Former Apple employee claims Steve Jobs would have 'lost his mind' over Siri - Page 2

 

Or maybe named Rubenstein...

 

 

 

I wouldn't say that Siri is an embarrassment.  Or it shouldn't be, anyway.  It will only get better with time, and this open public beta is a huge part of that.

 

Apple should probably focus on managing expectations.

Everyone has this all wrong. The technology is not about Siri improving and becoming better, it is about Siri training humans to speak better. If Siri does not understand you correctly, then you are still needing to evolve.

Forget Siri's lack of understanding,
She fails miserably on a NYC street

Siri is perfect for those suffering from Tourette syndrome.
I can't wait to hear my neighbors yelling at their new Apple TVs. .

Siri works very well for me 95% of the time. The more you use it the better it is. There are a few tricks to getting it to work better. Scrolling up and correcting what it heard you say a few times seems to go a long way in getting it to understand your particular dialect.

Siri is at its worst in noisy environments or in the car over Bluetooth with lots of road noise. That being said i still send very accurate texts and make reminders in the car all the time.

Sounds like a monumental conspiracy.

Which is a bit scary since in order to learn your speech, all of your Siri usage is stored on Apple's servers as a resource.

I question Apple's quality these days. Siri worked incredibly well when I first used it. I use to use it in traffic without any problem...now I worry about it being a distraction because it is so much less reliable.

 

And, then there's iCloud...for something that is just suppose to work, I'd like to know why my bookmarks come and go over the last week and why intermittently mail can't access Apple's servers. Then there's iTunes in the cloud...it worked great in the beginning but about a month ago I made some changes with the playlists. Now I don't ever know until it's too late whether the playlists are going to be on the devices they should be. They'll just disappear.

 

Something that just works...yeah, I would like that...it's not here though.

Except that it doesn't.

Not a conspiracy theorist so I'm okay with it since it makes my life way easier.

This is where Apple should be careful.  Never give the marketing department too much power or sway over a product.  This is exactly what happened to GM - the marketing department was dictating what cars would be made and even how they would be designed.  That's we they ended up with nothing but overpowered SUVs and pickups that inevitably became less popular and thus destroyed revenue.

 

Tim: keep the marketing department on a short lead.  Less BS in Apple ads would be appreciated by all.

 

User: "How bout' dem Yankees?"  

Siri: "Fugetaboutit!"

I agree. It's not perfect, but it would be unreasonable to expect it to be. Can you fool it? Sure. Are there questions it won't answer? Yep. Are there people who have trouble getting Siri to understand them?Absolutely.

But that doesn't mean that the technology is an embarrassment or should never have been released. It's far better than anything else out there - by a mile. Sometimes being on the cutting edge creates difficulties.

Until someone has something else that works better, no one has any room to complain. If you want to sample really bad voice recognition, you should see my car's navigation system. I spent weeks trying to get it to do ANYTHING properly and gave up.

If you don't like the way it works, take your phone back for a refund and stop whining.

If it's still in Beta, then it shouldn't be the primary marketing thrust of the iPhone.    So saying it's "beta" is just an excuse, especially when you haven't announced when it's expected to come out of Beta.   I think it's reasonable to expect that at the very least, Siri will accomplish what Apple demonstrates it's doing in the spots (aside from the "compressed time" disclaimer).      If it doesn't, I'm surprised the FTC hasn't gotten involved.    The FTC used to send inspectors to film shoots of detergent ads to make sure they weren't "cheating" when demonstrating how a detergent cleaned clothes.   

 

I'm a big Apple supporter and don't support those criticising Siri because, well ... it's a beta.  

 

On the other hand, my experience is the reverse of yours.  Siri barely works at all for me.  Maybe 2% of the time (if I'm generous).  

 

Some obvious problems and reasons for this are:

 

- For anything other than Wolfram-Alph searches, it doesn't work *anywhere* outside the USA (I'm in Canada, that exotic far away country ten feet to the north).  

- For everything else, it just asks to look it up on the web (just using Google search is much faster for this)

 

So if you want to know how many inches in a mile or how high the moon is, your in luck.  Otherwise not at all.  For stuff like adding appointments and dialling numbers, it only understands me roughly 10% of the time so of course I never use it for that because it's so unreliable.  

 

The dictation part of Siri completely fails for me, every time, under all circumstances, in quiet and noisy places. I'm almost certain that this (and the low return on making appointments) is because of a stupid language preferences situation that the US engineers at Apple aren't even aware of.  Because dictation fails literally 100% of the time (it doesn't even come close), I have to assume that it's because I have English language set as my preference instead of American.  It's the only thing that makes sense to me.  

