Users say Siri struggles in Japanese debut - Page 2

Neither of those upset me. The problem is the "alternatives" can't do anything close to what Siri can/is supposed to, because of the limited nature of multi-tasking and the restrictive APIs.


Sorry, for some reason when you mentioned "Mail" I got it in my head you were talking about the Mac versions.

It's built into the OS. There is even HW in the A5 chips specifically for Siri. So if you want something that has EVERYTHING that Siri has you jut aren't going to get it. But there are clearly alternatives.

But all that is beside the point. Apple calls it a beta. You know what a beta is so why expect Apple to show a service that doesn't work on a 30 second ad. Nothing in technology works every time. On paper you can make things flawless but in the real world there are bandwidth hiccups, there are server glitches... and we're not even talking about a nascent service that isn't even 6 months old.

Do you realize why this was released as a beta with so much focus on the customer? Simple answer: It needs to be used in order to become great. It's as simple as that. You can't work out all the kinks of the world's languages, dialects, speech patterns and "what one meant when they said something else." Case in point, even in plain text you misinterpreted something I wrote:

There are more dialects than prefectures, there are some similar and some very different, going from Okinawa to Saporoto me they are almost different languages.

Now that I remember, I learned English in SoCa and when a moved to Ky, it took me a while to get hang of the accent

Yes, but I'm not marketing nor selling my services. They are clearly in beta though.

You are most certainly selling and marketing yourself on this forum when you reply.

Cut her some slack... What would you do if you were called "a**" all the time?

Tried it in Japanese a couple of times yesterday, it worked fine for simple requests. Can understand that there would be some teething problems, however.

Oh thank God. I was so worried.

It's ok to deceive customers into paying to help you develop your product so long as you really need to. I mean, if there's no other way, there's no other way, right? What's important is that the product ultimately be a success, i.e., that it make a huge profit. And waiting to sell something until it's worth buying is hell on cash flow.

Now that it's 100% legal for anyone with the money to buy as many Congressman as he, she, or it can afford, we can all look forward to the time in the near future when pharmaceutical companies are finally free of those irksome regulations that all-too-often prevent them from pursuing this strategy.

It's just "marketing," right? After all "lying" is what poor people do, and being as we're all "temporarily inconvenienced millionaires," we wouldn't want to be confused with them, would we?

Liars are everywhere regardless of status ok, you are perfect and you don't ever lie so good for you.

So you're saying oral is a better experience than aural!

The issue with all voice recognition software is that although the population of each country mostly speak the same language there are many dialects and accents.

For example, in the UK English is the main language but as you move from the south of England to the North of Scotland Nd Northern Ireland the accents become stronger and the rate at which people speak increases and words effectively meld together.

So, if you are Scottish and ask. 'where am I'

Siri responds: 'I don't understand, Rhianna'

If you then slow down and space the words a little Siri understands you, although as you are in the UK Siri can't help you as maps etc only works in the USA.

As a work in progress Siri is ok, however there is a huge amount of work for Apple to do to get it to work for everyone without them having to talk like a total fanny to get it to understand you.

It would be really cool if there are new innovative language related products from third party companies for Siri. Or perhaps even from Apple.

I have always wanted to be able to speak in another language, but the current software solutions are really clunky. I tried a class but to busy with work right now.

Just imagine having a conversation with a native speaker while on vacation, then being able to ask Siri on the fly, then as you repeat that to the speaker, the spoken words are automatically recorded and stored in a database for later reference.

It has been said that we only use about 600 common words on average in everyday use. Not sure of this truth, but the prospect of using something like Siri as a learning aid seems more organic than memorizing thousands of words out of context.

Again, an old idea that has practical application. It seems to be a natural evolution.

I was going to bring up the smartphone as a Universal Translator a la Star Strek, but where is the fun in that? Languages are so rich and beautiful, we should be able to speak at least a few of them other than our own.

It is a bit embarrassing to go in a foreign country and everyone else has to speak English because I can't speak theirs. I am a Filipino and my wife is Russian. She can speak Spanish, French, English and of course, her native language.

But isn't Sicilian generally held to be at best a distant dialect of modern Italian, at worst a different language? (just as Portuguese and Castillian, being Iberian romance languages, are more closely related to each other than to say French, but still very, very different.)

Instill say it needs a "teach" feature. When siri gets it wrong you should be able to correct it and thus help the database along. With pronouncing, too: "Say it like this siri..."

Why should it? "I have a stomach ache" isn't a question.

Seriously, do people expect Star Trek to happen overnight? Siri is a great product that does some great things. I don't recall Apple ever saying that it would answer every single possible question from every single person. If it doesn't answer your question, slow down and speak more clearly. My car's navigation system is far worse - and my car cost a lot more than an iPhone. Heck, even the navigation system cost more than an iPhone.

Technology has limitations. Expecting perfection (especially on the first version and especially when it's still in beta) is ridiculous.

And if you don't like it, you can return the phone.

I have seen estimates as high as over 400. Basically, in the Edo period and before, each village effectively had its own dialect. Remember, Japan is effectively a country at the top of a mountain range, so travel was difficult. Given the differences in dialects across Japan - even native speakers of Japanese have difficulty on occasion - it is not surprising that Siri has trouble. Akita-ben anyone?

Siri in Japanese... for me, no real problems.

Setting alarms is easy.
Simple messages OK.
Making calls is OK.
Making schedules is OK.
Asking for info comprehends the question, then prompts to see if you want to check the web. Press OK and Safari comes up.
"I love you" brings up several responses.
I can't ask a question in English while it is set to Japanese.

Directions don't work and say that it works in the US and needs English.

