http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/14/siri_in_japan/
Apple's attempts to get its natural-language assistant to speak Japanese haven't gone down well locally, getting itself trounced by the Android-based Syabette Concier.
We're grateful to Kotaku for the translation, which demonstrates how Siri fails to provide directions to the hospital when told of that the user has a stomach ache, and can't even work out when someone is looking for recipes for curry, unlike the DoCoMo-provided alternative which runs on Android handsets.
It's not the first time Siri has been found wanting, even when compared to Android. Following Motorola's assertions that the voice recognition on its Atrix 2 could comprehensively outperform Siri, Gizmodo did its own testing and confirmed that even with the default software Android was just as much better at recognising spoken instructions in English as it is in Japanese.
But that misses the point of Apple, and the iPhone. Android might be the technically leading platform, but iPhone users don't want to be at the bleeding edge of technology: they want to buy into Apple's projected lifestyle. No one buys a phone 'cos it's marginally better at recognising voice commands we're a very long way from when that matters.
In the mean time Siri is good enough, and sometimes it's not **** at all:
Apple's attempts to get its natural-language assistant to speak Japanese haven't gone down well locally, getting itself trounced by the Android-based Syabette Concier.
We're grateful to Kotaku for the translation, which demonstrates how Siri fails to provide directions to the hospital when told of that the user has a stomach ache, and can't even work out when someone is looking for recipes for curry, unlike the DoCoMo-provided alternative which runs on Android handsets.
It's not the first time Siri has been found wanting, even when compared to Android. Following Motorola's assertions that the voice recognition on its Atrix 2 could comprehensively outperform Siri, Gizmodo did its own testing and confirmed that even with the default software Android was just as much better at recognising spoken instructions in English as it is in Japanese.
But that misses the point of Apple, and the iPhone. Android might be the technically leading platform, but iPhone users don't want to be at the bleeding edge of technology: they want to buy into Apple's projected lifestyle. No one buys a phone 'cos it's marginally better at recognising voice commands we're a very long way from when that matters.
In the mean time Siri is good enough, and sometimes it's not **** at all:
