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

[macmyworld]

Wow, thanks Walt. You are dead right. Siri is brutal.

A few weeks ago I asked Siri for directions to a golf course 30 miles away and it kept naming courses around my location. Other times it has no idea what I am saying or it just does a web search.

Hope Apple is listening. One of many things falling behind.

At least we now have stickers for messages </sarcasm>

 

[arthurjohnson]

Scuac, that's an interesting anecdote, but Alexa actually flunked, if she indeed answered that the first Beatles album was Revolver. Revolver was released in 1966 and the first Beatles album, Please Please Me, came out in 1963.

 

[nvmls]

Siri was the main macOS "feature", Apple has a huge banner on their website advertising this embarrassing beta functionality and many people are accepting and supporting these half-baked release practices and spreading good word about Sierra & latest Apple software, show some respect to yourself, interact with it 5 minutes, try a few languages, try and play non-english music, locations, any kind of language mix request will make it go nuts, remind yourself how polished this addition is, and note I didn't even mention maps, forced upgrade notifications, safari or any cloud sync trash.

Also, apparently Apple thinks current openGL performance state is at it's best, metal was just another troll?perhaps Walt could share some feedback on any of these as well?

All in all, while organizing priorities, Apple decides to put a fireball on iMessages so your children can enlighten their thoughts and buy some stickers, while they are at it, they throw some ads in between as well (because it's not like you pay premium prices to avoid these), for now U.S. based only, until they get away with that and insert them globally, perhaps they could extend them to the font-polished brand new Apple Music as well, any coincidence with Microsoft is just your illusion.

 

[Traverse]

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.

You were able to get her to tell you when and what was on TV? I haven't managed that yet.

 

[pkissel]

I'm getting ready to abandon the Android phone world and get my first iPhone this Fall. But I know I'll miss the verbal search ability that my existing 2 year old Android phone does so well. I've watched my friends and wife ask Siri questions and it seems they rarely get a good answer on first try if ever. I wonder if this is just a case of Google having so much metadata to pull from with their search engine technology. They know how to data mine the Internet.

 

[arthurjohnson]

Bingo.

Those kinds of questions make for good ads and canned shootouts, but in reality who are asking these questions from their phones/cylinders/watches/tvs/computers? Maybe long tail questions shouldn't be the focus ahead of making utilitarian tasks work reliably.

And the less said about Mossberg's turn against Apple post his friend dying the better.

Brutal and accurate. Thanks.

 

[MadeMyDay]

Listen to response(s) after asking: "Is Amazon Echo is better than Siri?"

 

[Col4bin]

I'm 100% with Walt on this one.

I typically deactivate Siri on my iPhones and use Google Now. Much more reliable. (Never liked how Siri needed to connect to an Apple server just to use voice dial for phone book contacts.)

 

[swingerofbirch]

I had a Nexus 6 until I dropped it and wrecked it, and I loved using Google Now on it. Was years ahead of Siri.

Back to using Siri on my iPhone, and it's pretty bad. I have "Cox" in my contacts (my cable provider). The other day I said "Call Cox" and it started to call 911 (it interpreted me as saying "Call Cops"). I do not have "Cops" programmed as a contact. I guess that is actually "smart" in that it figures out what you mean by cops (not that I said cops, which has a bilabial stop in the /p/ as opposed to Cox which has a velar stop in the /k/ sound). It also still thinks my nearest emergency room is a veterinary hospital or a museum of an old psychiatric hospital, which is a problem caused by it using Apple Maps--an issue I have been reporting for years to Apple through the Maps app. I've never actually needed it to find me an emergency room, but I've tested out if it would know in an emergency. It varies based on whether you say "emergency room" or emergency department" and both times it gives bad results.

Sometimes it's just really stupid and like Mossberg said it gets all the info right and still makes a mistake that is local to the device. For example, I'll say "Call Joe Smith" and it transcribes it right, but says there is no one by that name in my contacts even though there is. Other times it will say, "Did you mean call Joe Smith?" even though up above it shows that's exactly what I had just said.

As far as transcribing correctly, the Nexus 6 was also way faster and way more accurate.

A problem that Apple has is that it doesn't know or care that it has problems. I've been telling Apple that their software has been in decline since whenever it was that Lion came out. But they were in an ascendency so great, I don't think they could see that their quality was declining. At least in the 1990s, they knew that they had problems and they were trying to find solutions. Buying NeXT and bringing on Steve Jobs was one of the smartest things they did. But even before that they were acknowledging issues with Mac OS and had various plans to try to come up with a next generation OS. Now they're too rich to care.

 

[monstruo]

One function of iOS that I never bother with.

