I must say I agree, Apple should not be advertising something that is a beta product, and subsequently eschewing responsibility because it's still in beta. Certainly, beta software need to be tested publicly, but until you're prepared to take responsibility for the quality of the software, for heaven's sake, don't use it as a selling feature....but, as soon as Apple featured Siri in an ad he became a fundamental part of the product.
You can't feature something in your ad campaign, and then claim that since some fine print somewhere calls it "beta" you're not responsible if it utterly fails to do what you have advertised.
OTOH my Honda Accord and Pilot are far worse at understanding me (and especially my wife) than Siri is. I find that Siri understands me correctly about 95% of the time, while my vehicles' voice automation (which has a much more limited vocabulary) is closer to 50% for me and not much better than 25% for my wife (she usually has to voice dial a number four or five times to get it right when using the vehicles' voice recognition).I stopped using Siri to maintain my sanity and composure. Very poorly implemented in it's present state. I would say it's next to useless, and aside from setting an alarm Siri makes life more challenging. My Acura RL does a much better job of understanding what I am saying.
I do find Siri quite useful when my hands are not free, or even when I want to dictate a text or email instead of typing it on the virtual keyboard.Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)
I use Siri all the time and she gets what I'm saying about 95% of the time!! Sending text while driving.
Setting alarms without having to unlock the phone.
Setting timers when cooking and have my hands dirty just hold the home button!!
I actually use it more than I thought I would!! And it's only gonna get better with every iPhone gen from now on.