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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

>Wozniak got his hands on early versions of Siri, and, he said, “I loved Siri for years. I could ask it: ‘What are the five largest lakes in California?' and get an answer. That’s hard to do any other way on the Internet. Then, Apple bought it and now, if you ask that, it gives you a list of lakeside real estate developers.”

Mmm no. It gives you a list of web results, none of which has to do with real estate. Maybe Woz's Google results were influenced by his own real estate searches :)

It's still ridicolous that you don't get a straight answer, though.

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I just tried that exact query and it showed a table of results from Wolfram Alpha of the "5 largest notable lakes in CA".

I would consider that a correct response.

I tried the exact same query and got told to google it on my iPhone.

When I asked the same question, I got a series of web search results, not Wolfram Alpha results. The top result was Wikipedia's entry "List of Lakes in California" which contains a big list alphabetized by name, not sortable by surface area.

I’ve found you can ask Siri to explicitly search Wolfram Alpha. Far from ideal.

I am getting the Wikipedia list (“I found this on the web”). Tried asking it to search Wolfram Alpha (which spellcheck corrected to WolframAlpha btw!) and it said it couldn’t find that info on WolframAlpha

You’ve actually hit on Siri’s biggest problem - inconsistency. Sometimes it works great and others it’s a head scratcher with the exact same query. I think it is getting better though.

> The top result was Wikipedia's entry "List of Lakes in California" which contains a big list alphabetized by name, not sortable by surface area.

Works for me (at least for those where a surface area is maintained in the table). Do you have JS turned off?

I got the same list from Wolfram Alpha. I wonder why so many people get different results.

I don’t think he was being serious about precisely what it gives you. I think he was commenting on how these tools are meant to either turn us into commodities or sell us stuff.

To those who worry about AI taking over everything, I present them with Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. Some of the brightest folks are working on them. They still can't make sense of often trivial questions, let alone complex ones.

I just asked Google Home that question, and it the largest lake it gave isn't a lake that exists. The largest lake (by surface area) is the Salton Sea, which was result #2.

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