
Why does Siri seem so dumb? - ssclafani
http://www.recode.net/2016/10/12/13251618/mossberg-apple-siri-digital-assistant-dumb
======
asd
>>>But I suspect that people don’t ask those questions because, after trying a
time or two and getting no answers or wrong answers, they just give up on
Siri. <<<

Absolutely this. I mean, you try a few of this these "long tail" queries and
you eventually say "Fuck it!" I attempt these "long tail" queries (which to
me, that term sounds like some shitty play-it-down excuse from Apple) weekly
just to see if Apple is finally getting their act together in regards to Siri
usefulness. I am consistently disappointed and never surprised and delighted.

I try to screenshot "Siri fails". Here are the last few in my screenshot
album:

\-------------------

"Open last screenshot" → "You don't seem to have an app named 'last
screenshot' We could see if the App Store has it [App Store]"

"Share this with my wife" (Photo was open in Photos.app) → "I'm sorry Joe, I'm
afraid I can't do that"

"When is the last time I exercised" → "Interesting Question, Joe"

"What year was this song recorded" (In Music app with song playing) →
"Interesting question, Joe"

\-------------------

We're living in a world where we can do more and more without using the screen
as an interface. It's happening. I'm worried that Siri is a low priority
product for Apple right now and they will soon be scrambling to play catch up
if they aren't already.

EDIT: I'm hoping that Apple's recent buddying up with IBM allows for some of
Watson's intellect to seep into Siri. Who knows, maybe in a future keynote
we'll hear Tim say, "Ladies and gentlemen, Watson is coming to your Mac and
iPhone!"

~~~
gxs
FWIW none of those work with the all mighty google's personal assistant either
on my nexus 5x.

~~~
fizzbatter
Out of curiosity, is this the the actual "Google Assistant" you're referring
to? Or simply Google Now?

I believe there is a difference, but that's purely speculation on my park.
I'll be able to test it more in ~2 weeks when my Pixel XL arrives.

~~~
gxs
Ah good point - this might be google now. It's the voice search feature on the
search bar that persists on all home screens.

Didn't realize they might be different products.

~~~
fizzbatter
I _believe_ they have added ML in the Assistant, along with some new features
like context recognition. Granted, it's of course difficult to say how much is
shared between Now and Assistant.

------
dkyc
_" It also can’t distinguish between the question of “who is” a person and a
request for that person’s contact card. For instance, I have a contact card
for Apple CEO Tim Cook. When I ask, “Who is Tim Cook?” Siri shows me the
contact card, not his bio."_

Tech reporter humblebrag of the year.

~~~
LA_Banker
I don't see it as humblebragging (any of us could create a Cook contact /
ReCode readers likely know Walt Mossberg's relationship to Apple) but, worse,
a faulty premise.

Odds are, if you have them in your contact database, you already know them;
you're not going to want Siri to give you their Wikipedia bio.

Siri has myriad faults, and thankfully someone of Mossberg's stature might
push Apple to address them, but this is not one of them.

~~~
bobviolier
If you are asking specifically for _who_ somebody is, it should tell you who
that person is - not give the contact card, because that card does not tell
you who somebody is. At least, that's what I would expect if I asked who
somebody is.

~~~
LA_Banker
I'm presupposing the contact card has their job position/title, and therefore
still answers the question – also presupposing the original (odd) premise of
wondering who someone already saved in your phone is.

The Venn overlap between the set of "contacts in your phone" and "people with
Wikipedia bios" is likely rather small. Hence why I think it's a faulty
premise to complain about Siri defaulting to contact card when these two sets
do intersect.

~~~
shopkins
That's not the point either. The point is that if I asked you, a human, "Who
is Tim Cook" and you replied "123-555-1212" or "tim@apple.com" I would be a
little dumbfounded.

If I'm asking the question - maybe a friend is nearby who doesn't know them
and I'm too lazy to explain - then I want to know _who_ they are, not _what_
their contact info is.

~~~
vilhelm_s
I could imagine some scenarios when I ask a human assistant "who is Joe
Bloggs" and it would be quite reasonable for them to answer "oh you've met
him, he even gave you his business card".

