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Siri's Accuracy Continues to Improve as Apple Works to Reduce Reliance on Google

Sharp Stick

What they fail to mention is 109% of people forwarded to Bing wish they had just stabbed their eyes out and poured molen lead in the bloody, puss filled holes. Up from 100% last year.

Mathematicians were at first puzzled by this seemingly impossible percentage but upon further research, every test subject that was forced to use Bing stabbed thier eyes out and poured molten lead into the bloody, puss filled holes: making it impossible to do proper analysis.
 
NightFox said:
Never defend a technology! Technology is meant to develop to serve the requirements/limitations of existing human behaviour; human behaviour shouldn't be expected to adapt to meet the requirements/limitations of technology.
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HenryDJP said:
You're being ridiculous. So you're saying a person should be able to mumble, speak in a lazy manner, speak unusually fast or mispronounce words and a "computer" is suppose to fully understand a human??? GTFOH.
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I'm going to have to disagree with you a bit here. NightFox hits the nail. People should be able to mumble, speak in a lazy manner, speak quickly or mispronounce words. It's called being human. We are not all the same, and we all speak differently. Funny thing is, Apple, Google, and other companies who deal with speech recognition recognize this. It's why they are all steadily trying to improve their products to account for differences in speech patterns, dialects, and other idiosyncrasies. Siri and GN are getting better and better and "understanding" us. It's what they are supposed to do.

GTFOH? You're better than that.
 
Siri understands me 90% of the time. However, after I speak I often get an error message saying Siri is unable to complete my request.

I'm not sure if that's 3's appalling 3G network, though.
 
chirpie said:
I don't know, that net percentage increase (4% better) year over year seems kind of low to me. Am I the only one who feels that way? Not my field of study, so I'm not entirely sure if this is supposed to be impressive.
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I look forward to when this is at 100% comprehension
 
They also have to improve the speed at which Siri reponds if they want to reduce reliance from Google ... waiting 5-10 seconds for results is frustrating enough to make you just want to manually enter the question into Google search.

.
 
HenryDJP said:
You're being ridiculous. So you're saying a person should be able to mumble, speak in a lazy manner, speak unusually fast or mispronounce words and a "computer" is suppose to fully understand a human??? GTFOH.
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I know right? All those other dialects are just obvious bastardizations of the superior Upper Midwest American English master race, what with our long vowels and quirky rhotacism. Why can't they learn just to speak properly??

It's good to finally meet someone who has perfect pronounciation! :D
 
paul4339 said:
They also have to improve the speed at which Siri reponds if they want to reduce reliance from Google ... waiting 5-10 seconds for results is frustrating enough to make you just want to manually enter the question into Google search.
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I've almost always had instant results with Siri, I just never found it to be more reliable or even easier than just doing it yourself. Although it was handy for setting timers...as long as I didn't say "fifty" or "fifteen" (in my dialect, the "n" tends to be brief and subtle).

On another note, if you want to maximize both frustration and convenience, just ask Siri to Google your query! :apple:
 
Amazing Iceman said:
How could Un-Controlled Environment results for iOS 7 be 94% and 7%, which adds to 101% ???

The same happens to Controlled Environment for iOS 6.
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This is probably just a rounding issue. For example 93.5% and 6.5% would total 100.0%, but would be rounded to 94% and 7% if you didn't want to show any decimals.
 
HenryDJP said:
You're being ridiculous. So you're saying a person should be able to mumble, speak in a lazy manner, speak unusually fast or mispronounce words and a "computer" is suppose to fully understand a human??? GTFOH.
Click to expand...

Now seriously…

A computer is not a human being. The way a computer "understands" what you say is not the same as the way a human understands it. When iPhoto face recognition was introduced, someone posted that iPhoto had no problems distinguishing two twins that few humans could reliably distinguish - on the other hand, there were plenty of people that iPhoto could not distinguish. That's because it uses different methods than a human being.

It is quite possible that a computer could understand language that a human cannot understand. Speaking unusually fast should be no problem whatsoever. Take a nice recording of your voice and speed it up by a factor of ten, no human can understand it, but for a computer that is programmed to handle this, it would make no difference. Different accents could be handled. Not for a single word, but for longer sentences.

Now imagine a phone that can not only understand what you say, but can also understand what a person calling you says, and translate it into the accent that you understand best! _That_ would be a lot more useful than Siri.
 
Siri has gotten worse for me in IOS7.
It's like having a retarded secretary..
 
