Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the next big step in technology and consumer products, and Apple had a pretty big head start in the way it is being implemented now. But depending on who you ask, that head start may have been squandered.
Early this morning, Walt Mossberg wrote up a piece entitled, “Why does Siri seem so dumb?,” where he outlines some use cases he’s had with Siri recently, and compares it to the overarching AI movement in general, and, specifically, to Google Now and Amazon’s Echo with Alexa. Mossberg points out that Siri has gotten better, adding new feature sets (like sports and business data), but that while Apple may take the stage and make these changes official with excited announcements, Siri’s main functionality hasn’t really changed since its debut many years ago.
“For me at least, and for many people I know, it’s been years. Siri’s huge promise has been shrunk to just making voice calls and sending messages to contacts, and maybe getting the weather, using voice commands. Some users find it a reliable way to set timers, alarms, notes and reminders, or to find restaurants. But many of these tasks could be done with the crude, pre-Siri voice command features on the iPhone and other phones, albeit in a more clumsy way.”
For its part, Apple told Mossberg that Siri is constantly improving, and that was made clear by many examples Mossberg gave that, when he tried the first time, simply didn’t work. When he tweeted out his frustration, many of the questions Mossberg had asked, and initially didn’t come up with an answer, Siri can now handle — like when the next presidential debate is.
“If you try most of these broken examples right now, they’ll work properly, because Apple fixed them after I tweeted screenshots of most of them in exasperation and asked the company about them.”
However, Apple was also quick to point out that it is improving Siri in ways that the company believes are essential, based on actual usage. Apple says it is improving things like making calls, sending texts, and other “every day things,” and avoiding “long tail” questions, which apparently include things like, “What is the weather on Crete?” or when the Emmy awards show was scheduled to air.
Apple say those types of questions only number in the hundreds on a daily basis.
Mossberg says he believes this is the case because, over time, Siri users have essentially given up on the digital personal assistant, because there have been so many questions they’ve asked once, maybe twice, and not been given the answer they were looking for — or an answer at all. As a result, those folks have simply stopped asking these types of questions, ones that encompass the wider world at large, and have instead been resigned to keeping their queries “local,” and hyper-focused on specific instances.
Mossberg pointed out a Tim Cook-related query, so I had to try it myself. When I asked Siri, “Who is Tim Cook?” the digital personal assistant answered, “I think Apple’s website should be able to help you with that.” Technically speaking, yes, Siri is offering me a solution to the question, I just have to do a bit of digging — but I could have done that without involving Siri.
I tried the same query in the Google app for iOS, and Google brought up the relevant information on Tim Cook, by way of a Wikipedia entry. It barely fits in there that Apple’s the current CEO of Apple, but it’s there, with a picture, his height (!), his residence, and even gives me a list of his education.
Basically, Google gives me a profile, albeit a brief one, while Siri doesn’t give me a single piece of information on the CEO of the company that launched the platform.
In many respects Mossberg is spot-on: Siri does feel dumb, and it has felt like that for a long time — made only worse by the fact that companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others are legitimately making huge headway in more interesting upgrades. Google Now does feel smarter than Siri, and that’s not even using Google Assistant, which means it will be getting even smarter and more conversational.
Sadly, I gave up on Siri a long time ago and for the same reasons Mossberg outlines. Its usefulness beyond making calls, sending texts, and, now, even in iOS 10, sending money or getting an Uber, is too limited when compared to the competition’s efforts. Siri needs to improve in a big way if Apple legitimately wants to compete against Google and others in the AI space.
The company does have plans, of course, with machine learning leading the charge, but if Apple’s focus remains on simply improving things like making calls and sending texts, and not broadening Siri’s scope in a big way, I don’t see it as a competitor at all. And let’s not forget Samsung’s acquisition of Viv, the next big-thing in AI from the original team that created Siri. Which would be a sad way to see Apple’s lead in this space squandered so heavily.
Have you given up on Siri?
