While most people are marveling at how well Siri recognizes and fulfills on many of their intentions, the inevitable criticism has begun. In this post called “SIRIously This Sucks!” Colin Berkshire, a guest contributor on Dave Michels’ new blog, recites a litany of deficiencies in the new service. The gist is that Siri is good at doing tasks that its developers anticipated – like setting the alarm clock, dictating text messages, getting directions – but ” if you stray much off the beaten path it is like playing twenty questions with a belligerent two year old.”

Some speech app developers have piled by noting that the service should do more “on the device.” It is crippled when the data link to the server is down (which happens quite a bit over AT&T’s network – at least in SF). I would also note that Apple made no friends by discontinuing the Siri App for those (like me) who have it on their plain vanilla iPhone 4s with several more months on their contracts.

Sight unseen, I take the attitude that this is the reason Siri made the transition from approved app in the iTunes store to “beta” version of a native feature (meaning it ships pre-loaded and accessible through the “Home” button).

I take the attitude that this rendition of Siri is the worst one that the general public will encounter and that it can only get better. This started me thinking of computer graphics for the movies. Anyone who saw the first Star Wars was totally “wow’d!” and had little idea how much better it would get. Meanwhile, the producers of the film were already seeing all its faults and telling themselves that they were spending too much time on the stupid stuff like making sure that the strings holding up models of starfighters.

Even in the days of Pixar, they are ever-improving computer generated images in subtle ways that make for a better viewer experience. The animators of the first “Toy Story” told themselves that “this is the worst looking movie we will ever make.” And so it was.

We should weather the criticism of “SIRIously sucking” that I’ve seen. We can only hope that the data link between device and server gets more consistent because the marriage of AI and speech rec that is required to provide a consistently successful user experience depends on it. And we need a better way for the app to work when the data link is down.

I’m pretty sure that Apple and the Siri folks are already addressing these issues.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Apple, mobile speech, iPhone, Artificial Intelligence, Siri