Siri Co-founder is Surprised By How Much Siri Still Can't Do (qz.com)

In an interview with Quartz, Norman Winarsky, a founder of Siri, suggests that Apple may have given Siri an overly ambitious collection of responsibilities and hasn't made the feature reliable enough. From a report: And while vastly improved from its earliest days, Siri still isn't a sparkling conversationalist. "Surprise and delight is kind of missing right now," said Winarsky, now a consultant and venture capitalist. Winarsky acknowledges that some of this disappointment stems from the sheer difficulty of predicting the pace of major technological advancement, which Bill Gates once summed up as the human tendency to "overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10."

But part of it is also likely because Apple chose to take Siri in a very different direction than the one its founders envisioned. Pre-Apple, Winarsky said, Siri was intended to launch specifically as a travel and entertainment concierge. Were you to arrive at an airport to discover a cancelled flight, for example, Siri would already be searching for an alternate route home by the time you pulled your phone from your pocket -- and if none was available, would have a hotel room ready to book. It would have a smaller remit, but it would learn it flawlessly, and then gradually extend to related areas. "These are hard problems and when you're a company dealing with up to a billion people, the problems get harder yet," Winarsky said. "They're probably looking for a level of perfection they can't get."

Comments

Re:Digital Assistants suck in general.

[Zak3056]

The problem with All the Digital Assistants is that it doesn't really get context. So it comes up with silly answers to questions, because the context of the question isn't place in concern.

SOME things it has context for it and gets right in a downright scary fashion. Siri (and Google in the Samsung phone it replaced) know when I usually leave for work, or leave to go home, and pop up a notification with route, traffic, and anything else. They know that on Monday I take my daughter to Girl Scouts, that I leave work at a different time on that day and take a different route. The know that on Friday I drive to my Girlfriend's house, but that I have a doctor's appointment first, and that my ex-wife picks my daughter up on that day so I don't need to drive to school (except on those weekends I have my daughter, when I DO need to drive to school). That stuff (while, as noted, is REALLY freaking scary) is pretty useful.

Almost EVERYTHING else, it's just downright shit for. As another poster put it, "I found this wrong information on the web, which I won't read to you."