 

All of these are dumb-ass beta problems though.  I just hope that we don't have to wait more than a year after it's debut to actually get  working copy of the product simply because we don't live in California.  

Edited by Gazoobee - 5/25/12 at 8:57am

More like-

User: "I am like soo totally Sirious."

Siri: "Yes you are seriously an idiot."

I find it funny that a product that Apple is supposed to be so disappointed in, is the main feature of the TV ads they are running now with stars like Samuel L Jackson, etc.  If Siri was such a big problem, why create more attention to it?

 

I don't use Siri as much as I could.  Part of it is just forgetting what Siri can do, and part of it is that my normal daily workflow is not something which has me needing to walk around asking it questions.  As I have used Siri more I have learned how to better ask it questions that it will understand and provide useful info to.  And how to speak more clearly when I need to.  Siri even works great over my hands-free in the car.

 

Also the voice recognition is great for note-taking and composing text messages.

 

The only problem I have with Siri is that whenever I ask her "Who took my french fries?",  the only answer I get is "It wasn't Tim Cook!"

Any article I see that quotes someone saying "Steve Jobs would.." I call BS on. Steve was not some god who never did anything wrong or never had a bad idea. Lets not forget Steve was initially opposed to putting iTunes on Windows. He was opposed to 3rd party apps on iPhone. iPhone antenna issue happened on his watch so did MobileMe.

As far as Siri goes its hit or miss for me. And it's not something I use all the time. Nice to have but if it was gone tomorrow i don't know if I'd miss it that much. Considering it's beta software I'm a bit surprised Apple is focusing so much advertising on it.

 

This is pretty offensive.  You are just assuming that everyone it doesn't work for has a speech impediment? 

Not too mention all that money spent advertising a BETA???
The hobby Apple TV should be that lucky.

I suppose Beta trumps hobby??

I agree Steve J. should have lost his mind over Siri. It does not seem ready for prime time to me. I have an iPhone 4, and picked up my friend's new iPhone 4S to try out Siri, and after a few commands, I was not impressed at all. It did not recognize what I was trying to do or say. I would expect Apple should not have used something in beta, but wait until it's "ready", even if it's later that others. That's what people came to expect from Apple. As much as I love Apple as a whole (I really like their products and customer service, etc.) they sometimes make mistakes. One other mistake in my opinion is how the iCloud rollout took place. It was still too complicated to set up, there was confusion about which ID to use, whether you can have separate IDs from the App Store, etc. Once set up, it just works, and that's good. But there are other aspects of it which don't work well: if you accidentally back up your photos, including your photo stream to iCloud, you quickly run out of space, and keep getting an error message. That's OK for me, I can figure it out and fix it, but a non-technical person, such as my wife, it can be confusing as heck. Hope someone at Apple thinks about all these things.

 

Indeed. I find these 'Steve Jobs would have..' despicable, narcissistic, hubristic, self-righteous, and just down-right wrong. 

 

Either way when the guy doesn't have the balls to give his identity, you can basically throw his words in the trash. When did this employee leave Apple? A year ago? 5 years ago? 10 years ago? Was he fired or did he quit? What department was he in? What did he work on? Apple has and has had thousands and thousands of employees, and some random ex-employee doesn't hold a special divine insight into the thoughts of Steve Jobs. This shit shouldn't have been published, as its meaningless, irrelevant, and insulting on so many levels. If this guy had an ounce of class, he would have kept his mouth shut- who knows what his motivations are? Speech recognition isn't something ANYONE can perfect- even Apple. It's pretty much the most complex problem in computing because of the imperfect variables that will only be involved. Siri is definitely not 'embarrassing', as in my experience its ahead of anything else out there in the consumer space, as well as the implementation. For the people saying its not 'ready for prime time'- when would have it been ready? Now? In a year? 2 years? I guarantee in 5 years it will still **** up and will not be perfect, as there will still be an infinite number of dialects, accents, and contexts out there. There comes a point where it needs to be released so you can get the data and feedback of millions of users. 

This came from Lashinsk's cover story in Fortune magazine. I find it ironic that he was the one touting Scott Forstall as Apple's next CEO (not sure where he thinks Tim Cook is going). Isn't Siri Forstall's baby?

good one except you forgot the "OMG"

If I want to learn something juicy about Apple, I always consult anonymous, former Apple employees. It's well known that they are an incredible source of insight on Apple (second only to actual [or self-described] Wall Street analysts!)

 

As far as IBM, that's hilarious.

Have they also banned the use of Google?

(I heard a rumor that all Google search requests go to Google servers!)

