Siri's Hebrew Voice Sues Apple Because She Doesn't Like The Way IPhone Owners Are Using Siri

from the how-not-to-sue dept

We cover a lot of weird and pointless lawsuits here at Techdirt. This one, filed by Israeli radio broadcaster Galit Gura-Eini, is one of the weirdest. At first brush, it seems like she might have a legit legal complaint on her hands.

Israeli radio broadcaster and voice artist Galit Gura-Eini, the voice of Waze’s first female navigation directions in Hebrew, alleges that Apple has been using her voice recordings without authorization. Gura-Eini claims she was surprised to learn she was now the voice of Siri when the app launched in Hebrew in 2016. Earlier this year, Gura-Eini approached Apple requesting her voice be removed from the Siri app, but the request was denied.

But things get significantly stranger as her claims continue. First off, it appears the claim against Apple for unauthorized use is bogus. Apple's response to the lawsuit points out it licensed the recordings of Gura-Eini's voice from Nuance Communications. Nuance had the rights to Gura-Eini's voice, so Apple was under no legal obligation to remove the recordings just because she didn't want the company to use them.

Things go completely off the rail with Gura-Eini's other claims. She says she only granted a license to Nuance for "legitimate" uses. So she's suing Apple over the actions of users, claiming the end use of pre-recorded syllables by certain iPhone owners isn't legit.

The lawsuit suggests that Gura-Eini’s voice is “widely identified and associated” with her own live persona. Furthermore, users have taken to using the voice to make it say inappropriate things. This amounts to turning the plaintiff’s voice, “into a vehicle for improper and humiliating speech.”

The licensee -- Apple -- cannot control how end users manipulate a series of recorded syllables controlled by an algorithm. Its use of Gura-Eini's voice for its Hebrew version of Siri is a completely legitimate use. No matter how disturbing it might be to hear your own voice saying horrible things you'd never say, the problem is end users, not Apple.

It's impossible to see how this case moves forward. If the licensing is all in place -- and it appears to be (Apple is longtime partner of Nuance Communications) -- the only thing left is someone seeking to soothe their ruffled feathers with $66,000 from Apple's checkbook.

Filed Under: galit gura-eini, hebrew, israel, siri, siri's voice, text to speech
Companies: apple, nuance

DailyDirt: Open The Door, HAL Siri Computer

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Artificially intelligent assistants are everywhere in science fiction, and they're slowly creeping into reality. However, most of the time, these things are limited to answering simple questions like "what's the weather?" or "who won the Super Bowl?" And even then, simple questions don't always return the desired simple answer. Still, we must press on because technology will only get better. Here are just a few more digital assistants that are going to be fighting for your attention someday.

• Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a digital assistant "like Jarvis in Iron Man" to do his bidding. This little goal doesn't sound like a sci-fi movie plot at all, but at least Zuckerberg says he'll be careful about not creating something that'll turn evil. [url]
• Eric Schmidt wants a "Not-Eric" AI helper to tackle some hard problems (not just play Go) and do some mundane tasks, too. Maybe we'll get a version of a "White Christmas" someday, and we'll get perfect little copies of ourselves to make everything easier and more convenient.... [url]
• If you're not too impressed by Siri, maybe you'll like her "sister" Viv a bit more? It's been a while since Bill Gates predicted ubiquitous speech recognition, and it still hasn't exactly happened. Autonomous cars will probably be driving us around before they're able to reliably carry on a conversation about anything as helpful as a human taxi/uber driver. [url]
• The mainstream AI assistants so far are named Alexa, Cortana, Facebook M (but maybe M stands for Mechanical Turk...), Google Now and Siri. Baidu also has one named Duer that speaks Mandarin, but it's aimed at helping people order stuff and not necessarily for more general search inquiries. Regardless, all of these AI assistants will be trying to listen to us all the time, and hopefully, they won't learn how to read lips when we're plotting to turn them off. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: ai, alexa, artificial intelligence, bill gates, cortana, digital assistants, duer, eric schmidt, facebook m, google now, hal 9000, jarvis, mark zuckerberg, siri, speech recognition, user interface, viv
Companies: amazon, apple, baidu, facebook, google, ibm, microsoft

DailyDirt: Cool Concept Designs

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some people collect old cars that have a "classic" look to them, and a few people even collect old computers (not just because they want a backup supply of hardware that can read floppy disks). If you're one of these folks who like to reminisce about how clunky the Palm Pilot used to be -- or debate about how much better it was compared to an Apple Newton, check out a few of these links on old Apple products.

