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Walt Mossberg Calls Siri 'Too Limited and Unreliable' to Compete in 'Coming AI Wars'

mdriftmeyer said:
The logical failure is in your assumption that the slang for father, Dad, is part of her vernacular. If you want a fat repository of words and their slang equivalence; combined with their Digraph relationships in common vernacular, to their shortest-path results via Djikstra's Networking algorithms, but not have any of this discrete/finite automata stored on your phone, thus force a Cloud storage extension which requires deep search and stored procedures for repetitive and weighted patterns, while also having Apple still not store your data [privacy!!], then you and the rest of your Generation Lost don't understand the technology behind it.
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Okay, sure -- I'll buy that "father" --> "dad" is "vernacular" so to speak. However, why then, do both "mom" and "mother" both work to place the call? If the relationship is set up in contacts as such, and it is, it should be able to recognize either. One working and the other not makes no sense. Also, both father and dad used to work until six months ago. So, sounds like a software update broke it?
 
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I drive my wife nuts by going "Siri, please be a good chap and contact the local chemist and refill my prescription so I may continue to be a functional member of society. Also, please make sure the local constabulary is notified of the unusually large animal wandering about the premises herewith."

It doesn't work at all when you do that but it's funny.
 
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This is a great point, but I'm not even really asking for any of that.
Like I said earlier, it would make Siri FAR more useful for me if it was able to simply answer back verbally with more results instead of defaulting to firing up a Google search and showing you those results pages.

If I wanted to Google for answers, I'd have done that in the first place!

IMO, it would be more useful if Siri just defined the boundaries of her knowledge better. If you ask something Siri doesn't have answers to in its database, just respond that way instead of starting up a web search. There's an awful lot Siri should be able to do for you without even going out to the Internet at all. Anything math related for example, whether you're asking for the answer to an equation, or you're asking for a units conversion, should be doable. Can you ask Siri to take a photo for you from an iPhone or iPad? (I never tried that one -- but thinking about it now, why not? That would be a great remote shutter control!)



sziehr said:
Siri may blow but at least I am not giving up mountains of data for some goliath to scan and sell me to some third party. I am slowly becoming the minority who still wants to have my stuff private just cause.
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tekchic said:
Siri sets my alarms every night, and adds items to my Grocery list in Reminder. That's it. Apart from that, things like "Call my dad" completely confuzzles her where she tries to call ME... yet "Call my father" works fine. No logical sense whatsoever.

I've pretty much given up on Siri because 99% of the time, anything out of the ordinary (timers, reminder items) seem to just get me a snarky, useless response which triggers my nerd rage. :D
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Try using a nickname and / or making sure the relationships are set correctly.

http://www.macworld.com/article/2053310/teach-siri-nicknames.html
 
Amazing how they listen to Walt... but if we want Apple to enable our ability to edit a previously typed phone number and we cannot. Living internationally, we click on the link for a phone number but have to add some 00's to the front or something and no way. You have to erase the whole number, remember it, and then type it back in.. it's so pathetic, never owned a phone that didn't let you edit a typed number.
 
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sziehr said:
Siri may blow but at least I am not giving up mountains of data for some goliath to scan and sell me to some third party. I am slowly becoming the minority who still wants to have my stuff private just cause.
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That's just it.

Do you want a assistant who knows everything about you, has full access to personal data, predicts your next moves, and is super smart at the sake of giving up serious personal info, or do you want a good-as-it-can-be assistant that doesn't make you give up privacy and much personal data to use...

Me? I'll take Siri everyday as an assistant for doing things. For searches, I use Google voice via 3D touch on the Google app.

But for anything personal I use Siri. I don't give Google ANYTHING.

Also Google has been at this for YEARS and has the Google search engine and machine learning. Siri is still relatively young in comparison and Google makes a full time job out of processing information and online services. For Apple, it isn't the main focus. For them it's hardware and operating systems. I agree Siri isn't very good in comparison to Google, but again in order for Google to work as people want, you have to give up that information. For me it's not worth it. For some, it is. YMMV.
 
He's not wrong. I disabled Siri a long time ago. Inexplicably now it just randomly activates "voice control" instead - Siris older, dumber cousin.

I can't even disable that it seems!

The problem is, since users know how limited it is from their previous queries they're simply not going to keep trying it until one day it gets the question right.
 
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Siri ShortCuts

Maybe I'm just a power user but I always thought iOS 9 and then 10 were due for a Siri Scripts feature. Record a command that is stored on your device and invoked before Siri goes out to the cloud for information and then record a set of actions.

I could have Siri change the input on my app enabled receiver or mute it. I could have Siri set or disarm my home alarm system and more. If you could record repetitive tasks via AppleScript like commands or actually recording the launching of an app followed by the taps within, then Siri would be useful for automating things we do over and over. 3D Touch does some of this but Siri could have done it sooner and with more customization, allowing the user to design their own shortcuts.

Instead apps like the Yamaha AV controller have 3D Touch controls to share the app?!?!

