4 ms·
The hype around Siri as a "personal assistant" and the carefully-crafted ads that show it working in an ideal context remind me a lot of the hype around Newton,
by wrs 15y ago
The hype around Siri as a "personal assistant" and the carefully-crafted ads that show it working in an ideal context remind me a lot of the hype around Newton, which caused a backlash when it turned out to be just a computer after all.
The problem is deeper than recognizing what you said or wrote. Newton's "intelligent assistant" had the same sorts of trouble with meaning, like having to use literal text from your data ("When is Dentist?" vs. "When is my dental appointment?") Apparently while computers are better at determining what words you said than they were in 1992, there hasn't been a ton of improvement in understanding what you said, even at this apparently simple level.
- ugh 15y agoHm, if there is a backslash it hasn’t started yet. I have seen nothing but an outpouring of love for Siri around the web. I don’t even think the examples in the ads are very carefully crafted. They are all pretty simple, stuff that nearly always works and where there is not much potential for confusion. Creating reminders, calendar entries, checking the weather or writing text messages is something Siri seems to get right nearly all of the time. Only when people start to push beyond that will they see the limits and because of all of the fun you can have with Siri I don’t think it matters much.
- mechanical_fish 15y agoThe problem with Newton is that there was little alternative to struggling with the handwriting recognition. You could plug in external keyboards, but they added even more bulk. I believe there was an onscreen keyboard, but who on earth wanted to tap out text with a stylus? When Siri screws up you can laugh off the problems and go with Plan B: "Use iOS the usual way, like we all did last month".