Celebrating Steve: Event Video Now Available

Apple has made available the video archive of its internal event on October 19, 2011 celebrating the life of Steve. Apple stores worldwide closed momentary to allow its retail employees to participate in the event via live cast.

Go to this site on Apple to watch the event while still available. The event was hosted by Tim Cook, the new Apple CEO. Al Gore and Jony Ive were among those who gave their speeches about Steve. Steve's wife, Laurene was there too. I think the performance of Bob Dylan's Song "Forever Young" by Norah Jones was especially moving. Besides the fact that Steve was a big fan of Bob Dylan, the lyrics of the song was simply poignant.

A side note: while not that many readers here use Chrome, I found that the video was not accessible on the Google's browser. I have no idea why, but you shall have no problem using desktop or mobile versions of Safari to see the video.

Siri is a Great One Liner

When it comes to 2-way communication, Siri is quite limited. Before I go further on this allegation, let me make myself clear that I think Siri's natural language parsing is by no means a small achievement.

Seeing it in action

I spent a little time with Siri today and made this video to share:

Overall, Siri is very good at understanding natural English, to the point that you have nearly no need to learn any syntax to operate it. However, there are still some rules you need to be aware of. By and large, your day-to-day plain English, like "what are the Indian restaurants around here", or "find me an Indian restaurant", or any other ways of expressing this idea, can be handled quite comfortably by Siri, most of the time. Sometimes, you need to repeat yourself. Not a big problem.

But when it comes to a series of back-and-forth between you and the device, Siri can get a little stubborn. As you can see in the video, I asked "When is Christmas" and Siri answered perfectly. Impressive. But when I followed up with the request to "set an appointment on that day", Siri failed to associate Christmas with "that day" as a human being would.

In my test, had I say "set up an appointment on Christmas day" instead of "that day", Siri would have understood me perfectly. We human beings work mostly with implicit meanings in conversations; otherwise we would be a verbose bunch. With Siri, that assumption falls apart. To avoid yelling at Siri for being stupid, you need to start practicing forming complete, self-containing sentences today. Yikes! To some, that's more daunting that typing in an appointment.

Fair assessment

Having tried Siri, I must say, as long as you make your statement clear, you can say it however you want and Siri can understand you perfectly. Using Nuance technology, the voice to text conversion is mostly flawless too.

Where Scott Forstall tried to sell the idea of Siri "following along the conversation just like a human being does", I think it is mostly not true. To be fair, that type of conversation is NOT the intended use of Siri anyway, as that capability represents true AI that we human has yet to grasp. Looking at Siri's behavior now, it is safe to say that we have a long way to go before Siri can talk to us like Jarvis to Tony Stark.

Apple Overtakes Exxon Mobile, Again

The stock market has been on a roller coaster ride lately. Today is historical in the corporate history of Apple, not so much in overtaking the largest oil company in market capitalization as reaching its highest price per share yet, at $418.75 shortly after the morning bell. All that from a company that nearly failed a decade ago.

One Week Later - Ongoing Memorial for Steve Jobs

Today I took a trip down to the local Apple Store here in Houston Galleria, and saw this remarkable scene.

Eulogy for Steve Jobs at Apple Store, Houston.

Looking at the eulogy written allover the window on Post-it® Notes , I found Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and many other languages. As you can see in the pictures above, there is even one coming from the Andriod nation.

I stood at the window for a few minutes just to see the reactions of the mall goers. Sure enough, many people were curious about what was going on, and someone would whisper "It's for Steve Jobs". People were spontaneously picking up the blank Post-it® Notes and pens left by others to write something of their own to add to the wall. Flowers were laying before the storefront. As cynical as I could be, I must say, this phenomenon was genuine; it goes on to show how much of a cultural impact Steve has on this generation. If you want to hear more about how people reacted, I suggest watching the 10/5/2011 episode of Buzz Out Loud.

Flowers for Steve. Blank Post-it® Notes are available for passers-by's to write something.

No sign points to when this public display of mourning will end. Eventually, Apple will begin stopping people from "decorating" their austerely styled stores, but the company itself is still in the mourning phase and most likely will allow the public to express themselves this way for a little while longer.

Business As Usual

Inside the store, things aren't any different. Tomorrow the demo units of iPhone 4S will be on display, and I wonder if there will be a line of fans here in Houston, eagerly waiting to bring home their new best friend named Siri.