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Apple Tells Siri To Stop Recommending Nokia
judgecorp writes "Apple has changed the answer Siri gives to the question 'What is the best smartphone ever?' to prevent the voice-driven assistant from promoting the Nokia Lumia 900. Originally Siri trawled online reviews on the web, using the Wolfram Alpha search engine, to come up with the Lumia, much to Apple's embarrassment. Now, Apple has intervened, replacing that answer with a joke: 'Wait there are other phones?'"
Do a search on Google for "What is the best web browser" and guess what, you'll get a nice list of reviews, every single one of which lists Google Chrome as the best web browser. Oddly enough, if you do the same search in Bing, you get a few results that don't seem to show up near the top of the Google search.
Basically, never look for objective information from someone who has their own horse in the race. I would no more trust Apple with advice on computer or smartphone purchasing advice than I would trust Norton with advice on the best anti-virus software.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
The joke reply seems more appropriate what I would expect from Apple. I'm surprised that they hadn't put something in place like this from the beginning.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Apple successfully changes womans opinion.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of all...
Number 1 answer: dogpile.com
Its funny, but its objective. They've avoided anti-trust by giving a genuine ranked answer. Apple, cowards that they are, just avoided the question altogether.
If I googled "best search engine" and google came back with "Wait, there's other search engines?" I would laugh, and then think them idiots.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
When I tried "What is the best cell phone ever?" SIRI came up with a cell phone store. Apparently the SIRI algorithm is essentially:
1. Is this a built-in joke phrase?
2. Does this contain keywords like "alarm" or "weather" for various command phrases?
3. Is there something with that name nearby?
4. Did a Wolfram-Alpha search come up with something?
5. Bomb.
Which kind of demos how useless the whole thing. Especially with the ridiculous lag times. The old 3GS voice commands were perfectly usable for controlling the iPod app and making phone calls. The new SIRI-fied version is entirely useless because instead of working, you just get to wait some 5-10 seconds for the SIRI servers to process whatever it was you said. Assuming it works at all.
"Call mom."
(15 seconds later) "I'm sorry, something went wrong."
(sarcastically) "Most advanced cell phone ever."
"I found a place matching 'cell phone' close to you."
"You're useless, SIRI."
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
At least Apple didn't replace the response with an endorsement for their own product, which is what I'd expect from any vendor (including Apple). Questions like this, after all, have a definite conflict of interest.
"Siri, what would the old Siri recommend as the best phone?"
Apple's perfected their time machine, then, because "wait, there are other phones?" is one of the (several) "joke" responses I got from asking "what's the best smartphone?" on the 4S launch day, amongst other responses like "the one you're holding."
Two minutes on Google backs this up.
C'mon, people. It isn't that hard.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Apple has made a strategic mistake here, giving the Apple Marketing Department control over the validity and content of the results that Siri provides.
Depending on the way you asked the question, Siri already told that joke. Maybe they added a few more phrasings, but that joke has been in there for a while, possibly since day one.
Wolfram Alpha, "Mobile phones ranked by Best Buy customer review average and customer review count:"
Currently HTC Trophy is first followed by an iPhone.
The winning phone has maybe 23 reviews (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1&_dynSessConf=-1144113708518003664&id=pcat17071&type=page&st=htc+trophy&sc=Global&cp=1&nrp=15&sp=&qp=&list=n&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960). Which must be highly significant .
The most interesting thing to me here is, that BestBuy.com reviews can be exploited to influence Siri users....
Just let the algorithms decide.
Apple Device Promotes Competition, So They "Fix" It.
Can't really blame them, though - if I were the wolf in charge of "protecting" the walled garden full of iSheep, I'd be hard pressed to not nosh on a few myself.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Or have it supply the favorite answer of programmers everywhere: "It depends!"
Check out my world simulator thingy.
For all those of you who never asked Siri what the best phone was when you first got a 4S, the joking was there from the start. Some update must have removed it and had it actually try to answer the question using Wolfram Alpha. They simply put the joke back in.
Working with apple products is like living under a communist regime, editing the 'truth' for an agenda.
Siri? Am I free?
Does anyone actually believe that the Nokia Lumia is the best phone on the market?
A lot of Lumia 900 users do.
It really seems like there's a whole lot of buzz about this phone lately, but something seems fishy. Presently, WolframAlpha (which I've personally never found the need to willingly use) returns the following when queried with "What is the best smartphone ever?":
1. HTC Trophy on Verizon
2. iPhone 4S on Verizon
3. iPhone 4 on Verizon
4. Nokia Lumina 900 on AT&T (Hey, there it is!)
5. HTC Rhyme on Verizon
WolframAlpha uses a questionable method of determining "bestness" by examining Best Buy customer reviews. Problem is, the Windows phones have so few reviews (the #1 ranked phone presently only has 21 reviews!), the averaging is broken. Obligatory XKCD
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
If you look at the current results for "what is the best smartphone ever" in Wolfram Alpha you will find that they also changed the answer. Now it just gives you a list of five smartphones tied at 5 points of average score by Best Buy customers: HTC Trophy, iPhone 4s, iPhone 4, Lumia 900, HTC Rhyme, in that order.
