New Study Finds Siri More Distracting Than Google Now While Driving

[newdeal]

There are obviously a lot of factors involved in good vs. bad directions and voice commands, but while I agree Apple has a way to go interpreting requests to specific addresses and guessing exactly what you meant in less-obvious cases, Siri has consistently done extremely well giving directions to specific chains or common types of store on request.

That is, if I ask "Give me directions to the nearest Dairy Queen" or "Take me to Costco", Siri almost uniformly executes that request correctly. Likewise, interestingly, it does pretty well with Yelp-answerable queries--if I say "How late is Sears open?", I get a correct answer for the local store. Basically, for the kind of directions or simple info I might need while driving, it does quite well, at least for me.

Asking about specific local businesses, particularly if they've got a very generic name or don't have a good Yelp listing, is a lot more hit-and-miss.

Yeah except I ask siri to take me to Home Depot and it directs me to a home depot that isn't even in my country! It takes me to one in Buffalo NY and I live in Canada, turns out it wants me to ask for THE Home Depot....

 

[dk001]

Yeah except I ask siri to take me to Home Depot and it directs me to a home depot that isn't even in my country! It takes me to one in Buffalo NY and I live in Canada, turns out it wants me to ask for THE Home Depot....

That was one thing I found annoying with Siri (now I only play with her occasionally) and I have read it oft and on in other articles: Siri is very temperamental on how you ask a question or make a statement.
Key Words and Tricky Phrases.

 

[Keirasplace]

No, it doesn't. The reason of their study is exactly that it's not possible to simply evaluate a "progression of distraction" between different sources of distraction: it's clearly explained in the introduction of their paper, together with an explanation of the control experiments they did and how they validated their results.

It's only hard to believe if you either didn't read or didn't understand their study.

Really, you think they validated ANYTHING. This thing is a failure in experiment building by any book on the matter.
The conclusion with ridiculous amount of precision that's taken from this so called crap goes way beyond what hey actually proved.

They can't even demonstrate that their test subject are the same and put in the exact same conditions, which would be pretty important in a study were stats actually matter.

Put people of same age, same skills, same time of day, train them a week or more on using those voice systems, put them in a driving simulator with the same driving conditions without any distraction, test a while to get a reasonable baseline.

Then, do the same thing with a distraction and increasingly bad conditions. Do it often, do it on many different days to make sure one bad day effects result, see how often people hit someone, go off road, etc. Then you'd actually have real data, not crap data.

You can even do it with other distractions so you can compare them for this set of people and experimental design.

 

[Soccertess]

Siri will never be as "good" as Google Now because Apple doesn't mine your data as intrusively as Google does.

Google now is much better at understanding language and I think much better integrated with their mapping solution, far more than Apple's is integrated with their mapping solution.

I think google now is more more functional.. which is sad because Apple really hasn't done much with Siri.

 

[dk001]

Google now is much better at understanding language and I think much better integrated with their mapping solution, far more than Apple's is integrated with their mapping solution.

I think google now is more more functional.. which is sad because Apple really hasn't done much with Siri.

The original Siri was pretty good and had great potential.
The Apple bought it and turned it into entertainment.