Siri Is Apple’s Broken Promise | Hacker News Reader

Siri Is Apple’s Broken Promise

gizmodo.com

7 pointsryandvm5 comments

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.

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."

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.

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.

His review may be a bit hyperbolic, but this is how I predicted people would respond to Siri.

10 years ago there was a big push in commercializing automated ("intelligent") speech recognition systems. AT&T, TellMe and BeVocal were big players in this market during the last tech boom. Naturally, there was a lot of marketing behind these systems. Many claims were made that these intelligent agents would understand you and make common tasks easier.

It was all hype then, and it's all hype now. The dialog management found in Siri is likely based on research that's 10-15 years old - a slot-value style of filling in a form. VoiceXML is an example. It's the bastard spawn of speech recognition and XML, born in the late 1990s. It's woefully underpowered and simplistic, but it works reasonably well if you have good UI designers. Unfortunately, DARPA cut the cord on speech recognition grants in the early 2000s because they considered it a "solved problem." The number of speech dialog research projects fell and the subject has stagnated a bit.

Apple has great design for GUIs and hardware, but VUIs are a different beast altogether. Nuance (which provides the ASR software for Siri) has experience with creating VUIs for large corporations, but I can guarantee you they don't have the end-user ethic that Apple does. I don't think this will affect Apple much, but Siri will likely fall to the wayside like Facetime did.

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