Siri, ahem, improvements

I have absolutely hated Siri until now because it has been worse than useless. I mean really, it's a bind to use, it's been so bad that really not having it at all would have been better.

How is anyone finding the advertised improvements in iOS6? I have just been having a fiddle and am not at all impressed.

It still mishears simple words from my not especially hard to understand accent. It just cannot get Lisa for example. I try it to see how it links in with directions on Maps. It tells me that there is no address for Lisa (plus family name) despite the card being displayed on the screen and asks if I want to add it. I do but it doesn't save and asks me again next time.

I try the sports stuff. I ask "What is the next fixture for Glasgow Rangers (my team)?" I get a fixture today for an American sports team called the Rangers (not sure who they are, sorry) I try Glasgow Celtic and I get what i assume is the Boston Celtics fixture instead. It works with Liverpool, correctly telling me their next game. It has no clue what Internazionale is. It gives me Barcelona's weekend score, I ask about the Champions League fixtures from tonight and last night and it doesn't know what the Champions League is.

Restaurants locally kind of come up though Yelp doesn't look too useful here.

My main bone of contention is that despite it being able to do new things to varying degrees of success, the core technology behind Siri still seems to be pretty poor.

JRoDDz said:

In America, a fixture is something you turn in the bathroom sink to get water out of it. What is a fixture??

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Really, you wouldn't recognise the term fixture to represent a sporting encounter between two teams?

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lepeos said:

You're obviously Scottish and probably from Glasgow. No one I know here can get Siri to work 'like in the ads'. I'm from Ireland and it can't understand me either.

I guess the good news is that if you were cuaght talking to your phone in Glasgow you'd be murdered.

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I am from Glasgow but I have lived away from there for 20 years. Even when i was living there few people thought I was a native of the place.

It's really terrible, it can't discern between scores and scorers - words with different numbers of syllables. On the iPad it is much worse at picking up what I say that the Dictation feature seemed to be.

secondhandloser said:

Not a term used in the US much.

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Which is fair enough, but you would know what it meant. Siri knows what it means, it just isn't smart enough to work out what fixtures you are trying to get in what competition and on what date.

What I said above, we're drifting away from the point here.

Siri 'understands' what a fixture is, it is hardly an obscure term out of the US and would apply in every single European language Siri supports. And while you would not expect Siri to have every single term in the world, they are advertising this as including sports updates and this is a normal sports terms. It did successfully tell me the correct forthcoming Liverpool fixture.

Anyway, the issues are different. The wrong fixtures with the Glasgow teams being taken as US sports teams because they have a Rangers and Celtic in their names - this despite me specifically saying Glasgow beforehand. An inability to recognise other major European football clubs. An inability to recognise the continent's biggest football competition - the Champions League.

And these issues came from nothing like any sort of intensive testing. They are using Yahoo Sportacular to provide information cards and this is a horrible app that presents information in an American style, totally alien to European football fans.