I still have no idea why people keep calling Siri a "her". My Siri has a male voice, and fails the Turing test already at the second sentence of a conversation, so it's an "it" to me. I do use Siri a lot, and I do speak to it like a friend - a mentally handicapped friend, who is rarely able to remember my last sentence.
Something I posted before, and which is still true: Siri is useful to me only because I have figured out exactly the correct sequence of words required to do specific tasks. Everything slightly out of the ordinary is like playing the lottery with frustratingly bad odds. trying to actually rely on some level of context awareness is pointless, even though Apple heavily promoted that aspect of Siri when It was introduced.
I know how to pronounce album names to make Siri recognize them for example. Still, I have never ever managed to get Siri to play Peter Gabriel's album "So". Now with Siri's real-time voice recognition display, I can even see that it understands the word "so" perfectly well, but then it quickly changes it to "soul" to play Tower of Power's album "Souled Out" instead. Every time. Siri hates Peter Gabriel. Or it just can't imagine that someone would own an album called "So".
The funny part is that the voice control that the iPhone had before Siri worked significantly better for my music than Siri does, even though the voice control was purely client-based, while Siri is server-based. But perhaps that is a part of the problem, because a server does not have all the relevant information about what is on my phone.
Machine translation was actually my minor subject at the university in the 90's. I would have thought machine-based language recognition could have made some progress since then, but Siri can't even do some of the basic stuff that we discussed in class 20 years ago. Quite sad, actually. I rarely say "I can do this better", but in this case, I easily could. I know if I were in charge of that team, Siri would improve drastically very quickly. Yes, sounds like a case of severe over-confidence, but some stuff Siri does ist just mind-numbingly stupid.
And the same goes by the way for the pitifully bad Google and Bing Translate sites, which suffer from some similar basic problems like Siri. Someone with my background in language recognition could easily improve these significantly, but I have the impression that the teams working on Siri or Google Translate are purely software engineers with very little knowledge on how language actually works. Bizarre, but it's the only explanation for the bad results. Even more bizarre that Apple actually bought a company specializing in voice recognition to enable Siri. What a waste of money!
That would be like buying maps from a company specializing in mapping applications only to find out that the maps are wildly inaccurate. Oh... wait... Apple did that too! ;-)