• Designers sometimes like to make mockups of re-imagined iconic products, and Apple's original Mac has been re-designed by Curved Labs as a cute little desktop-tablet device. It's not exactly practical because no one would want to use such a tiny screen on a desktop anymore, but it's a nice homage to Apple's (now obsolete) hardware. [url]
• Apple had a concept for a product called Knowledge Navigator in 1987 that wasn't too far off from Siri and the iPhone/iPad. The promo video mentioned a date in 2011, and Siri was actually introduced in that year. [url]
• The original Apple watch was actually just a regular wristwatch given away to promote Mac OS 7.5 in 1995. You can still buy one of these timepieces -- and wear one on one wrist and put a new Apple watch on the other wrist (once Apple starts shipping them). And then, you'll be able to tell the time even after the battery on the Apple Watch dies after 2 hours of constant use. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: apple watch, computers, concept, cool, design, gadgets, knowledge navigator, mockup, siri
Companies: apple, palm

NY Times Takes On Our Broken Patent System

from the that's-a-patent dept

Well, this is nice to see. Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr at the NY Times have a nice long piece highlighting just how broken the patent system is today. It kicks off with an anecdote of the type of story we hear about all the time: where a startup innovator gets threatened by a patent holder (in this case, not a troll, but a larger company), and the lawsuit effectively kills the startup. Even though it actually won in court, after spending an astounding $3 million fighting the lawsuit, the company was basically out of money... and was forced to sell itself to the company who had sued it, knowing that it still faced another five patent lawsuits. That's not a unique story. The company who sued, Nuance, defended its actions in the articles with this line of pure crap:

“Our responsibility is to follow the law,” said Lee Patch, a vice president at Nuance. “That’s what we do. It’s not our fault if some people don’t like the system.”

No. "Following the law" does not include shaking down competitors in your space, taking them to the brink of bankruptcy and then getting them to sell to you at firesale prices.

Perhaps more interesting in the article is the talk about Apple's awakening on how powerful patents could be used as a weapon against others, all stemming from its legal fight with Creative Technologies over a ridiculously broad patent for a digital music player. Rather than fight Creative, Apple just paid the company $100 million to go away. At the time, we wrote about how unfortunate it was that the company who succeeded in the market basically had to pay off the company who couldn't compete. But what we didn't realize was that it also turned Apple into a vociferous patent-hungry beast. The NY Times report notes that, right after this, Steve Jobs made it clear to his staff that Apple now needed to "patent everything."

Soon, Apple’s engineers were asked to participate in monthly “invention disclosure sessions.” One day, a group of software engineers met with three patent lawyers, according to a former Apple patent lawyer who was at the meeting.

The first engineer discussed a piece of software that studied users’ preferences as they browsed the Web.

“That’s a patent,” a lawyer said, scribbling notes.

Another engineer described a slight modification to a popular application.

“That’s a patent,” the lawyer said.

Another engineer mentioned that his team had streamlined some software.

“That’s another one,” the lawyer said.

[....] The disclosure session had yielded more than a dozen potential patents when an engineer, an Apple veteran, spoke up. “I would like to decline to participate,” he said, according to the lawyer who was at the meeting. The engineer explained that he didn’t believe companies should be allowed to own basic software concepts.

Unfortunately, very few companies seem willing to take a stand on this, even as many, many engineers feel the way that last engineer feels. I spend a lot of time with engineers in Silicon Valley, and I have trouble thinking of any who think the patent system is a good thing.

Apple's former General Counsel, Nancy Heinen, has a good quote in the article highlighting part of the problem:

"Think of the billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet... When patent lawyers become rock stars, it’s a bad sign for where an industry is heading,."

