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Comment by stevenleeg | Hacker News Reader

Since when has Siri been "an embarrassment for Apple?"

It's had a similar number of issues, as compared to Maps. The difference is, it didn't replace or introduce a must-have feature in iOS. As a result, it's failures were something users are able to overlook because Siri is still, essentially, a toy feature. It's not key to the phone's operation; heck it's non-obvious that it's even a feature because no where on the interface indicates that it exists (it's a hidden long-press action on the home button).

Maps, however, is crucial to most people that use an iPhone. After telephony and web functions, it's probably the next most used feature. So, any failure by it, even if it's slight, is amplified. Yes, you can use Google Maps on the web or another app (MapQuest should really be capitalizing on this opportunity to reclaim some relevance), but it's one of the default icons on the home screen and where most people are going to head first. It would be like the dialer not being able to call certain phone numbers or the text message not working with certain recipients. It's a vital function and has to work.

I would say Siri is probably more of a failure than Maps, but because of it's non-essential nature, that feature is able to get away with what Maps can't.

> Maps, however, is crucial to most people that use an iPhone

Citation please. Nobody I know uses google maps, even when we travel (which is a lot).

I used it three times yesterday.

Citation might be difficult, but since we are doing anecdotal evidence anyway my experience is that most people use maps apps extensively.

How do you know that nobody you know uses Google maps? I'm assuming you know at least a few people who own smartphones and who you do not often travel with; have you asked them whether they use Google maps?

What an insulting question. Of course I asked them - I'm not going to fire off that statement without checking with them.

Interesting. I was thinking the same thing. Everytime I decide to depend on ios4 maps (pre-debacle) for active usage (while driving), I end up getting lost because it was horribly offcourse. Other than offline direction search, I learnt not to depend on it. So technically, other than the Schadenfreude, I dont really have a lot of problem with ios6 maps since I can fireup maps.google.com for maps/directions

Citation! <anecdote>

FWIW, the first thing I did when I first bought an iPhone was move Maps onto the taskbar - replacing Mail - since I used Maps more than any other phone feature.

You don't know anybody who uses a mapping app on their smartphone?

Does it work for you? I stil have to meet a single person which actually can ask Siri something and Siri understands it and gives reasonable answer... I was under impression that it did not work because I'm ESL speaker: but it also does not work for people who speak english very well.

Aha and there is class action lawsuit: http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2012/06/12/class-action-lawsuit-file...

Here is the quote:

   Ryan asked Siri, “What is a class action?”

   Siri told her, “I found this meeting.”

Works for me. If it doesn’t, it’s because I asked something Siri inherently does not understand.

I think it’s pretty useful and use it sometimes.

Siri works fabulously for me. Here's how I use it, these use cases work consistently.

1. Call my wife at her office. 2. Text My Wife - I'll be home in 15 minutes. 3. Set a timer for 15 minutes. 4. Where's the closest Mc Donalds.

Obviously I'm not looking for a magic speaking encyclopedia of knowledge, that being said my primary use case for Siri is in the car, and for 90% of what I need to do it works fine.

BTW I just asked Siri "What is a class action" and it asked me if I wanted to search the web for "What is a class action" and it found the definition. I'll give it this though, whether automated or manually Siri's been pretty consistently tuned to get better and better as its gone along which was likely to happen as it got a larger and larger dataset to work with.

Yep, works nicely for me too. Definitely a net positive in functionality on the phone, even if it's limited and not entirely reliable. Text messaging can be MUCH faster with it, especially if my hands are busy.

It's no AI and you'll have trouble if you treat it as such, but if you think of it as list of occasionally useful things that it can do, then it's pretty handy.

I was very impressed by Siri the other day. I asked "Find me pictures of Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat"

And Siri responded by asking whether I wanted to search for "Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat", getting the spelling exactly correct.

I am German and we didn't get all Siri features before iOS 6 (wolfram Alpha is still missing). But I tried it more in the last days and am really impressed! Even when I thought "oh, I mumbled the word, Siri won't get it" it was correctly recognized. I most use it as text to speech for SMS. And checking Fußball Bundesliga works good. (But only first league, no info available for second league.)

Since iOS 6 (or at east I never noticed before?) there is also an info button on the Siri screen which shows example querys/commands. This hels a lot!

I'm from germany too - I mentioned this before, but did you notice that you can't speak to Siri in english at all when its set to german? This is problematic when telling Siri to play music by any artist whose name, band or album is pronounced in english - a native german name would work though.

This, I guess, would apply to every non-english country and seems like a quite an oversight rendering music controls via Siri useless. Since english words and expressions became natural parts of every language, and are also pretty common in artist, movies, brands, places, etc, Siri should always check back with its english dictionary regardless of language settings.

Yes, you are absolutely right!

Me: "Suche nach Häcker News"

Siri: "Das Web nach Hecker News durchsuchen"

Googles Search: "Meinten Sie: Hacker News"

The biggest issue with Siri was the same as with the current Maps blunder, where it works well for US users, but causes issues for everyone else.

There are some videos of non-native English speakers trying to use Siri on their new 4s (before additional languages were added), which are quite funny actually.

The same goes for the new Maps, which seems to have most of its issues related to countries outside the US.

But especially with iOS6, it's actually the first time for me personally where I feel like I'm downgrading my device instead of upgrading it: youtube app - gone, maps - replaced with inferior alternative, ...

That's what I was wondering. It's not perfect, but what it does it does well for me. Setting timers, alarms, etc... all work pretty well.

Always. But especially after Google Now.

Might not be so much about functionality as that it was down an awful lot when it was launched. To the point where several people I know gave up relying on it - a feature that works less than 95% of the time quickly becomes 0% useful because the small fraction of failures is so frustrating and annoying that you avoid the whole thing (until recently this problem applied to speech recognition in general, but it's just finally getting over that hump, I think).

Since lame tech bloggers decided Apple is ruined sans Jobs.

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