~~~
Rzah
Sure, but only after telling you who Joe Bloggs is, because that's what you
asked, you didn't ask 'Have I met Joe Bloggs?', an assistant (human or
virtual) that doesn't actually help isn't going to keep their job for long.

------
givinguflac
My wife is exactly the customer that's given up on asking Siri questions and
uses it for timers. I can agree that Google does a better job at answering
questions, but I don't like that Google requires access to just about
everything in my life to be at all worthwhile, which is generally why I avoid
google services. I realize I'm a minority but I don't like their all or
nothing approach to slurping my data.

~~~
captainmuon
Does Android really answer questions? The only one I know to work is "How high
is Mount Everest?". For everything else, it just reads the first sentence of
the Wikipedia article, or presents a search. I'm using a German phone, so an
English one might work better. But mine doesn't even know "What color is the
sky?"

~~~
soylentcola
The thing that always impresses me about Google Now and their voice parsing in
general isn't so much about speaking answers back to spoken queries but just
how good it can be at guessing what you mean.

My favorite example was a couple of years ago when I was at a bar. There was a
song on the jukebox ("Coffee Pot" by Cajmere) which, for reference, is a house
music song with a repeated vocal sample that says "It's time for the
perculator [sic]". I assume they mean "percolator" but that's how the guy
pronounces it in the sample.

Anyway, we were joking around and even though the bar was quite loud with
people talking loudly all around and music playing, I pulled out my phone and
asked "Ok, Google: is it time for the perculator?" I pronounced it incorrectly
like the guy in the song and within seconds, I had results. The top one was a
link to the video for "Coffee Pot" by Cajmere on Youtube and the rest were
links to other stuff regarding the song.

Now, this was at least 2 years ago and possibly more. The response to my silly
joke of a question wasn't so witty as to give me a spoken "it's time for the
perculator" or anything like that....but it could parse my words despite all
the noise and competing speech around me, it understood a mispronounced word,
and it knew that this lyric sample referred to a song with a different title
(Coffee Pot) and linked me to the video.

That was seriously the first time I was really impressed by their voice
assistant even if it was a ridiculous request. No idea what the result would
be on today's Google Now or tomorrow's Assistant (guess I'll find out when my
Pixel gets delivered). Still, even if just from an engineering and software
angle, that made me grin a bigger geeky grin than I might have imagined.

~~~
shostack
I find all of the voice responses from both to be tediously slow. I'm a fast
speaker, and I like it when people speak at a fast pace with me.

I like that Google seems to just display information for may of the responses
vs. trying to cram in some overly long witty reply or verbatim reading of the
text that takes too long to speak back.

Having some sort of speed/succinctness setting would be helpful in that
regard.

------
Doctor_Fegg
> When I asked, “What is the weather on Crete?” Siri gave me the weather for
> Crete, Illinois, a small village which — while I’m sure it’s great — isn’t
> what most people mean

Most of the narrative about Apple's maps products has simply been "Apple bad,
Google good" and hasn't looked much deeper than this (with the exception of
Justin O'Beirne's cartographic commentary, which is remarkably detailed though
much of it is just a matter of taste). But Mossberg really hits on something
here:

Apple's geocoding is way below par. The cartography is superb IMO. The routing
is very good[1]. The source data isn't bad at all. But the geocoding is really
error-prone. I've asked it for directions to Milton Keynes, a town with a
population of 250,000 just 40 miles from here, and it won't give me anything
other than the nearest branch office (in a completely different town) of a
company whose HQ happens to be in MK. I've asked it for directions to the
village of Brize Norton and it flat-out refuses, sending me instead to the RAF
base of the same name, even if I ask for "Brize Norton village", "Brize Norton
School" and so on.

Yes, geocoding is famously hard. But as an OpenStreetMap volunteer I see that
for anything other than granular street-level addresses (where we don't have
the data), our grassroots geocoder is more reliable than that built by the
most valuable company on earth. And as feedback to OSM shows, bad geocoding is
the easiest way to make people think your entire map product is no good.

[1] except there's no bike routing... but hey Apple, if you want top-notch
bike routing, give me a call ;)

~~~
dx034
Route information with Siri doesn't seem to be useful even if they know the
location. I asked Siri (in central London) how to get to heathrow the next
day. It just opened apple maps and showed me how to walk there. I guess I used
maps for in pedestrian mode before, but that answer was absolutely useless.

