Why does Siri seem so dumb?
recode.net
Why does Siri seem so dumb?
1–10 of 80 posts
Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?
#2"It also can’t distinguish between the question of “who is” a person and a request for that person’s contact card. For instance, I have a contact card for Apple CEO Tim Cook. When I ask, “Who is Tim Cook?” Siri shows me the contact card, not his bio."
Tech reporter humblebrag of the year.
Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?
#3"It also can’t distinguish between the question of “who is” a person and a request for that person’s contact card. For instance, I have a contact card for Apple CEO Tim Cook. When I ask, “Who is Tim Cook?” Siri shows me the contact card, not his bio." Tech reporter humblebrag of the year.
Also that seems like a reasonable failure condition.
Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?
#4I'd like AIs to have settings so they start engaging me, rather me always having to engage them. e.g ask me what my tasks are today, or other types of interactions initiated by them at a propitious time.
Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?
#5"It also can’t distinguish between the question of “who is” a person and a request for that person’s contact card. For instance, I have a contact card for Apple CEO Tim Cook. When I ask, “Who is Tim Cook?” Siri shows me the contact card, not his bio." Tech reporter humblebrag of the year.
I don't see it as humblebragging (any of us could create a Cook contact / ReCode readers likely know Walt Mossberg's relationship to Apple) but, worse, a faulty premise.
Odds are, if you have them in your contact database, you already know them; you're not going to want Siri to give you their Wikipedia bio.
Siri has myriad faults, and thankfully someone of Mossberg's stature might push Apple to address them, but this is not one of them.
Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?
#6The main gripe I have with Siri is that is still can't understand bilingual (german/english) conversation. This makes this service unusable for me. How do you ask Siri for a song, a movie, a person name which happens to be english, when the device is set to german?
Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?
#7The main gripe I have with Siri is that is still can't understand bilingual (german/english) conversation. This makes this service unusable for me. How do you ask Siri for a song, a movie, a person name which happens to be english, when the device is set to german?
Honest question, do other assistants offer that? Just curious.
Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?
#8"It also can’t distinguish between the question of “who is” a person and a request for that person’s contact card. For instance, I have a contact card for Apple CEO Tim Cook. When I ask, “Who is Tim Cook?” Siri shows me the contact card, not his bio." Tech reporter humblebrag of the year.
I don't see it as humblebragging (any of us could create a Cook contact / ReCode readers likely know Walt Mossberg's relationship to Apple) but, worse, a faulty premise. Odds are, if you have them in your contact database, you already know them; you're not going to want Siri to give you their Wikipedia bio. Siri has myriad faults, and thankfully someone of Mossberg's stature might push Apple to address them, but this…
If you are asking specifically for _who_ somebody is, it should tell you who that person is - not give the contact card, because that card does not tell you who somebody is.
At least, that's what I would expect if I asked who somebody is.
Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?
#9My wife is exactly the customer that's given up on asking Siri questions and uses it for timers. I can agree that Google does a better job at answering questions, but I don't like that Google requires access to just about everything in my life to be at all worthwhile, which is generally why I avoid google services. I realize I'm a minority but I don't like their all or nothing approach to slurping my data.
Re: Why does Siri seem so dumb?
#10What 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 can parse most well-formed English sentences. Start with simple sentences like "Golden delicious is an apple" or "Barack Obama is the President". Then you store this in a Subject-Verb-Object database (I just learned that this is called a Triplestore [2]).
Every statement gets a plausibility value. Deal with ambiguity by adding multiple interpretations of a sentence (with different plausibilites if available). Assign an origin (e.g. website, author, quoted person ...) to each statement. Then, you could query this by asking "What do mice like?"... and it would make "Subject: Mice, Verb: like (enjoy), Object: ???" and return a list of solutions, ordered by plausibility.
Does anybody have any insight into why this isn't done or wouldn't work? It seems wierd that I can't ask my phone simple facts about the world, other than those whose form have been hardcoded.
(Now that I think about it, the opposite would also work. Hardcode a ton more commands. Hire 100 people, let them sift through the most common queries. Watch a few dozen testers, add add all queries they try to use. Instead of throwing computing resources at the problem, this would throw cheap labor at it.)
Anyway, it boggles the mind that I can't shout "OK Google, play 'itsy bity spider' on youtube" when my toddler demands it but won't release my phone :-). It opens a search and shows what I want as the first result (probably customized from my history), but I have to go the last mile myself.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore