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You can already ask a spoken question and receive a (synthesized-)voice answer. So what kind of re-design/re-factoring/whatever would be required to take a fork of that code and modify it for fact-checking?

In the current "Conversations in the Digital Age" http://www.digitalage.org/ interview with Deborah Norville regarding the upcoming presidential debates, the moderator, Jim Zirin, joked that real-time fact-checking would help keep the candidates honest.

So why's that a joke? Seems like the current voice-recognition and response google interface is already poised to do just that, with possibly not-very-significant modifications. Then anybody watching the debates could just pipe the sound to the app, and hear a "bzzt" (or whatever) whenever stated facts are incorrect. Obviously wouldn't be 100% accurate, but accurate enough to make candidates think twice about what they're saying.

And doesn't have to be such a targeted insult to candidates' honesty. Just a general-purpose fact-checking app. That some people might pipe presidential debates to it would just be one more use for it. (wink,wink, nudge,nudge:)

John Forkosh
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  • Questions like this are purely speculative, unless you expect an Apple employee to wander in here and disclose trade secrets to answer this question (not likely to happen). – Robert Harvey Aug 30 '16 at 05:53
  • @RobertHarvey Well, Apple could take the idea and run with it themselves. Or, one possible way to front-end the app to accomplish the purpose, keeping the code closed-source: Just take every statement and prefix the phrase "Is it true that...?" Then a statement becomes a question, which maybe the current app answers "yes" or "no". That might or might not work. So I'm specifically asking about such possible designs, hoping to identify (a)easiest, (b)most likely to work, (c)etc, and then evaluate if any seem worth pursuing in more detail. – John Forkosh Aug 30 '16 at 05:58
  • @RobertHarvey Nothing. As per previous comment, "...then evaluate if any seem worth pursuing in more detail." In any development cycle, there are several phases that precede coding. – John Forkosh Aug 30 '16 at 06:02
  • So without any prior research on your part, or any ongoing discussions with Apple, you neverthelesss think that we have enough inside knowledge to provide some sort of meaningful guidance? I think you give us far too much credit; we're just a bunch of random strangers on the internet who think we might have something useful to say about reasonably well-focused software design questions that are actually answerable. – Robert Harvey Aug 30 '16 at 06:07
  • @RobertHarvey I don't "think", per se, anything. I wouldn't even assert it's possible. But maybe one of your so-called "random strangers" knows more about it than I do. That's what I'm hoping. From your remarks, I'm guessing you don't know much more about this topic than I do. But that doesn't mean nobody knows more. If somebody does, then the question may well be "actually answerable". Your assertion that it isn't "actually answerable" is only with respect to your knowledge (and my knowledge, too). – John Forkosh Aug 30 '16 at 06:16

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