What those Apple ads fail to report—at all—is that Siri is very much a half-baked product. Siri is officially in beta. Go to Siri’s homepage on Apple.com, and you’ll even notice a little beta tag by the name.
It is important to understand that unlike Apple’s hardware and app designs, Siri’s software could not have been fine-tuned and thoroughly tested in the lab prior to a glorious release. It had to be released in its current form, to get exposure to as much variability as possible all the way from the acoustics to the interpretation of natural language. For each of thefunny questions that Apple’s engineers had anticipated, poor Siri has to endure a hundred others.
Why do you think it has been the butt of all jokes lately at Google Voice’s transcription feature and how bad it is at guessing what people are saying? Google didn’t buy Grand Central to get into the telephony market. They did so to collection millions of hours of voice recordings to improve their understanding of human language on a global scale. Every accent, word and conversation is analyzed and we are asked to vote on how well Google did at transcribing it.
Then, 3 years after Google acquired Grand Central, Speak to Search is a feature on Google.com and its mobile apps. How is this spoken search so great? As Benoit puts it, “there is no data like more data.” Siri sucks because it doesn’t know us yet. We are the guinea pigs and it seems weak that we all upgraded to the 4S for Siri and have to be test subjects but there was absolutely no way around this for Apple. I imagine Siri remains in beta for the next 12 months.