radugrama

Soli said:

It hasn't? How are quantifying that? I could create tests that could show Siri not changing at all to changing dramatically since it's first release as an Apple Service, but that would only show those specific metrics. That's because it's very difficult to gauge how Siri as a whole has evolved in terms of its speech recognition, its ability to correctly convert to the correct spelling of a homonym (contextual), its ability to proper analyze a query or statement (regardless of whether it can answer it), its database of available information, the services/apps it can access as part of the personal digital assistant service, its speed/Apple servers.

I remember the first weekend when the service would time out because the servers were overloaded. Does that happen know despite there not just being a million phones but hundreds of times that number being able to access the service? Surely their Siri traffic is higher now, but I also assume per-device traffic was higher that weekend as people were testing the service, so you could measure even just the access to Siri in different ways. I couldn't even tell you if it was a server HW, network HW, or SW issue that caused those rampant timeouts… and that's just a single possible data point in comparing Siri today to Siri from 2011.

Objectively speaking, I have no way to quantify my statement and your statement is 100% correct. Unfortunately, we live in the subjective realm of end-users, where Apple and its spin doctors are supposed to be pretty darn good and delivering magic or making us feel that they deliver magic. Subjectively speaking, they fail, and for 6 1/2 years Siri - on my various generations of iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, iMac and MacBook Pro - has continued to fail to understand what I'm saying while Google Assistant and - for goodness sake - freaking Cortana have no problems understanding me on the very same devices sometimes. When that happens subjectivity trumps objectivity!