------
smrtinsert
While I ask Android for occasional content (while watching tv, "How tall is
blah blah actor" etc) I usually use Androids ability to get my usual
directives. "Directions to ..., Weather in..., Call <business> in
<location>..., Set timer for...". It does both very well.

I stay signed out and opted out of all Google Now features and tracking so
this is just it does by default. Voice is my primary ui for my phone. It is
very useful and I find it parses my input correctly nearly everytime, it's
very rare for it to error.

Meanwhile, my wifes iphone 6 gets basic commands wrong frequently and she
spends minutes typing all the time. Siri isn't losing, it has lost.

I don't think this actually matters to the iOS population however. It's well
known they don't buy iphones for features.

edit: A sample question from the article "when is the presidential debate" is
handled fine as an example

~~~
logfromblammo
On the occasions when I have witnessed it, _every_ attempt my spouse makes at
using Siri in an ordinary, reasonable way _always_ ends in cursing and
shouting.

It reminds me in many ways of the handwriting recognition on the Newton--which
is to say it appears to be only a hairsbreadth from absolutely useless.

~~~
smrtinsert
The most frustrating part of it for my wife is that she has great enunciation
and I'm a mumbler.

~~~
chetanahuja
Also, accents. Google sells phones all around the world and has worked very
very hard to get training data from everywhere. For example, it has no trouble
with my Indian accent at all. Siri... She's very American.

------
okket
The main gripe I have with Siri is that is still can't understand bilingual
(german/english) conversation. This makes this service unusable for me. How do
you ask Siri for a song, a movie, a person name which happens to be english,
when the device is set to german?

~~~
givinguflac
Honest question, do other assistants offer that? Just curious.

~~~
elboru
Yes, I'm a native Spanish speaker and Google Now works great with bilingual
queries for me, that has been improving in recent years.

I always select English as my default language in my phones, some years ago if
I wanted to call someone with a Spanish name saying something like "Call Ramon
Hernandez" or asking for directions "Take me to Periférico de la Juventud" I
used to had to fake an American accent. Today I don't have to do that anymore,
I can speak natural Spanish and then it can understand my Mexican accent when
I speak English. So it's not just improving in bilingual queries, they have
focused in accents and mispronunciations.

------
singularity2001
Siri seems so dumb because she is dumb, incredibly annoyingly dumb. Not
compared to humans, but compared to what Apple could have achieved, what
others achieved some time ago. Examples see other comments and: ... “Stop
searching the web” “OK” … 1 minute later: “open my email” “I found this on the
web for ‘open my email’” (... fixed by now? ...)

"here is what I found on the web for 'what is Yen's email address'"

O. M. G. ...

------
wvenable
I wish Siri wouldn't ever show me web results; If I'm talking to my phone I
don't want to click around or often even look at it. Everytime Siri offers to
search the web for something, it's a fail.

Siri is great for setting alarms and timers -- much faster than using the UI.

------
brandon272
I recently switched back to iOS after using Android for a couple years and one
thing I found shocking is how little Siri had improved. I only use her for
creating timers these days. I'll try to schedule events but I find her success
rate at adding things to my calendar accurately is < 50%. Try correcting a
time to a just-added event. She can't do it.

I asked her for the nearest gas station the other day while driving and I
think she responded with a list of google search results? Which is almost
comical. I'm not going to grab my phone and sift through Google search results
while behind the wheel.

~~~
thesimpsons1022
nearest gas station works for me. i use it all the time. perhaps it's the
phrasing. either way, i agree with the general sentiment. only use it for
timers and directions while driving

~~~
brandon272
I'm in Canada which perhaps has something to do with it.

------
pwinnski
>It puts much less emphasis on what it calls “long tail” questions, like the
ones I’ve cited above, which in some cases, Apple says, number in only the
hundreds each day.

And every one of those "hundreds per day" is another person one step closer to
disabling Siri. Which is what I did last month. Siri got things wrong so
often, it was worse than useless.

