

Siri Is Apple’s Broken Promise - ryandvm
http://gizmodo.com/5864293/siri-is-apples-broken-promise

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idspispopd
Although Siri is what it is, (i.e. seemingly great for some and disappointing
for others) Apple don't really have a history of selling perfected technology
out of the gate.(At all honestly) They do however have an excellent record of
delivering software changes that enhance and add value to already purchased
hardware. It's why it's a no brainer to buy an apple product, with very few
exceptions: you are safe knowing that Apple have a plan and a pathway for the
device you've already purchased, it will get better, more featured and
ultimately rebirth the product again and again.

So with this ideology I bought a mac, and each OS X update brings something
interesting and new to my computer, so I bought an iPhone and each update
brings a larger set of features and refinements that I enjoy.

This is why I stopped buying nokia phones and dell computers. With those
devices I always knew that the best day of each of those products was the day
I opened them, after that it was a downhill slide to the garbage bin.

So, yes I use Siri, and being based in Australia I haven't been able to do
business searches, but I've found so many opportunities where it's been a
saving grace. I don't need to be annoyed by siri, because I know more
capabilities are coming in 2012 and with it being an apple product, there are
likely to be further developments past the beta tag.

------
redrobot5050
This rant goes beyond "I have a realistic view of what people expect from
Apple because I'm a tech journalist" to "I am a three year old who was
promised the world, and my expectations fell short as they were completely
unrealistic."

~~~
cheald
I'd normally agree, but this has touched on my gripe with Siri from the moment
that it was announced - Apple has the best marketing team on the planet, and
they're selling people a product that they can't deliver. Siri really isn't a
super AI. It's not a Star Trek computer, able to infer intent and reason
enough to fill in the gaps in what you didn't say, and respond in perfectly-
inflected English, yet that's what Apple's marketers are playing it up as.
This is immediately obvious in the anthromorphization of Siri as "she" - a
person, a gendered, thinking entity.

There was an awful lot of brouhaha over the past week or so about Siri being
"anti-feminist" because it failed to produce results for certain womens'
health terms, and because it fails to understand terms in
colloquial/contextual senses, rather than in literal senses. The reason this
was even an issue is because people have believed that they're being sold a
thinking assistant, so failures to locate politicized terms are viewed as
intentional censorship rather technological failure. One person writing about
it was offended that Siri couldn't determine context for a given query despite
her "obviously female voice". Where did that expectation come from?

We, as technologists, understand that Siri is a voice recognition system
married to a search engine and integrated with the phone's calendar system.
The vast majority of the population doesn't. They expect it's just "Apple
magic" that's going to sell them what they've been watching on Star Trek and
CSI for the last 20 years. The product doesn't live up to that - and it can't.
I don't think it's wrong for people to be disappointed by it. The fault - and
triumph - lies with Apple's marketing department. They've done a bang-up job
selling the feature.

By comparison, Android's voice recognition performs pretty similarly to Siri
in terms of practical usage, but it's neither hyped by the marketers, nor made
into the crux of the marketing campaign for various Android phones. The result
is that people don't buy Android for voice recognition features, and they
aren't disappointed when the voice recognition features don't work flawlessly.

Apple's marketing department could sell ice to an eskimo. Doesn't mean the
eskimo shouldn't be disappointed after the fact.

~~~
redrobot5050
Keep in mind that Siri was a wholly stand alone product for all smart phones
before it was bought by Apple. Apple has improved the product to a degree, but
really, nothing has been changed except it has been modified to run only on an
iPhone 4S.

Now to respond to claims by the Gizmodo toddler that reviewed it and kind of
work your responses in here:

1\. The "find me an abortion clinic" use case is flat out, utterly without a
doubt retarded. You couldn't find a more manufactured controversy in the
mobile space -- unless you go back to last week's now disproven "carrier iq is
an android rootkit put on by the carriers" controversy. First off, no one, and
I mean no one, searches for "abortion clinic". Both sides of the debate are
aware of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood doesn't list themselves as an
abortion agency -- despite what you might have read at TheOnion.com. Searches
that are REALISTIC Use Cases like "Pregnancy Information" or "Family Planning"
or "Birth Control" or "Morning After Pill" provide realistic results.

Yes, you can find edge uses cases that lead to Siri-baiting like above. Just
like you could Google Bomb so that when you search for "idiot" you get George
W. Bush's Wikipedia page. (I wonder..does that make the Googlebot a lefty? See
how retarded that kind of anthropomorphic-thinking is?)

2\. The editor's complaints that he can't find "the fastest route" to the
emergency room. You know what else you can do with a phone if you really need
medical care in an emergency situation? Dial 911. Odds are an Ambulance will
get you seen by a medical professional a lot faster than driving. (Also,
Google Maps on the iPhone automatically shows traffic where available. It
wouldn't be hard.)

3\. Complaining about No Turn-By-Turn baked into the iPhone: This is entirely
Google's fault -- as they obviously have an API for it, but are locking Apple
out in what you could argue is an anti-competitive behavior. This is why Apple
recently just bought a Map Tiling company. It's obviously to anyone following
the mobile wars that Apple didn't expect Google to be so responsive and
competitive in the mobile space -- probably because they originally partnered
to write the Maps app for the iPhone. Apple plans on cutting Google out of the
mobile map search space in the future. Not in time for iOS 5, but next year it
will likely be a whole different ball game.

4\. Siri is supposed to be App-aware? Where did Apple market that? Complaining
about use cases Apple hasn't even considered is childish. What next,
complaining that there isn't a third-party API for other Apps to integrate
with Siri (which will likely show up in the next year or so...)?

5\. Where are these so-called Apple users that expect "Apple Magic" all the
time? Because as a technologist, I'm guessing they don't exist. At all. Anyone
who's used an Apple product for more than an hour understands that it's still
a product, made here on planet earth, with it's on quirks and bugs. Every
iPhone user has had to reboot their iPhone. Or had a download go bad. Or had
dropped calls because AT&T is terrible. Or had to find a turn-by-turn GPS on
their own. Same goes with Macs. Apple is know for high-quality design. For
reducing the use case to such a minimal number of steps that seems so easy it
might as well be "magic". In the auto space, BMW holds a very similar
reputation. They are considered pricey, but worth it. A top notch driving
experience. Well designed, well made, etc, etc. But the auto press is very
much aware that like all other cars, it has an engine, moving parts, and can
problems. They don't "magically" expect it to suck their dick to high heaven.

In comparison, Android's voice recognition isn't Siri. It can search the web,
but it can't search wolfram alpha or the yellow pages, or Yelp, or any of the
other databases Siri is in. With Siri, you can say "Call me a cab". With
Android, you have to have a cab company programmed into your phone. To equate
the two is short sighted, at best, and technically ignorant at worst.

