Siri is good for certain things.
"Siri, do I need my coat today?"
"It looks like rain."
"Thanks."
or
"Siri, I need to get laid."
"I found these escort services near you."
"Holy &*( WTF is wrong with you."
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Well I'm for the plaintiff on this one, but purely as Apple need a serious, and public kick up the ass about Siri. I use Siri every day, so let me explain why:
- There is no public listing of current bugs with Siri. If Siri isn't behaving as expected I cannot check and confirm it's because of a bug. It's a beta product, in public beta, and I can't have this information because that's not how Apple works.
- Apple won't acknowledge a bug (unless I log in as a developer) or tell me when it has been resolved. So assuming I have a bug, and know it's a bug, I will stop using that feature because it doesn't work. So now, if Apple fix it, I don't know it's now fixed (I suspect they won't detail all the bug fixes) then I will never use that feature again. How many features will I never use as a consequence.
- AppleCare are also unable to tell you what behaviour is a bug with Siri, nor will the record a possible bug. They will point you at a standard troubleshooting document and hope you go away. Having spoken to someone at Apple Exec. Relations this is exactly what they've been told to do - they have no other information. This means, that as a user I have no idea if my handset is in fact faulty, or simply has a bug with Siri. That strikes me as a fundamental problem - how long do I assume something is a bug before it turns out that it's a handset fault? 1 month? 6 months? Until the warranty runs out?
- If AppleCare can't tell you if it's a bug I waste considerable time satisfying myself that a problem I'm seeing is a bug by logically diagnosing when and how it occurs. That doesn't make me a happy customer.
- Having got so pissed off with this I ended up on the phone with Apple Executive Relations who were able to, over a three week period, and acting as an intermediary to Apple's Engineering team, determine that one of my current faults is indeed a bug (cause as yet unknown), and that the other fault was "behaviour by design". That behaviour by design means that I should "expect to have to invoke Siri twice on occasions when at home on my wifi". Why? Because the power-saving in iOS5 switches off wifi periodically. If I invoke Siri when it's in this state Siri will attempt to use the mobile network which has limited GSM data connectivity (very low signal) and after a long delay, will fail (I'm really sorry about this...). If there's no mobile network at all I get told to connect to the internet. This is because Siri initiates the network before wifi re-connects (1-2s), so trying again immediately afterwards will work. The generic nature of Siri's failure message may be masking just how many people this problem may be affecting so I thought I'd share it.
- I too have experienced the bizarre non-sequential of Siri at times. I get halfway through doing one thing, and say OK or something similar and it decides to call someone or do something entirely unrelated despite actually correctly interpreting the command I gave it.
So that's my view - Apple have dropped both balls with this one and I think they need a good public kick to encourage them to sort themselves out and be a bit more receptive to user feedback, and perhaps a bit more open about current Siri bugs. For reference, I'm in the UK on the O2 network. This all stems from an email I sent to Tim Cook asking whether the "S" in 4S stood for the number of times Siri says "Sorry" to me through the course of a day.
I can't agree more. You are 100% correct that Apple direly needs to get its bug-tracking to be more accessible to concerned users who are not developers.
Developers are computer nerds who really SHOULDN'T have time to be bug-checking things like Siri that are intended for use by the public. They should be coding and working on their own software not wasting time reporting Apple's bugs to them (unless those bugs are directly related to APIs and features they are using in their software).
The public can just submit "feedback" to apple, but you never hear back from them, you never get acknowledgement if your feedback was even received, you never get told if it's a bug or something wrong with your device. So ultimately therefore you have to call in and waste support's time, which could be saved if they just had a simple issue-tracking system like almost any other major software company...
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Here is where you go terribly wrong. And if people are dumb enough not to read the fine print or do their own research when buying a product, then it is their damn fault when they realize red bull does not give you wings and siri can not bake you cake, call your mother, and massage your back.
No, he's right, they do advertise it as a main feature. I did not know it was a beta and I'm a developer.
It has lots of problems. Most annoying to me is that it thinks you're done talking if you pause for more than a second to think. I wish it would wait until I'm done talking and say "done". Or if it had easier ways to correct words that were said wrongly.
Also there is almost no documentation on all its features with the product. I really hate it that companies have stopped documenting all the features of their products in user manuals. Software used to come with extensive documentation. Now you have to google and sift through lots of annoying forums like this one, getting lots of wrong answers along with the correct ones, to find information about core features such as OS X's dscl command.
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Doesn't matter. 30 Day return policy on the phone ensures that no one can say they got mislead.
I disagree. Even if Siri doesn't live up to claims, the iPhone 4S is still the best phone on the market. The fact that someone would have to be inflicted with an inferior phone because Siri doesn't work right is reason enough to have a grievance.