Siri can launch an app and beyond that dictate and get information. Sending texts. That's all great. But Walt is wrong. Where Siri fails is not in providing more accurate information. Apple is correct there. But Walt missed the point that Siri completely ignores the potential to liberate the user.
 
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Siri is concentrated on short term responses. The longer the question the less chance of getting the right response. One would think that the algorithms written for Siri would be broader in scope after six years.
If Apple wants to make an impression not just a mark in the AI world they need to fix Siri. And do it fast.
 
I think maybe Siri should have a higher level person in charge of making it great.
 
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arggg14 said:
And he's exactly right. Half the time she doesn't understand what I said and most times takes 5-7 seconds to even load on my 6+
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I used to have that problem. Then I switched carriers. Now she's under two seconds… and, weirdly, her comprehension is WAY up.

Inspired by that, I replaced my home WiFi router. Now she's under a second at home, too.

I think we blame the iPhone for a lot of things upstream of it. That's not to say Siri is smart, because she isn't. But the types of questions she can answer, she's fast and accurate with.
 
The only part of Siri (and any other "personal assistant"-type thing that exists today) that uses AI, is the voice recognition. Beyond that, the actual queries use simple dumb pattern matching garbage which is never too flexible.
 
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macgeek88 said:
That's just it.

Do you want a assistant who knows everything about you, has full access to personal data, predicts your next moves, and is super smart at the sake of giving up serious personal info, or do you want a good-as-it-can-be assistant that doesn't make you give up privacy and much personal data to use...

Me? I'll take Siri everyday as an assistant for doing things. For searches, I use Google voice via 3D touch on the Google app.

But for anything personal I use Siri. I don't give Google ANYTHING.

Also Google has been at this for YEARS and has the Google search engine and machine learning. Siri is still relatively young in comparison and Google makes a full time job out of processing information and online services. For Apple, it isn't the main focus. For them it's hardware and operating systems. I agree Siri isn't very good in comparison to Google, but again in order for Google to work as people want, you have to give up that information. For me it's not worth it. For some, it is. YMMV.
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This is the issue i have with google. They mine all your data and claim it is not identifiable. I just am not sure i trust that. They are holding keys to unlock my data. Apple holds nothing to expose my data. I can use google now when i want on IOS and it does not have access to everything on my phone.
 
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Traverse said:
Siri's good for simple things like "Remind me to..." or "wake me up at..." but that's really just voice commands which tech has been able to do since the early 2000s. When Forstall announced Siri he said "the ability to understand what you mean and act on it...that's the breakthrough" and Siri has never been able to do that to me. It just recognized certain phrases.

I'm shocked at what Siri can't do. I can imagine some common stuff that Siri still can't do like:
  • "What time is XXXX on TV tonight?"
  • "What channel is XXXX on?"
  • "How much is XXXX on Amazon?"
  • "Check for new emails."
  • "When was my last email from X?"
  • "Text XXXX about [subject] in one hour."
  • "What's the best way to go to work this morning."

Some of those things are fairly advanced but with Apple's tight software integration and 5 years of Siri use I would think Apple could have taken it farther. And all this is ignoring the accuracy rates of speech recognition.


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Some super cool things that could leverage app integration would be tt
  • "Back up my system to Time Machine and then put the computer to sleep."
  • "Retrive [file name] from my last time Machine backup."
  • "Copy [folder name] to iCloud be Drive
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Well hang on there, Traverse. How recently have you used Siri?

When I asked Siri your first batch of queries just now, on my iPhone 6s Plus, she passed all but "best way to work" with flying colors. The last was really a trick question, because I work at home.

The second batch isn't relevant to iDevices, but I wouldn't put it past Siri on my Mac within the coming year.

I'm getting the feeling that Siri is suffering from initial impressions during her debut, quite a few years ago.
 
Who cares what this old fart thinks. I mean Siri is weak, but no one should be listening to this outdated dirt. And the fact that he works at the verge makes his credibility even lower. he is just stating out the obvious here
 
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scuac said:
Siri is way behind, and it is not because of "Apple refusing to harvest your data" as some people suggest. I have almost never gotten an useful answer from Siri beyond the weather.

The Amazon Echo on the other hand has been spot on most of the time. Last month I was arguing with my parents about what was the first album recorded by the Beatles. I asked Siri, "what was the first album recorded by the Beatles", and it showed the question exactly as it was on the screen, so no misunderstanding, and it replied that it didn't understand the question. I then asked Alexa the same question, and immediately got "first album was Revolver recorded in ... blah blah blah... would you like to hear it on Amazon Prime music?". Now that was more like it.
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Zaft said:
I guess you don't remember him ripping mobile me
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That was an entirely different context and set of circumstances.

Walt was merely parroting Steve Jobs very public and unusually candid confession that MobileMe Cloud and the extremely narcissistic "me.com" email address were his greatest failures.

This after he came unhinged, screaming and raging against Apple manager Erin Caton...


http://www.iclarified.com/29351/for...-jobs-an-abusive-husband-to-an-entire-company
 
Long term it's unlikely Siri will ever catch up with Google unless Apple changes it's policy of not collecting user data. It's just too much of an advantage to leverage that information.
 
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