As for dialects: where I've, there are three major ones within 50 miles. Within each area, sometimes limited to a single village, there are several more. There's one town about 20 miles away where I can't understand a thing. Many of my neighbors, all Japanese, say they have trouble, too.

For more on dialects in Japan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_dialects

Here's a start

Exactly. Siri is very cool. Not ready for prime time but fun to play with. Worth having for sure. But the fact that it's still in beta doesn't address the fact that Apple is not promoting it as a beta function. If you did a survey of MacDonald's eaters and asked if they ever ate pink slimed reconstituted chemically cleaned chicken they'd say no, and it's not because MacDonald's had ever lied about it. The 95% of iPhone buyers who didn't know it was beta is not mostly constituted of people who are dumb or refuse to read labels.

You can't get this sort of service "perfect" without people using it. Look at what the service does. Can you see how a few programmers could possibly program in every thing a person from anywhere in the world might say? Of course not!


They've promoted it as a beta since the start.

They did in the keynote. Multiple times. And on every Siri page on their website since then.

Who listens to keynotes except for us? Normal people don't. Plus, obviously you and I know what beta means, but Aunt Betty who just bought her first smart phone doesn't.

My point is simply, and obviously, that yes Apple didn't hide the fact that it is a beta function, but if you don't know the lingo the term means nothing without an explanation.


What about people who DON'T buy from Apple? I guarantee that those who walk into a Verizon store for their first iPhone do NOT have this explained to them, nor are they given any impression that they need to look further than how it is laid out in the store, such as Googling the keynote or reading the entire Apple site. Is it their fault? Apple's? Verizon's?

That said, I'm not adverse to Siri. It works as well as it has a right to in the U.S. English version, and I don't think it even needs the beta label to be accepted for what it is. But I'd be interested in what your response to the person on the street would be when asked if they knew if Siri was beta. That's the measure of how far the information got, not what the keynote said.

Buried way down on the VERY TOP of the page?!?!

• http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/#siri

As for your argument that Apple needs to define every fraking word on their webpage well that's just insane. Sure, you only picked out beta, but for you to suggest that it needs to be defined means that all words need to be defined just in case your Aunt Betty doesn't know. But let's not overlook the fact that people on Apple's website are on the internet to wit they can google 'beta'. They can also call Apple or walk into a store and ask about the feature. At some point you can't hold everyone's hand or you end up with toasters saying don't use while bathing.


So you're problem is calling it a beta, but you wouldn't have a problem with Apple releasing an incomplete service without the beta label attached?

If you don't know what you're buying, why are you buying it?

"This has a 2 'gigga hurts' processor, so I bought it."

"So tell me what that means."

"They said it was fast."

"That doesn't tell me what it means. That doesn't tell you what it means. You didn't need this. You could have gotten a much slower machine for half the price and been perfectly fine."

There're people buying Mac Pros because they think it's the only thing that can play games. Not doing the research is the customer's fault.

Sure, because I personally don't have a problem with such an iffy technology as VR being iffy. Previous OSX and Windows VRs were released not as beta over the decades and didn't work perfectly by a long shot.

The manner in which Apple's referring to it as beta in their material as something that will "improve" implies to many that it works fine as it is, beta just means that it will "improve". (Duh. what doesn't?) No one who doesn't understand that beta means incomplete and not final release is going to Google the term because they think they've been given the full explanation. Same as when the Verizon store sells it to you and doesn't say anything.

But none of that is what bothers me. Here's the issue: Releasing functions and features as "beta" in such a mainstream, saturated product is a very new thing. Of the top of my head I can only think of iWork to have had it, and it seemed nervy then, and it never even made it out of beta before it was killed off. It's a bad tag to have on a function. It implies "don't blame us for anything, it's beta", even three years later. Just don't release something and call it beta. It's released. You put it in my phone and in the OS. If it doesn't work don't put it in either. Not that I'm saying Siri doesn't work, but having an Apple beta program running on a device is very un-Apple like. That's my main gripe. I don't like it.

I don't like anything on any of my Apple devices that doesn't work REALLY well. I'm not into gimmicky amusement. It's just a preference.

VR? VR?! Siri's VR is a mere single aspect of the entire services suite. This is why Siri is in beta and why it's so difficult to scale across all languages, dialects, and cultures. It's not simply about the Dragon Dictation back-end that can parse your spoken words into text, it's about understanding every part of the process that leads to a contextual understanding of your implied meaning.

That's some next level shit! It will take a long time to get right but it can't be done in a lab. It has to have a continuously large foundation to build off of. But that's not it, it has to keep learning because language evolves... and quicker than many think. I don't just mean the spelling or pronunciation/inflection of words, I mean the meaning of words themselves.


That's my point. You took Apple's inclusion of beta to mean "it will improve" so that its inclusion is moot because all such services and software are likely to improve. Did you consider that Apple's inclusion of beta is an acknowledgment that it's simply not up to their standards for a non-beta product? By your definition Mountain Lion shouldn't be referred to a beta because it will improve after it's on the market. Bottom line: Siri isn't as complete as they'd like it to be but they had no choice but to release it to the public if they ever want it to be complete.


Messasges was just released as a beta for Lion. Apple has had plenty of beta software. Some things need volunteers, the least of which is Messages, the most of which is Siri.


If you have an iPhone 4S it's easy not to use... and thank god they label it as beta so you aren't tricked into expecting it to work really well all the time.

Uncommon sense. Thank you for that.

I would think that when the no 1 new feature of your new phone thats been touted and marketed so agressively and is supposed to usher in an era of ai (not that ai ) needs a canadian update to be able to reply to questions concerning the time and weather that this is indeed embarrassing. Wouldn't you? No, I take it back, you wouldn't.