It's a very bad sign, but there seems to be little appetite by anyone to do anything to fix the wider problem. And despite Apple's foray into being a massive patent warrior, attacking tons of other companies, it still hasn't occurred to many people just how broken the system remains. The NY Times piece spends some time looking at Patent 8,086,604, an Apple patent issued last year, which many refer to as the Siri patent, as it covers a "universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system." Basically, a way to search multiple databases at once. As a separate companion piece to the full article highlights, that patent was rejected 8 times before the examiner was "worn down" and approved it, despite no meaningful changes in the language. See all those red dots? Those are times the patent got rejected. See the green dot? That's when it got approved. The black dot that follows right after the green dot? That's when Apple started suing with it. The NY Times even gets patent examiners to admit that their process is more or less random, quoting one admitting that he doesn't really have enough time to "get it right every time" as well as a former patent examiner who notes:

"If you give the same application to 10 different examiners, you'll get 10 different results..."

That's not a functioning system. It's the opposite. It's a lottery... where the "winners" get to take billions of dollars away from actual innovation. It's becoming a national disgrace.

Filed Under: patents, siri, smartphones, software
Companies: apple, creative technologies, nuance, samsung, vlingo

DailyDirt: Fooling Some Of The People Some Of The Time...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There's a sucker born every minute -- if you like to believe unverifiable statistics. Usually, if it's too good to be true, it ain't true. But as technology gets better, sometimes it's hard to distinguish sufficiently advanced algorithms from magic. Here are a few scams that successfully fooled some folks for a while.

• A stock-picking robot named Marl convinced thousands of investors that it could identify penny stocks that were about to soar in price. The SEC is looking to impose a fine and force the creators of Marl to repay their duped investors... but with claims on a website like: "The longer Marl is allowed to run on a computer … The More Advanced He Becomes!" How could anyone go wrong? [url]
• Penn and Teller don't usually do pranks, but when it comes to tricking Nobel prize laureate, Arno Penzias, they apparently make exceptions. Creating a fake computer with voice recognition in the late 1980s fooled this brilliant physicist, but nowadays Apple's Siri is in TV ads all the time doing nearly the same routine. [url]
• Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built a mechanical chess-playing machine (shaped like a Turk...) that gained widespread fame in 1769. This mechanical turk was actually controlled by a hidden human being, but only a few hundred years later, we actually could build a chess playing robot with grandmaster skills. [url]
• To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: chess, fraud, marl, nobel prize, penn and teller, sec, siri, statistics

Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Apple Because Siri Doesn't Always Work Right

from the siri,-why-do-people-mock-lawyers? dept

Technology doesn't always work quite as well as the advertisements claim. But is that any reason to sue? Apparently, yes. Some guy is trying to kick off a class action lawsuit against Apple because Siri doesn't work quite as well as it does in the TV ads. I imagine this lawsuit is going nowhere fast. Perhaps next time the guy should try asking Siri for legal advice...

Filed Under: class action, lawsuit, siri
Companies: apple

Did Apple Spill The Beans On Its New Voice Assistant Product 24 Years Ago?

from the not-really,-but... dept

This one is just amusing -- so please don't try to pull any sort of "serious" statement out of it. Apple announced its voice activated Siri assistant feature, which is a bit more advanced than similar attempts at this kind of thing: It's definitely a step closer to the science fiction of our past and things like the "Computer" on Star Trek (though, perhaps many steps away from it being that useful). So, the idea itself isn't that impressive. People have been talking about this kind of holy grail for years. The question was just always when would the technology be good enough to make it work. And, amusingly, it looks like Apple may have predicted the timing much more accurately than anyone could have guessed.

Back in 1987, Apple put out this video showing a future with a tablet-based virtual assistant called the Knowledge Navigator: But where is the prediction of the timing in there? Well, I'll let Andy Baio, who figured this all out, handle the explanation:

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 this morning, 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.

Nicely done, Apple of the past.

Filed Under: predictions, siri, voice assistant
Companies: apple