Siri isn’t dumb, she’s less consistent
Everyone loves to hate on Siri. The common trope equates to her being dumb or not up to par with the other voice assistants (largely being Alexa and Google Voice Assistant). I believe this perception largely comes from Siri’s greatest opportunity for improvement: general knowledge. 1
Table Stakes
Let’s first address the table stakes among digital assistants — weather, sports, news, smart home functions, etc. I feel they all do these jobs equally well, with little differences.
For example: let’s say my living room Lurton Caséta dimmer is at 5%, but I want to raise it to 100%. If I tell Alexa to “turn on the living room lights”, Alexa is smart enough to interpret my intent as a human would and just raise the lights. A human might have more snark at first. Siri, on the other hand, does not understand my intent. If I issue the same command to her, she does nothing because the lights are already on. As if a child, she might as well be saying “the lights are already on, duh”. I must specifically ask Siri to “set the lights to 100%” or some variation.
It’s a little annoyance, and although I prefer Alexa’s handling of the situation, there is still feature parity here.
General Knowledge
By contrast, I feel this is the main area in which Siri lacks consistent feature parity with the others. Even in my own circle of friends and family, the questions that fail the most fall into this category. These are usually questions I would never ask Siri myself, since I know she can’t answer them accurately (if at all). Here are just a few examples, comparing Siri and Alexa.
Are tomatoes a fruit?
- Siri: Wolfram Alpha results with no direct answer to the question.
- Alexa: “Yes, a tomato is a fruit.”
What is the largest freshwater lake in the world?
- Siri: “Here’s what I found on the web.”
- Alexa: “The largest freshwater lake by area is Lake Superior, at 31,795.5 square miles.”
What time is Brooklyn Nine-Nine on?
- Siri: “Sorry, I couldn’t find anything called ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine playing nearby.”
- Alexa: “Season five of Brooklyn Nine-Nine airs on Fox Tuesdays at 9:30pm Eastern and 8:30pm Central.”
Now, I will say that Siri answered most of my general knowledge questions correctly (about 70% of them) as I was looking for the above examples. However, every time Siri doesn’t answer correctly or in an unexpected way, trust in the service takes another hit.
Siri’s negative perception will continue to increase until Apple addresses this area and others (hopefully in some capacity at this year’s WWDC). This isn’t Siri’s only problem, but I think it’s the biggest one. Severely reducing dumps to web searches (like above) is another one. As Siri and voice input are increasingly positioned at the forefront of new computing methods, the last thing Apple needs is to be thought of as behind. Does this all make Siri dumb? No. It makes her less consistent.
- General Knowledge. /salute ↩
Originally published at One-Tech Mind.
