Why Google And Microsoft Are Bad-Mouthing Apple's Chatty Siri

My wife got an iPhone 4S on opening weekend. Our consensus so far is that Siri is largely a gimmick. Fun to mess around with the first couple of days, but she hasn't used it once since.

Three problems:

1. AI Uncanny Valley. It's hard for her to know what's going to work and what's not. Things that seem like they should work, don't. It feels like it understands things sometimes, but obviously doesn't at other times. This makes the experience feel fragile and unreliable.

2. It's actually unreliable. The speech recognition is not quite good enough, and the connection/server issues were intermittently awful.

3. Robopsychology. My wife doesn't actually want everyone around her to know who she's calling or what she needs a reminder of, sort of for the same reason she leaves the room to take a phone call. It's socially awkward to broadcast your private interactions that way. This is true at work and in public, which greatly diminishes the opportunities she might have to use it. When she does get the opportunity, it never occurs to her.

Though I find the comments of both Lee and Rubin to be very short sighted, this article is equally limited in vision.

I doubt Google or Microsoft are as far behind as the author describes.

Microsoft has already been working with voice interaction with Kinect on, and WP7 has voice search. The Kinect API is being built into Windows 8.

I haven't used Android (about to install it on my touchpad), but my understanding is that the voice capabilities are there, just not as refined as Siri.

Apple has a lead here, but I doubt it is insurmountable. The challenge once again for Google and MS is that Apple has jumped up and said "we're the first to do this", and are marketing the hell out of it, so everybody else just looks like imitators.

tl;dr: "Lee [Microsoft] and Rubin [Google] must be nervous."

And don't have anything that obviously competes.

And to Rubin's "you shouldn't be communicating with a phone." Assuming he's talking about personal assistant-like communication, which personal assistant am I personally supposed to be communicating with? The one I can't afford and don't have?