Over a year and a half ago I was beyond excited with Siri and the possibilities Apple could explore with it. I wrote this article and argued that Siri took a more personal approach to digital personal assistants and thus could engage and learn more about the user than ever before.
I even risked saying that the search game could be changed with a service like Siri, as Siri would learn about you in a unique way and then start to anticipate results that were more relevant to you.
I clearly remember one night when Siri surprised me in an unprecedented way. I was used to asking her to wake me up in the morning. I believe it just felt better, psychologically, to ask “wake me up at 7am” than setting up the alarm app manually.
One night I was going to bed unusually late and asked her the same question. To my surprise she added to the default message “don’t worry, I won’t forget it”. Isn’t this the reassuring message that you want to hear when you fear that the alarm might not work and then you might sleep-in due to the short night of sleep? I thought that was an amazing touch, a sign that some layer of intelligence was indeed being added to Siri.
Unfortunately though, that was the only moment of bliss in my relationship with Siri.
I still use the service on occasion, but for the most part, I get annoyed with the Siri’s delay in simply understanding what I am saying. A recording of my voice needs to hit the cloud in order to be translated to text back to me before Siri replies. Also, my accent still sometimes gets in the way, and she didn’t learn even a single thing about me or my personality. Generally, it appears that her abilities only grow in incremental bits whenever Apple decides to do so.
One night in New York I was packing for a trip to Brazil and asked Siri what the weather was like in São Paulo. To my dismay she replied, “Here’s the weather for Brasilia, Brazil, through Wednesday next week.” Well, Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, is 500 miles away from São Paulo, and its weather so distinctive, we could say it’s a different country.
“OK Google, what’s the weather like in São Paulo?” — and I see the words being interpreted by Google as I say them, which is great. An instant later, I hear back:Source : VentureBeat
“Here’s the weather forecast for São Paulo, Brazil, for Sunday night.” Oh, wait, do you know that I am traveling on the morning flight and getting there at night? Also impressive, Google used a web service to correct what it had understood initially from my question to something that made complete sense. Siri usually apologizes for not getting what I said.
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