
Wolfram Alpha Explains How Siri "Recommended" The Lumia By Mistake - tortilla
http://searchengineland.com/with-fix-in-place-wolfram-alpha-explains-how-siri-recommended-the-lumia-by-mistake-121671
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mcmatterson
It's shit like this, Apple.

Sure, the cutesy "tee hee, aren't I clever" routine was cute when Siri first
came along, but now that we're past that and moving into the real world of
real use, Apple's self-serving editorialism undermines the whole thing.

We're talking about a platform that is widely held to represent the future of
HCI. While there's no doubt that Siri is a technical marvel, we're still a
long, long way off from a better world in terms of actual content. If I ask
Siri what the best phone is on the market, I expect Siri to tell me the
'truth', not some banal "You're kidding right?" straight out of marketing. The
specifics of how Alpha messed up their original algorithm aside, Apple's
glossing over of these inconvenient truths doesn't bode well for the
impartiality of Siri as a knowledge conduit.

Imagine if Safari automatically re-wrote web content that was critical of
Apple, or if it simply put a giant black 'Redacted' overlay on top. There
would be riots in the street (or on Twitter). I don't see Siri's editorial
stance as any different; you're either a conduit for information or you're a
spin doctor. You can't be both.

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laconian
This is one of the reasons why I think the prognostication about Siri taking
over the world is silly. Voice UIs have to chop down the amount of information
by necessity. In cases where there are close finishes for the ranked results,
or the heuristic for selecting the top result is faulty (as in this case), or
if divining the truth from the raw data requires a human's interpretation, it
comes up short.