~~~
josho
It strikes me that they are still struggling to solve the questions that get
asked thousands of times a day. So, yeh, it'd be nice to have the long tail
work too. But, clearly this is still very much a work in progress from all
vendors.

------
cpplinuxdude
I'd like AIs to have settings so they start engaging me, rather me always
having to engage them. e.g ask me what my tasks are today, or other types of
interactions initiated by them at a propitious time.

------
doublerebel
Because voice recognition from all the major providers goes at it completely
backwards, being ready to answer any of the world's questions in every
situation.

In the real world nothing goes like this. We start with context and work
outwards from there. And I don't mean know-everything-about-your-personal-life
context, there's no need for that either.

I'd say more but that is what I am solving at Optik. We're a bit over a year
into development and things are really starting to pick up. Using Cortana in
the Hololens is making it painfully obvious just how close but how far off the
mark remains most voice command software.

------
captainmuon
What I don't understand is why we don't try to solve this using a huge fact
database derived from natural language parsing of the web. Basically the same
approach as deep learning - something that was unfeasible 20 years ago, but
due to massive improvements in processing power now works.

What I'm thinking of is basically SHRDLU [1] on steroids. Parse a ton of web
pages. There are great natural language parsers that can parse most well-
formed English sentences. Start with simple sentences like "Golden delicious
is an apple" or "Barack Obama is the President". Then you store this in a
Subject-Verb-Object database (I just learned that this is called a Triplestore
[2]).

Every statement gets a plausibility value. Deal with ambiguity by adding
multiple interpretations of a sentence (with different plausibilites if
available). Assign an origin (e.g. website, author, quoted person ...) to each
statement. Then, you could query this by asking "What do mice like?"... and it
would make "Subject: Mice, Verb: like (enjoy), Object: ???" and return a list
of solutions, ordered by plausibility.

Does anybody have any insight into why this isn't done or wouldn't work? It
seems wierd that I can't ask my phone simple facts about the world, other than
those whose form have been hardcoded.

(Now that I think about it, the opposite would also work. Hardcode a ton more
commands. Hire 100 people, let them sift through the most common queries.
Watch a few dozen testers, add add all queries they try to use. Instead of
throwing computing resources at the problem, this would throw cheap labor at
it.)

Anyway, it boggles the mind that I can't shout "OK Google, play 'itsy bity
spider' on youtube" when my toddler demands it but won't release my phone :-).
It opens a search and shows what I want as the first result (probably
customized from my history), but I have to go the last mile myself.

[1]
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore)

~~~
jimbokun
Obviously there's still a long way to go, but yes, Google is working on
everything you suggest and more.

This is actually Google's bread and butter, and why Mossberg found so many
cases where Google Now does better than Siri. It's not clear how Apple can
catch up, either, given Google's massive advantage in training data.

------
t0mbstone
Apple and Google are both shooting themselves in the foot by insisting on
keeping their voice products within walled gardens.

Amazon is doing an amazing job of allowing the community to extend the voice
functionality of their Amazon Echo. You can build an app that does just about
anything you want and release it on their Amazon Echo store. There are already
hundreds on there, and it's only a matter of time before someone releases a
truly conversational A.I. integration for it.

My family uses our Amazon Echoes (all 6 of them, scattered strategically
around the house) for hundreds of little things throughout the week. I control
all of my lights, my thermostat, my entire home theater (via custom voice
activated scripts). I even use it to make my tempurpedic bed vibrate ("Alexa,
turn on bed vibration"). I use Echo for timers, and my morning alarm to wake
up (which also triggers my bed vibration). I use it to query wikipedia
subjects, perform quick math calculations, order new paper towels...

If you gave me a couple of hours, I could even whip up an Alexa integration
that would let me open my garage door and remote start my car in the morning
("Alexa, turn on my car's air conditioner")! It would just be an Alexa command
that triggered a custom script which would log into the web interface for my
car link and would click the remote start button. Easy. I love building this
sort of thing.

The possibilities are endless when you have an open, extensible platform. I
don't understand why Apple and Google are being so dumb and close-minded, and
still don't understand this!

------
KiwiCoder
Siri seems dumb because we are shown demos that suggest the tech is far more
advanced than it actually is.

------
Luc
Due to my (very slight) Eurotrash English accent, Siri doesn't even get over
the speech recognition hurdle four times out of five.

When it does, it replies 'Here's what I found on the web...'

I try tricking Google's app with unlikely stuff but it gets it right most of
the time, and gives a reasonable answer too.