I think the Apple faithful here should come clean and admit that Siri plain and simply sucks right now. Of course, it is in beta but Apple shouldn't resort to using the Google school of software versioning, in which they answer every complaint with, "It's still beta software." It's seriously becoming a ridiculous crutch. 

 

What they should have done is keep their cute little commercials in the vault until it comes out of beta. 

It is pretty funny. I am, however, split on this issue. Not in the sense that I am torn between two positions of the issue but that there are many issues being presented as a single issue.

I don't think Steve would have "lost his mind" as he was surely involved in the release of Siri. There is simply no way to make Siri understand every accent, every dialect, every cultural colloquium and every other part of speak dive speech and comprehension without a vast number of samples to learn from. This is a huge and longterm project. For that I gave Apple all the credit and time needed as Siri is the best consumer product on the market.

Where I do find fault with Apple is with their ads. I don't mind the shortened sequences but I do mind that what the actor said to does not seem possible to have been interpreted correctly by Siri. This is where Apple needs to be held accountable. They should only clips that Siri was able to interpret correctly because people will, as we've seen, attempt to recreate these queries.

PS: iClarified has a video comparison of Sii v. S Voice that's informative and entertaining. S Voice? Really? Was Samsung Intergrated Response Interface a little too on the nose for even Samsung?

 

Oh horsesh!t.  So anything negative voiced about an Apple product is automatically "hate" speech?    Grow up.

 

It's more fun when both you and Siri are drunk  :)

Yeah! The company is dead. They should sell everything and give it back to the shareholders. The stock is overpriced. Retail stores will never work.

And that GUI thing on the computers, and that touch screen and multitouch thing on the iOS devices, also suck. The iPod is just another music player (but expensive.) . . . etc.

Anyway, Siri definitely sucks (although personally I've never really had much of a problem with it.)

Apple might say Siri is beta, but so far, only in very fine print. I had to do a Ctrl-F / Cmd-F to find the word beta in this page:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html

In short, they only say it's beta in the last sentence at the very bottom of the page.

It's mentioned in the last sentence of the top entry of the FAQ.

I never noticed a disclaimer in the TV ads.

I think that could be done better, because the disclaimers are done as if they're hoping you don't notice it. It seems inappropriate to make a beta feature also your headline feature, and advertise it so heavily without making it clearer.

Normally, I don't do this, but did you read his comment at all? He was touting the fact that they don't advertise that Siri can understand you even with a speech impediments (in his case being drunk off his ass ) I wouldn't call that offensive. I would just call that awesome!

It says Beta right a the top in a golden rectangle next to the word Siri.

But that doesn't alter your point. It might have been better to putan asterisk after every use of Siri or simply write 'Siri (Beta)' every time with beta being given a footnote on exactly what it means.

When previously has Apple ever released something still in beta? I could easily imagine Steve Jobs being upset by that.

Ha!

Good on you, I was just thinking I had never seen it *without* a Beta badge and went to check his link too.

 

How is it possible that any "global Moderator" such as yourselves could ever be fallible?

It does seem odd, but it can be interpreted as taking the name of the product: Galaxy S-Voice. So it could be a coincidence, or it could be intentional, I don't know. At any rate, S-Voice sounds like a poor name.

I really missed that one.

Non-developer public betas? Many times. Boot camp and Safari come to mind.

What I doNt recall is a beta that has been a prominent feature and having its own ad campaign. But that's fine with service as it's not possible to be baked with being a long term public beta.

Baloney. 

 

Steve Jobs "lost his mind" over MobileMe performance as well. But he "lost his mind" quite a bit later on, after enough gnashing of teeth and hand-wringing.  

 

Instead, the service improved over time. 

 

MobileMe was implemented (and half-assed) under Steve Jobs' watch. 

 

Now I'm not making this comment as a jab at either Siri or the former MobileMe, nor am I implying that Jobs was not concerned about quality. All I am saying is that Jobs, for better or worse, prioritized things a certain way. Tim Cook is doing the same. 

 

That's just an excuse.  Apple isn't promoting Siri is being in beta.  They're using it as a major selling feature for the iPhone 4S.

 

I love Apple.  Love my Mini, my Apple TV, my iPhone and my iPad, but I don't like the idea of making excuses - even for Apple - when products don't meet expectations.

Siri is nowhere near as bad a clusterf*ck as iCloud, and especially the MobileMe to iCloud transition. Duplicate contacts, duplicate phone numbers per contact, mandatory upgrade to Lion, good luck if you're using an older computer that's not Lion-compatible or an app as common as Quicken. Okay, Timmy, we got the message, you want us to buy a new Mac. Making the transition painless would go a long way towards convincing us to do so.