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Comment by tlogan | Hacker News Reader

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.”

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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 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"

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.

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.

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