 

[talkin73]

Like the vast majority, also agree. Least useful aspect of my iPhone and any actual progress in performance is moving at a glacial pace. Can't say I recognize much different in Siri's iOS 10 incarnation from her very first appearances in iOS years back. Time to fix it or forget it.

 

[kahkityoong]

Yep. Most of the time I've used Siri I've ended the conversation with "Siri, you're an idiot!"

 

[Sedulous]

I guess I do not know enough about the technology but yeah, Siri needs to be more capable. Particularly missing is comprehension of more complex ideas and the capacity that would add.

 

[newdeal]

I agree, Siri sucks horribly badly. In fact, basically every time I have the misfortune of trying to use it I end up screaming curse words at it for completely messing up what I was wanting it to do

 

[WestonHarvey1]

You can't say "Set an appointment with Bob Smith for 2PM tomorrow" if Bob Smith is not in your contacts. That one infuriates me all the time.

 

[genovelle]

Because the voice recognition is done on Apple servers, not your device. Voice recognition is very hard and takes a lot of compute.

I thought it moved to the phone in iOS 10 ?

 

[CarlJ]

I already tweeted his article to Tim Cook. Siri needs to finally graduate from Kindergarten.

Hey! My niece, who is in Kindergarten, understands context way better than Siri.

Siri handles some direct commands really well, like "Set an alarm for 7am" or "what is 435 divided by 2.37" (my niece can't easily answer that one, yet). Siri sort of sneaks onto the human side of the uncanny valley by seeming friendly, understanding and a bit playful, but then fails hard when she can't understand some simple things and shows that she clueless about context. And it's time for Siri to step up her game.

Along the lines of context, occasionally Siri occasionally latches onto a particular interpretation of a syllable or two, and then there's just no moving forward - she can't give you directions to the store because she can't locate it by name, because she isn't parsing the name correctly. This has led on numerous frustrating occasions, to really wishing there was a way to say, "Siri, you're mishearing the name, let me spell the third word for you:..." Since there's no way to spell things like this, sometimes you're just dead in the water, and cannot (say) get directions to some place.
[doublepost=1476330224][/doublepost]

In my ideal world I would like Siri to work sort of how JARVIS works in the Iron Man movies.

This ^^^. For years - decades - my benchmark was "I'll be interested in voice control when it can understand me as well as the computer on the bridge of the Enterprise". Siri is sort of getting close to being in the ballpark (wandering around outside, anyway), but now the goalposts have moved, courtesy of Marvel: I want voice recognition and the handling of context that works as well as Jarvis in Iron Man. Bonus points for his lovely accent.

 

[AxoNeuron]

Apple is far too busy blowing billions of dollars on acquiring headphone companies and launching pointless driverless car projects to focus on where technology is actually headed, AI.

Apple really needs to focus on AI, and fast. The driverless car projects and Apple Music are never gonna be the big sales drivers that Apple had hoped they would be...something I could have easily told them beforehand. I don't know who is advising these execs in Cupertino, but obviously they don't have a clue.

I'm very impressed with what Apple has done with machine learning in Photos. They really need to take his same focus on Siri.

 

[5105973]

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.

But is it really creating a "fat repository" of words to program Siri to recognize a highly common alternate word for "father"? I can understand it would be a problem trying to extend Siri's vocabulary to include all of the cutesy words for "grandmother" or "grandfather" that people toss around like "nana" and "pawpaw", but "mom" and "dad" are pretty standard and most likely to be used before "father" and "mother".

 

[MH01]

Siri is last in the AI wars. Simple as that.

 

[thatanonymoususer]

Remind me to wash the dishes when I get home
Vs
Remind me to wash the dishes whenever I get home

Only the first one is recognized as a location reminder.

 

[Hrududu]

Newton Assist was/is more useful than Siri...

 

[CartoonCat]

If Steve Jobs was still alive....Fill in the blank.

 

[DoctorDoctor]

The worst part of Siri is not that it being dumb, it's that you have no way to point out its dumbness, via continued conversation!

No real person can guarantee to understand everything at first sight, they get them eventually by piecing together the information collected during the whole conversation.

Me: I want to visit Liz' house.
Siri: There is no one named Lucy in your contacts.
Me: Her full name in my contact is Lizzy Romi.
Siri: I am sorry I don't understand what you mean.

Would Google Assistant/Now get this right ?

 

[1rottenapple]

You know what I hate about siri. I say Siri "call nadine" (my gf). It says, "for now on Ill call you B"

WTFFFFFF I HATE YOUUUUU SIRIIII

I call her every morning, and in the afternoon why do you come up with the result?