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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?
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.
No, the "ever" qualifier is what triggered the Wolfram Alpha results. "What is the best phone" without ever always returned the joke.
"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....
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.
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).
Except that they didn't. That joke has been in there for quite awhile. Hell, the article I first read reporting the Siri issue even had a screenshot of that joke in it.
I now want to know more about the Nokia Lumia 900.
If I ask for smartphone reviews, I expect smartphone reviews. It does bill itself as your big internet helper. If I wanted jokes when I asked for smartphone reviews, I'd download an app called "smartass jokes".
It's one thing to have jokes in there for when people ask blatantly daft things, like "will you marry me Siri", or "find me a restaurant on Mars". But when you ask a common question with a simple answer, you expect to get an answer.
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?
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.