Slashdot Mirror
'I'm Not Sure I Understand' -- How Apple's Siri Lost Her Mojo (wsj.com)
Apple has struggled to make Siri as smart as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa because of disagreements among its staff and its decisions to limit how long it stores user data, former Apple employees told The Wall Street Journal. The company unveiled a new version of Siri during its WWDC keynote address on Monday but failed to show the world how it's much better than competing products from Google and Amazon (alternative source). There are a few areas where blame can be placed. The Journal said Apple keeps data for only six months while Google and Amazon continue to hold on to it, learning more and more about specific users as they continue to use the personal assistants. From a report: Some former executives, close observers and even devoted customers say Apple's innovative power appears to be waning, stymied by a lack of urgency and difficulty bringing ideas to fruition. In nearly six years under Chief Executive Tim Cook, Apple's stock has soared but the company has not delivered a breakthrough product on par with the string of hits under late founder Steve Jobs, which included the iPod, iPhone and iPad. "Siri is a textbook of leading on something in tech and then losing an edge despite having all the money and the talent and sitting in Silicon Valley," said Holger Mueller, a principal analyst Constellation Research, a technology research and advisory firm.
Siri is useful in the car when you want to do simple things: send a text message, play music (you can name), answer simple questions or set reminders/calendar dates. I can't say I've used Siri in any other context: in most environments talking bothers other people, so I try not to talk.
My parents have amazon echo, and I haven't really found a use for it in the house except to play music I can name. I'm not sure what else I *would* do with these things. In all other cases I'd rather be quiet and push buttons on my phone. Turning off lights and what not is a feature I always forget to use and usually forget to set up at all... the only time its useful is in bed at night, and I don't really want any further spying in the bedroom for a number of reasons.
Siri is useful in the car when you want to do simple things: send a text message, play music (you can name), answer simple questions or set reminders/calendar dates.
Honestly it screws up even simple stuff most of the time. It cannot handle my wife's name which isn't anything exotic. I don't speak with a weird accent either - standard midwest bland. I find Siri to be frustratingly unreliable and routinely takes more time to use (and correct) than simply typing it in. I do use it here and there but not commonly and never in public. I don't like speaking to my phone out loud in public mostly for privacy reasons. It is terrible at dictation in my experience especially if there is any context involved.
Siri kind of reminds me of the handwriting recognition software on the Newton from back in the day. Neat but not really very useful and fails to work far too often.
Jobs was part of the problem. He jumped on technologies early, to get to market first.
I don't agree. Jobs is notable for jumping on technologies second or even third, but not settling for a second- or third-rate job from those in his employ. If you name a market which Apple blew wide open, it's always possible to name a product which is substantially similar which predates it. Not usually by very much, mind you.
What Apple used to do best was take someone else's idea and do a much better job. Jobs would get his hands on it, say "this and this and this are stupid, make me a product which is not stupid" and then he would hammer on engineers until they produced something that was pleasant to use and behold. And no one should discount the importance of that, because it is so seldom actually done, and also because he clearly had substantial insight and/or was willing to listen to other people who had substantial insight often enough to be successful.
As far as I am concerned, the only place that I can see that Apple has really failed so far (almost going away before because they didn't have Steve Jobs notwithstanding) is iTunes, which genuinely pisses people off. If people actually bought mp3 players any more, there might be room to blow Apple right out of the market by making a companion app that wasn't garbage. How ironic, since we know Apple for doing just that.
People didn't just use Apple products because of the RDF, they really have had a history of making nicer interfaces which are easier to use than those of the competition. I have mostly avoided them because of various annoying limitations or overpricing, and have mostly been sorry when I bothered to venture into that field, but my interaction with Apple has always been on the hobbyist level and Apple is not interested in feeding that market, nor even simply not being abusive to it. It doesn't generate any money for them, so eh... piss on 'em. It's hard to blame them for that, though, as it is a typical corporate attitude.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"