From this Fast Company post:
Every phonemaker on the planet has been gunning for Apple for a decade (and a bunch of them are no longer in business). Apple’s speedy and continuous reinvention has kept the competition at bay. New features, new materials, and new designs are cranked out like clockwork, year after year, and at a scale that has become truly astounding. The difficulty of the engineering, manufacturing, and marketing integration required is hard to overstate. And each year, Apple’s products get better.
Well stated. Apple’s products continue to raise the bar. At the same time they continue to get more complex, more sophisticated.
And with that rise in complexity comes cracks in the process. As Dan Moren points out in Adventures in Siri failures, inconsistency is an issue that bedevils Siri.
But to me, this is not a slam at Apple. It is more a statement about the nature of complexity. If today’s Siri was a beta release, you would marvel at the performance, at Siri’s ability to turn your spoken words into text, then translate that text into commands. Siri does a solid job at both of those things, able to do them via a device on your wrist.
Where the frayed edges show is in the bleeding edge, where Siri is asked to infer context, to walk the tree of commands into unknown territory.
When I say “Remind me at xxx to do yyy”, Siri inevitably gets it right (barring a bad net connection, overloaded server, or background noise). Some syntax is bulletproof.
The stumbles come when Siri is asked to tackle more complex contextual parsing. Try telling Siri, “Remind me when the moon is full to do the laundry”. Siri will gladly create that reminder, but not knowing that “when the moon is full” refers to an event, the whole thing is posted as a dateless generic reminder.
Is that Siri’s fault? Are we right to complain when the cracks show? Should Apple play it safe and only have Siri respond to bulletproof syntax?
My two cents? I enjoy puzzling along with Siri, trying to figure out a way to get Siri to understand the more complex queries. But I also know enough to know what Siri does well, to stick with the reliable when I need to get something done.
Siri’s still a novelty for me and I’m not very interested in training it.
to me SIRI is useful… on the apple watch! On the mac is totally useless and on the iPhone is quite useless (always having the apple watch)
p.s. people just need to lower their expectations and enjoy stuff we have now without always complaining.
Yesterday…
Me: “Siri, send a text message to Mike”
“Please put the cats upstairs.”
Siri: “Please put the cars upstairs. Ready to send?”
Me: “No. Edit. Please put the cats upstairs.”
Siri” “Please put the cans upstairs.”
Me: Gives up. POS
The problem with consistency is that some changes to Siri backend really change the experience with your phone. I’m used to say “Llévame a casa” (Bring me home in Spanish) or “Llévame al trabajo” (Bring me to work) to trigger navigation with 100% success in the last year, but for about 10 minutes two days ago, and this morning today, it has not worked.
So probably Apple is changing Siri infrastructure outside of an iOS release, which is good, but there’s direct impact on users.
Siri does a great job in understanding my text. But its the next step that is infuriating. Call X on his Mobile = “There is no mobile number for X”, even though the mobile number is being displayed by Siri.
Or every few weeks my phone forgets who i am and of course then Siri no longer knows who I am.
The losing the thread along a tree is somewhat understandable, but Siri forgets that she just asked you a question. “The nearest X is here, do you want directions to X?”: Yes : “I don’t understand, do you want me to search the web?”
One gripe I have, and it would be a simple fix, is to allow me to set the time that Siri will listen before acting on a command. All I have to do is take a quick breath and it thinks I am done. Fix that and the response time when hands free in the car, I always have to wait for Siri to say “I’m listening” because otherwise it doesn’t hear me the first time anyway.
This isn’t the exact kind of complexity you mean, but: the other day my daughter reminded me we were out of dog food (while we were out walking the dog), so I pulled up Siri and asked if the store was open. But as I asked the question, I realized I was doomed: the store’s name is Petagogy (get it?). But before I could explain to my daughter why this probably wouldn’t work, Siri had the right answer. Rock solid result IMO.
Surprising you are quoting Dan Moren isn’t he the guy who whined about the smallest thing the happened to an Apple product.
He is just a click bait writer – to me.