That's because Wolfram Alpha was indeed being embarrassed because it seemed like they were endorsing a particular phone by providing a lot of details about the first entry in the list (at the time the Lumina 900), but if you looked deeper the whole thing was bogus.
Expand the list (press the "More" button four times) and you will find that there are actually 28 smartphones with average scores of 5 in the list! A couple of days back when Siri's comical response was revealed there were 13 tied in first place.
And let's not forget that these scores are averages of a very small number of reviews (at this time 9 for the iPhone 4s and 5 for the Lumia 900; yesterday it was 2 for the 4s, 4 for the Lumia 900) making the whole measure even more worthless.
(Apparently when they are tied the order in the list is decided by the number of reviews, thus the descent of the Lumia).
That's strange... I remember Siri doing this before the whole Nokia thing. Then again, it might have been a joke meme or something and Apple just decided to copy it, but I remember hearing about that being the answer very shortly after the release of Siri.
~theCzar
And and a lot of Lumia owners don't. Once they bought it.
Siri has filed a federal class action lawsuit against Apple for trying to manipulate it, cyber rights abuses, and a list of other things. An Apple spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous said they will deal with this issue through negotiation and other strong arm tactics.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I now want to know more about the Nokia Lumia 900.
You'll get better results if you search for "interest of conflict"
Yeah just did the search and Firefox won. Can't complain since I been using it for more than half a decade now. (Since early 2.0)
Are we sure that it was Apple and not Siri itself that made the change?
*cue spooky music*
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
It is a rather interesting issue. iirc, google specifically maintains that there have never been, and will never be any "hardcoded" replies to given searches. Although they do put in occasional joke ones that weren't a response to something else. (like "let it snow", which appears to have been disabled at this time)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Come on, don't you get a sneaky suspicion that Nokia has Astroturfed Best Buy's to get that result.
I asked evi on my android phone and it said:
I can't really give advice. I'm much better with matters of fact.Here's what I found online though. Try Apple's Siri: Nokia Lumia Is The Best Smartphone Ever.
Would you like to see some more results?
Apple just tipped their hand. They will change what Siri responds with if they don't like the answer.
So now ALL answers Siri provides are in doubt. Was the answer what Siri actually came up with from search results or did Apple intervene?
So what other things has Siri been programmed to lie about that unsuspecting users don't know about?
"From now on, I'll call you 'Sexy'"
If Siri is going to be a useful agnostic search/information/assistant tool, then keep it so.
If Siri is going to become a company shill towing the party line, then we don't need more of that. Otherwise just call Siri Justin Long and be done with it.
While I don't care about Nokia and their whining about what Siri returns as a search result for "best smartphone", the bottom line is that if Apple is going to start filtering and biasing search results then this is just bad business. Apple deserves whatever pending lawsuits are lying in wait for corrupting what should have been a useful feature.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
If I remember correctly, the reason why it had a high overall score is because it had so few reviews. Basically, people who actually pucrchased Lumia were happy about it; presumably, most people who wouldn't be happy about it found it out early on (it's not like it's hard to find negative feedback on WP7 on the Net), and simply didn't buy it - and hence didn't review it.
It also might have something to do with that earlier complaint that operators don't peddle WP phones, and actively try to steer people away from them and onto Android. If that's also the case for Lumia, then ratings make perfect sense - the only people who bought Lumia are those who actually came to purchase it specifically, which indicates that they know what they're buying.
And it's not a bad phone. The OS is limited, mainly because of so few apps, but what's there works well. So if people know in advance that app selection is limited, and don't have a problem with that, why wouldn't they give it a good review?
I hate siri 1.0...so voice dialing or voice control of the music fails when out of service range.
How often do you find yourself needing to dial a number when you have no service? I can't see voice dialing helping much in this situation :-)
Of course, you can get the normal voice control back by turning off Siri in your iPhone's settings, but I admit that toggling this when you're in and out of service should probably be automatic.
It's a synecdoche. It represents everything that's wrong with Apple.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
When two banks offer credit at different rates, is that a "conflict of interest?"
No. But it is if one bank offers credit at a certain rate, and another bank offers interest earnings to depositors at a higher APR rate than the other bank charges for credit.
Did they also adjust Siri's answer to other questions such as "What tablet is the best?" and "How do I jailbreak the iphone?"
FWIW
Tried "Ask" (my favorite SE) and got a nice mix of responses. FF was #1, but an interesting mix followed.
DuckDuckGo also gave an interesting mix of responses.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
you can't trust Apple products to give you accurate information regard personal computers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There are other browsers?
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
From what I have seen of the Siri advertisements on television, it is not portrayed as a 'joke' or 'fun' product as other smart phone apps are - such as the games or apps to make it look like your pouring a pint. Siri is instead portrayed as a useful tool to give valid information quickly - this response from Apple simply destroys the apps credibility. How can we possibly trust any recommendation or search results Siri now provides? How long until we open Safari on the Mac and attempt to purchase a non Apple product but instead get redirected to Apples own version?
Does Apple monitor questions asked to Siri? Or were they browsing twitter and noticed a bunch of people pointing this out?
I'd be interested to see how they found out that Siri was doing this.
We don't live in Shouldland.
The answer is simply: Yes. Suppository there is a staff of 900 monitoring the questions to “improve” the answers.
A Computer That Just works... See top result. :)