep the lights on, what do I care? – It’s entirely predictable, shouldn’t hurt too much and might even work. As Liz Gannes said so well in her headline at Gigaom tonight: ‘The Twitter Ad Model Revealed (What Were You Expecting, a Pony?)’“
Gerrit Eicker
TweetUp
Bid on keywords to give Twitter posts a top ranking: TweetUp, organising tweets by popularity; http://j.mp/9Wc3BB
Gerrit Eicker
Online Advertising: All-time High
IAB/PwC; PDF: U.S. online ad revenue hit an all-time high of $6.3B in Q4 2009, plus 2.6% vs. Q4 2008; http://j.mp/bYhK9b
Gerrit Eicker
Yahoo: Display Search Advertising
Yahoo will introduce search advertising that integrates images and video in paid listings; http://tr.im/gzmn
Gerrit Eicker 09:38 on 9. October 2011 Permalink |
Apple: “Siri. Your wish is its command. – Siri on iPhone 4S lets you use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. Ask Siri to do things just by talking the way you talk. Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back. Siri is so easy to use and does so much, you’ll keep finding more and more ways to use it. … Talk to Siri as you would to a person. Say something like ‘Tell my wife I’m running late.’ ‘Remind me to call the vet.’ ‘Any good burger joints around here?’ And Siri answers you. It does what you say and finds the information you need. And then it hits you. You’re actually having a conversation with your iPhone. … Siri not only understands what you say, it’s smart enough to know what you mean. So when you ask ‘Any good burger joints around here?’ Siri will reply ‘I found a number of burger restaurants near you.’ Then you can say ‘Hmm. How about tacos?’ Siri remembers that you just asked about restaurants, so it will look for Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood. And Siri is proactive, so it will question you until it finds what you’re looking for.”
Wikipedia: “Siri is a personal assistant application for iOS. The application uses natural language processing to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to an expanding set of web services. The iOS app is the first public product by its makers, who are focused on artificial intelligence applications. Siri was acquired by Apple Inc. on April 28, 2010. – Siri’s marketing claims include that Siri adapts to the user’s individual preferences over time and personalizes results, as well as accomplishing tasks such as making dinner reservations and reserving a cab. … Siri was founded in December 2007 by Dag Kittlaus (CEO), Adam Cheyer (VP Engineering), and Tom Gruber (CTO/VP Design), together with Norman Winarsky from SRI’s venture group. … It was announced on October 4, 2011 that Siri will be included with the iPhone 4S. The new version of Siri is deeply integrated into iOS, and offers conversational interaction with many applications, including reminders, weather, stocks, messaging, email, calendar, contacts, notes, music, clocks, web browser, Wolfram Alpha, and maps. Currently, Siri only supports English (US, UK, and Australia), German and French. … Siri is a spin-out from SRI International’s Artificial Intelligence Center, and is an offshoot of the DARPA-funded CALO project, described as perhaps the largest artificial-intelligence project ever launched.”
TC: “The integration with iOS seems to be just as impressive as we’ve been hearing: you can ask it to remind you to call someone before you leave the office, and it’ll automatically create an entry in the Reminders app, complete with a geo-fence just to be sure. You can also ask Siri to read your queued messages to you and make an appointment in the Calendar app. – The worst part so far? Siri indeed seems to require the iPhone 4S’s extra horsepower, because it appears to be a 4S exclusive. The kicker? Siri was originally a run-of-the-mill iPhone app. What a shame. – Siri will be a beta for the time being, as it only supports English, German, and French voice input, but there are more language add-ons and tweaks to come.”
WP: “As rumored, Apple’s doing some all-new voice-control AI stuff in iOS 5. It’s called Siri, which is the name of the app Apple bought for $200 million a couple years ago. … You can also ask Siri to look things up on Wikipedia for you, and Siri can use Wolfram Alpha to do more complicated calculations. Siri’s list of capabilities is near endless, including asking it to play genres of music for you, look up something on maps, or what the weather is. Our favorite question? ‘Siri, who are you?’ Siri responds: ‘I am your humble personal assistant.’ … The bad news? All this great stuff is only available for the iPhone 4S – Apple had to do something to force an upgrade! In all seriousness, some of this AI functionality can be incredibly processor intensive, so Siri might be leaning on the A5 chip quite heavily.”
MLS: “Siri Search, makes use of Yelp’s business ratings, thus this makes instantly makes Yelp a strong local competitor to Google Places. Yelp is now very relevant to your small business rankings. Google Places has been the big dog in local optimization or as I call it, Local Awesomeization… And your places ranking and profile completion has become very important for your local marketing.- Now, Siri, which is a virtual assistant will be able to find you anything you want… and it is using the Yelp Reviews to rank the recommendations. … Nuture your Yelp account now. Claim it, and begin getting good reviews. Local search is a science, and you have to get that information out there.”
GigaOM: “Apple’s intent when it bought Siri was rumored to be building a search engine, though Jobs defused that speculation by saying, ‘We have no plans to go into the search business. We don’t care about it – other people do it well.’ But Jobs also said earlier last year: ‘On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop. They’re (consumers are) spending all their time on these apps – they’re using apps to get to data on the internet, not generalized search.‘ – With Siri, Apple doesn’t have to get into the search game if it can use Siri to direct people to the apps, services and information they need. That’s probably not a big money-gainer for Apple, but it could put a hurt on rival Google, which relies on search advertising.”
TUAW: “Curious about the iPhone 4S’s new voice assistant feature? So were we. – [We] tracked down a set of example phrases that the new Siri voice assistant is capable of understanding. It turns out that Siri can handle many categories of voice interaction. – Without further ado, here they are, ordered by interaction category, along with Apple-supplied examples of using each category.”
FC: “Don’t let her dulcet voice and easygoing, eager-to-please manner fool you. Behind Siri, the voice-controlled personal assistant app destined to power Apple’s iPhone 4S, lies the heart of a hardened combat veteran. That’s because the technology was spun out of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s high-tech research and development arm. … For now it can only respond to simple commands, but the technology underlying it is anything but. The problem with most speech recognition technology has been that it has a hell of a time with all-too human variations in speech – accents, dialects, intonation, enunciation, and slang. Tell it you want to hide under ‘a rock’ and it might tell you about ‘Iraq.’ Like the dream of the paperless office, which the advent of the personal computer was supposed to herald, speech recognition often makes more work than it saves. Siri promises to change all that, and you should thank the wizards at DARPA. While they didn’t create the technology, they incubated it. … I can’t wait to tell that to my Siri-powered iPhone, although I doubt it’ll know how to respond – not yet, anyhow.”
TC: “The most talked about element of … Apple event had to be Siri. The new feature of the iPhone 4S, born out of Apple’s purchase of the company by the same name in 2010, looks amazing. But one thing never mentioned during the keynote was a key piece of technology behind Siri: Nuance. – We first reported that Siri would be a key part of iOS 5 back in March. As we dug deeper, we learned that Apple and Nuance were involved in negotiations to make sure this could be a reality. You see, Siri does not work without Nuance. … So, is Nuance a part of Apple’s implementation of Siri as well? Yes. Though, don’t bother trying to get anyone to admit that. …Nuance is powering Siri. But Apple clearly struck a deal with Nuance which precludes them from talking about it. This is Apple technology, this is not about Nuance, is how I imagine Apple may put it. Apparently, Nuance is happy enough with Apple’s undoubtedly large check for this licensing agreement that they are willing to keep quiet.”
RWW: “Apple finally introduced the availability of the voice-command personal assistant app it paid $200m for today, called Siri. The military spin-off technology was both widely loved and often panned when it was available independently; it was either lovable Skynet or a fish on a bicycle, depending on who you ask. I tended towards thinking it the latter, myself. … But what do I want as a user – on my iPhone? I want Swype! Swype is a keyboard program available on almost every smartphone in the world except the iPhone. … It’s the fastest way to provide input on a mobile device. It’s fabulous and it’s incredible that Swype isn’t on iOS yet. I assume it’s because of Apple’s strict control over interface design and unwillingness to provide options in design. … Time will tell, but I don’t think Siri is going to be a killer app on the iPhone. Will it be used more than the current iPhone voice control? We’ll see.”
TUAW: “Since the iPhone 4S features the same A5 processor as the iPad 2, owners of Apple’s current-gen tablet have wondered if it’s possible that Siri, Apple’s new voice assistant, might be offered on the iPad 2. … Voice Control as it now exists on the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 doesn’t function on the iPad or iPad 2, but there’s a reason for that: the existing commands would be essentially useless on those devices. … On the other hand, Siri’s commands would be immensely useful on the iPad. … In fact, we’ve done some digging into Siri and found that most of the actual work of understanding voice commands gets offloaded to external servers. In essence, the iPhone 4S and its built-in processing functions determine what you said, while Apple’s servers translate that into what you meant and send that information back to your iPhone. … For the time being, Siri remains an iPhone 4S exclusive and one we have yet to test for ourselves. We look forward to putting this innovative feature under our interrogation lights once the iPhone 4S is released on October 14.”
Waxy: “In 1987, Apple released this concept video for Knowledge Navigator [the rest of the video is newer, probably circa 1996 or so, but the Knowledge Navigator part is from 1987], a voice-based assistant combined with a touchscreen tablet computer. … Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor’s calendar is September 16, and he’s looking for a 2006 paper written ‘about five years ago,’ setting the year as 2011. – And … at the iPhone keynote, Apple announced Siri, a natural language-based voice assistant, would be built into iOS 5 and a core part of the new iPhone 4S. – So, 24 years ago, Apple predicted a complex natural-language voice assistant built into a touchscreen Apple device, and was less than a month off.“