frumious

Somebody got paid money for this creative? Holy cow, how the ad business has fallen. No break through, no branding, and fuzzy messaging? Really Apple?

The first one doesn't even make sense unless you already know about the iPhone's photo capabilities, so just preaching to the converted. 

There's an account that needs to be up for review.

Gotta pile on here. When I first encountered Siri, I loved the IDEA of it, and fully understood it was a nascent application that would have learning issues. Even a year ago, I was perfectly willing to just let it dial phone numbers and set up reminders, and ask nothing more complicated. But when it got ported to the MacOS and it failed to even properly accomplish what little it was doing on my phone, I finally turned against it. On my iMac, it has failed every single test and task I gave it. Every one. The Christmas season ceding the voice recognition brand to Amazon instead of Apple (ie: the "Kleenex" example) finally just has me damn mad - especially as a stockholder, but far more crucially, just as a consumer and lover of Apple. There are just no excuses anymore for the comparative quality failure of Siri. Ben's article tries to use the "We got the numbers on our side! We win!" argument. But Siri comes in the box, like an accessory cord. It's not a profit-generating product that drives consumers to seek it out, like the Echo is apparently accomplishing. It's just something the box they were buying anyway does as an afterthought. No one is buying AppleTV or iPhone because of Siri, but in spite of it. That is NOT the position Apple should be in, especially after Siri's longer development and supposed refinement period.

I get that Amazon and Google leverage their horrific level of invasive privacy theft to teach their voice assistants faster than Apple. But there has got to be a solution to that, and it's frankly disgraceful that Apple has had the product in use so long and so widely, and yet is getting its ass kicked in the functionality and understanding. Apple has its Maps, Safari, iTunes, TV, etc. to feed data into Siri's brain, so how can it still be this unreliable? No, it shouldn't "push" ads to your phone, but it sure as hell should be able to at least successfully type a semi-intelligible text or memo longer than 8 words while I'm driving by now.

A previous poster's recommendation that Apple needs to regularly survey users at least as to the success or failure of Siri's functions should have been happening from Day 1. But Apple's corporate attitude has always been "We don't ask opinions, we make them." Maybe that has worked 85% of the time, but most especially with Siri, that's just frankly a lousy way to improve a product that has so many variables involved in making it work for everybody's voices and contextual phrasing, at all times.