From 77% in iOS6 to 79% in iOS7 is not that much.

"Heard incorrectly" just 6% in iOS7, this sure sounds Siri is "almost perfect" which is just not even close to being
 
JHankwitz said:
Haven't you ever heard of the "new math"? It was all the rage back in the 70's and 80's. The kids from that era now work for the media, spewing forth whatever numbers they get without analysis or question.
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Um, you have that backwards. Your last sentence describes the "old maths".
 
Other frustrations...

As I've used Siri, my contact entry has become filled in with my manager, my wife, etc. so that I can say, "Tell my wife I'm late".

I display contacts as last name, first name, but somehow iOS had placed two entries in my contact with both name orderings for my manager (last name first and first name first). In this state, when I told Siri to text my manager, I got into an infinite loop of prompts asking for which manager I meant.

Another annoyance - pronouns. I often say, "Tell my wife she's crazy", which, of course, produces a text message to my wife saying, "She's crazy". I guess it's a lot to ask to translate "she's" to "you're", but it would be more conversational, though I guess it introduces ambiguities - I might be talking about the neighbor's wife.

Finally, though I haven't tried this in a while, it would be nice to be able to say, "Send John contact information for Bill".
 
FirstNTenderbit said:
I'm going to have to disagree with you a bit here. NightFox hits the nail. People should be able to mumble, speak in a lazy manner, speak quickly or mispronounce words. It's called being human. We are not all the same, and we all speak differently.
Click to expand...

Yup. The aim should be for any voice recognition software to understand anything another person would be able to understand in a normal conversation. If you speak too fast, mumble too low, or mispronounce too many words for anyone else to make out what you're saying, we shouldn't expect Siri or Google Now to be able to either. On the other hand, we shouldn't have to sit with our phones held a foot from our heads, and scream GIVE. ME. THE. DIRECTIONS. TO. THE. NEAREST. SUPERMARKET. either.
 
NightFox said:
Never defend a technology! Technology is meant to develop to serve the requirements/limitations of existing human behaviour; human behaviour shouldn't be expected to adapt to meet the requirements/limitations of technology.
Click to expand...

Palm graffiti says hello. Technology was developed (specific rules of how each character were written), people learned how the technology worked (people had to conform to the rules), everyone was happy.

Graffiti sadly went the way of the dodo due to bad management. Meanwhile, various companies are trying to make handwriting recognition more "natural", and it couldn't be more off-base. Meanwhile we have touchscreen keyboards, swype, all failing to be excellent.

We're humans, we can learn to use simple systems, or complex systems if we are motivated. Qwerty keyboards are not perfect but they put food on the table for my folks and me and millions others for a century. No one would design one the way they are now, despite them being totally learnable.

This is not criticism of your response, just an observation that there is more to it than what you said.
 
I dont know - but for me it feels like the complete opposite.

Siri keeps getting slower and worse since I bought my iPhone 4S. But maybe its just this way here in Germany.
 
NightFox said:
So even though its accuracy at understanding has gone up, the accuracy of its answers has actually got worse?
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This is because it is only looking at words heard correctly. Since it can now hear and understand more words and phrases, even those more complex - it is not illogical that Siri would not be able to answer all of these questions correctly.
 
this is the most biased report ever.
Google now spanks Siri from the left cheek to the right cheek and back to the left cheek again

for one, Google now says out loud the answers to your queries - including wikipedia queries...not just a stupid 'here's what I found'

and commands??? what commands? wake me up at___AM...Set an alarm for______. call_____. message____.
all work on google now...

Siri sucks
the only thing keeping me on iOS on my phone are iMessage, iTunes, and great design and build quality. everything else is below par, especially after iOS 7
 
paul4339 said:
They also have to improve the speed at which Siri reponds if they want to reduce reliance from Google ... waiting 5-10 seconds for results is frustrating enough to make you just want to manually enter the question into Google search.

.
Click to expand...

Response speed has little to do with Siri and more with the speed of your data connection. On wi-fi, I have never had to wait more than about 2 seconds.
 
HenryDJP said:
So you're saying a person should be able to mumble, speak in a lazy manner, speak unusually fast or mispronounce words and a "computer" is suppose to fully understand a human???
Click to expand...

Yes. I used to work for AT&T/Bell Labs, training voice recognition software, 15 years ago when I was in college. We trained the software to recognize all kinds of accents, slang phrasing, pick out words from background noise, etc.
 
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