~~~
dwc
This always cracks me up:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmWRhhvf60Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmWRhhvf60Y)

------
scarface74
I have mixed feelings about Siri. The voice recognition has definitely gotten
much better. The domains that it knows about isn't increasing nearly enough.
That's not even a matter of AI it's just doing the work. For instance knowing
what's on tv.

It does come in handy when I'm driving and for reminders. It seems to do
pretty well with directions, playing songs, playing podcasts, and messages.

I much rather tell Siri "remind me not to forget my lunch when I get out of
the car" than try to do that with the reminders app.

------
Raphmedia
When I updated to Sierra, I was excited to try out Siri (I only ever user
Android's assistant).

I quickly gave up on all the features but using it to control music.

Then, I figured out that it's useless at that too unless I set specific
playlists.

"Play Underoath" > "Finding results for 'under oath'"

... It's even worst for artists with strange names.

How am I to say "Play 30h!3".

It is even worst when you try to have it figure out music in other languages.

...

I turned off Siri.

------
TorKlingberg
I don't use Siri much, but I tried to ask "How many hours until 7 am", and it
gave me the wrong number.

------
chetanahuja
The difference between Siri and Google Now is the real downfall of iPhone (at
least for me). I have enough comfort level with Google Now today that I feel
comfortable just flinging any question at it when I'm in hands-free mode (say,
when driving) and expect a useful answer of some sort. Trying Siri on friend's
or colleagues phones, it's always a frustrating experience.

And this doesn't even include the automatic actions taken by Google Now.
Alerting me about travel times, flight delays, sports scores etc. etc. without
even being asked. Ultimately, in Google's vision, the phones are rapidly
becoming just a tiny window (no Microsoft.. not you), into all the knowledge
and power that actually resides on the cloud. Not so much for Apple, whose
core competency is, and has always been, in hardware design and supply chain
management.

------
PacketPaul
I also think Siri fails with Text messaging. I should be able to have an IM
discussion using just my voice. But the Siri interface is simply not that
involved. I'm constantine having to say "Read Latest Text Message".

------
spike021
Best use for Siri: it can turn off all alarms on its own. Helpful for when I
set 5 or more occasionally for something, I don't need to keep scrolling the
list and disabling them all one by one.

------
sssilver
Add even a faint hint of an ESL speaker accent, and Siri becomes outright
useless even for the mundane tasks... like setting a timer or sending a
message.

------
singularity2001
Serious question: Is it possible that Apple keeps Siri artificially annoyingly
dumb because they still have to pay Nuance billions for all this 'useless
chatter' on a usage bases?

------
bigtunacan
I don't know about the new Google Assistant, but I found Siri to work much
better than Google Now.

I've been an Android user for about 10 years and just switched to iOS within
the last week.

Siri is really the only feature on iPhone (so far) that I have found I prefer
to Android.

While it's far from perfect, so far I have been quite pleased with Siri. It is
able to let me do my most common tasks via voice commands. 9 times out of 10
Google Now couldn't even tell what I was saying. I attributed it to my
somewhat strange accent, but Siri has been nearly perfect on this front. Good
thing though as I loved the Swype keyboard on Android and hate typing on the
iPhone; I fat finger everything on that tiny virtual keyboard.

------
gaius
Siri on Sierra is noticeably dumber than Siri on iOS, and has a much worse
sounding voice, I wonder why that is.

------
Pica_soO
> Me and a friend carrying furniture down the stairs. Im sorry i didnt catch
> that..

>At the Chinese drive in & Then.. (ProTip: Cooking recipes line by line for a
win)

