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:Deep learning

[iggymanz]

hahaha, nothing new in AI in the last couple of decades other than faster hardware. tell me what you think is new in AI and I'll tell you what decade in the 20th century it came from....

what a farce, machines aren't going to be intelligent in the near future, artificial or otherwise....

Siri's capabilities

[OneHundredAndTen]

The problem is that the public has been led to believe that the capabilities of Siri (and its counterparts by other companies) wouldn't fall too short of those displayed by HAL 9000 and the Star Trek computer. When you start interacting with them under such expectations, you are bound to be sorely disappointed. Siri et al. remain gimmicks good for grins and giggles, and not really much else - just about anything they can do, people can do themselves, probably more efficiently. Plus, the things we would really want for them to do remain well beyond their capabilities. And the AI community still has the chutzpah (or recklessness) to carry on coming up with exuberant forecasts.

Digital Assistants suck in general.

[jellomizer]

In general this technology, is just the command line interface all over again, with some rudimentary natural language parsing, with a default fail over of googling the question.

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.

Siri solved hard problems, then bungled easy stuff

[MorePower]

All my life, we've been expecting voice recognition "real soon now". And it always flopped. You had to shout really slowly and carefully to get the system to recognize maybe half the words you said.

Then along came Siri, and finally there was a commercially available system that was good enough with normal speaking tone and pace (mostly) and... it dropped the ball miserably at doing simple stuff with the recognized speech.
I haven't tried Siri in ages, so maybe they've improved it recently, but I already gave up on using it because of how dumb it was. For example:

I could ask Siri for directions, say to my hotel, and she would understand fine. But if I asked for gas stations along my route, or restaurants near my destination she wouldn't do it. My old Tom-Tom could do that fine, you had to push the touchscreen as it had no voice capabilities, but it did it great. Siri could understand my voice, but could not do what my Tom-Tom could. To add insult to injury, Siri's canned response indicated that she understood what I was asking for (to use my route or destination as a search location instead of my current position), she just wouldn't do it.

Another time, I wanted to call my wife from a rental car (my regular car has its own voice recognition that works better for this). So I asked Siri to call [wife's name]. She didn't understand, fine, my wife has a weird foreign name. So asked Siri to call [our last name]. She found 2 people with that last name in my contacts (myself and my wife ) and asked me which one I wanted to call. Great! I responded "[wife's name]" Siri then asked "what do you want to do with [wife's name]?" Siri you just asked me which of 2 people I wanted to call! Oh well, I responded "Call her". Siri didn't understand what "Call her" meant and looked up websites related to "Call her". Now even back in the '80s when playing Infocom text adventures like Zork, you could type commands like "hit troll" have the game respond "what do you want to hit the troll with?" and answer "axe". The game remembered just fine that it asked you to fill in some info, and was ready to plug in the new info into what you were doing a few commands ago. But Siri couldn'do that, 30 years later.