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Why does Siri seem so dumb?

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Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?

#41
post #19

>>>But I suspect that people don’t ask those questions because, after trying a time or two and getting no answers or wrong answers, they just give up on Siri. Absolutely this. I mean, you try a few of this these "long tail" queries and you eventually say "Fuck it!" I attempt these "long tail" queries (which to me, that term sounds like some shitty play-it-down excuse from Apple) weekly just to see if Apple is finally…

I keep trying to get Siri just to turn on the flashlight. I'm always disappointed when she says she can't.

Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?

#42
Siri seems so dumb because she is dumb, incredibly annoyingly dumb. Not compared to humans, but compared to what Apple could have achieved, what others achieved some time ago. Examples see other comments and: ... “Stop searching the web” “OK” … 1 minute later: “open my email” “I found this on the web for ‘open my email’” (... fixed by now? ...)

"here is what I found on the web for 'what is Yen's email address'"

O. M. G. ...

Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?

#44
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just asked mine 'what color is the sky', and it gave a reasonable answer, which is sourced from NASA. Might be a lack of corpus? Idk. Seems like if they could perfectly solve translate, that wouldn't be an issue heh heh (strong if ).

I can't wait until personal agent AI has advanced to the point where I can ask that and hear "Cerulean blue. Cerulean makes me think of a breeze. A gentle breeze..."

The future AI will find your post on the internet and will answer this as a joke.

Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?

#45
I don't know about the new Google Assistant, but I found Siri to work much better than Google Now.

I've been an Android user for about 10 years and just switched to iOS within the last week.

Siri is really the only feature on iPhone (so far) that I have found I prefer to Android.

While it's far from perfect, so far I have been quite pleased with Siri. It is able to let me do my most common tasks via voice commands. 9 times out of 10 Google Now couldn't even tell what I was saying. I attributed it to my somewhat strange accent, but Siri has been nearly perfect on this front. Good thing though as I loved the Swype keyboard on Android and hate typing on the iPhone; I fat finger everything on that tiny virtual keyboard.

Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?

#46

>It puts much less emphasis on what it calls “long tail” questions, like the ones I’ve cited above, which in some cases, Apple says, number in only the hundreds each day. And every one of those "hundreds per day" is another person one step closer to disabling Siri. Which is what I did last month. Siri got things wrong so often, it was worse than useless.

It strikes me that they are still struggling to solve the questions that get asked thousands of times a day. So, yeh, it'd be nice to have the long tail work too. But, clearly this is still very much a work in progress from all vendors.

Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?

#47

What I don't understand is why we don't try to solve this using a huge fact database derived from natural language parsing of the web. Basically the same approach as deep learning - something that was unfeasible 20 years ago, but due to massive improvements in processing power now works. What I'm thinking of is basically SHRDLU [1] on steroids. Parse a ton of web pages. There are great natural language parsers that c…

Triplestores are defiantly cool; I used one once where I put in our user's birthdays and took a public ally available TS dump (I think it was from dbpedia) of celebrities and matched them up saying things like "hey you share a birthday with X"

What was cool about that was that I didn't have to know how to get their info nor what format it was in, provided that they followed some standard namespaces.

Look up JSON-LD while you are at it. This method can be extended to the IoT and then we will get some interesting outcomes.

Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?

#48

While I ask Android for occasional content (while watching tv, "How tall is blah blah actor" etc) I usually use Androids ability to get my usual directives. "Directions to ..., Weather in..., Call in ..., Set timer for...". It does both very well. I stay signed out and opted out of all Google Now features and tracking so this is just it does by default. Voice is my primary ui for my phone. It is very useful and I fin…

On the occasions when I have witnessed it, every attempt my spouse makes at using Siri in an ordinary, reasonable way always ends in cursing and shouting. It reminds me in many ways of the handwriting recognition on the Newton--which is to say it appears to be only a hairsbreadth from absolutely useless.

The most frustrating part of it for my wife is that she has great enunciation and I'm a mumbler.

Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?

#49
When I updated to Sierra, I was excited to try out Siri (I only ever user Android's assistant).

I quickly gave up on all the features but using it to control music.

Then, I figured out that it's useless at that too unless I set specific playlists.

"Play Underoath" > "Finding results for 'under oath'"

... It's even worst for artists with strange names.

How am I to say "Play 30h!3".

It is even worst when you try to have it figure out music in other languages.

...

I turned off Siri.

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