Honza Dvorsky Steve Wozniak together with Steve Jobs founded the American company Apple Computer in 1976. Even so, the father-founder is not afraid to criticize his "child" and the things around him. After his informal departure from the company in 1985, he surprised the public several times with his statements about Apple and Steve Jobs.
Now he took aim at the beta version of the intelligent assistant Siri. It first appeared in October 2011, when the iPhone 4S was introduced. Since then, it has reached a new generation.
Siri before Apple
Even before Apple bought Siri, Inc. in April 2010, Siri was a common app in the App Store. It was able to recognize and interpret speech very accurately, thanks to which it built a fairly wide user base. Apparently, thanks to this success, Apple decided to buy it and build it into the iOS 5 operating system. However, Siri has a history, originally it was an offshoot of the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center (SRI International Center for Artificial Intelligence), which was funded by DARPA. It is therefore the result of long-term research in the field of artificial intelligence, connected to the US military and US universities.
Wozniak
So Steve Wozniak used Siri back when it was just an app that every iOS device user could download. However, he is no longer so satisfied with Siri in its current form. He says that he no longer has such accurate query results and that it is more difficult for him to achieve the same result as with the previous version. As an example, he gives a query about the five largest lakes in California. Old Siri allegedly told him exactly what he expected. He then asked about prime numbers greater than 87. She answered that too. However, as he says in the attached video, Apple's Siri can no longer do this and instead returns meaningless results and keeps referring to Google.
Wozniak says Siri should be smart enough to search Wolfram Alpha for math questions (from Wolfram Research, creators of Mathematica, author's note) instead of querying the Google search engine. When asked about the "five largest lakes", one should really search the knowledge base (Wolfram) rather than search pages on the web (Google). And when it comes to prime numbers, Wolfram, as a mathematical machine, can calculate them by himself. Wozniak was absolutely right.
Author's note:
The strange thing, however, is that either Apple has improved Siri to already return results in the manner described above, or simply Wozniak was not telling the complete truth. I myself use Siri on both an iPhone 4S and a new iPad (running iOS 6 beta), so I've tested these queries myself. Here you can see the results of my test.
So Siri returns the results in a completely accurate form, in both cases she understood me for the first time even in a busy environment. So maybe Apple has already fixed the "bug". Or has Steve Wozniak just found another thing to criticize about Apple?
To put things into perspective, Steve Wozniak is not only a critic but also an avid user and fan of Apple products. He says that even though he likes to play with Android and Windows Phones, the iPhone is still the best phone in the world for him. So apparently it does Apple a good service by always alerting it to even the smallest possible flaw. After all, every company and every product can always be a little better.
Yes, it's BETA, so it can and should keep getting better and better. Criticism is always an important thing to improve the product! The fact that it was SW "again" is productive on both sides, as is the weekly visit to the boulevard by Iveta Bartosova. That is, both the visibility of the SW and the sale of advertising in the given media. And SW must have mumbled a lot when dictating the question. :O)
It's strange, it did list the lakes, but the attempt for prime numbers didn't work :/
Doesn't Wozniak have anything to do with Apple these days? Hasn't he been working there since 1985? (I'm asking just to be sure ;) )
No. He left Apple Computer in 1985.
Only Wozniak can see exactly that. But he is reportedly still an Apple employee and getting paid. They just don't go there.
And what would he do there? Was he inventing new products or something?
so I don't know, but it listed all possible lakes and the attempt with prime numbers failed completely.... it referred me exactly according to Wozniak to google…
Can you provide a screenshot please? I would love to see the results of the last people.
It worked on the first try in both cases even with my poor pronunciation
You have 'what are the prime number' instead of 'numbers'. Try it with multiple. Otherwise, unfortunately, I don't see how the question was asked in the first one.
You could have guessed that, too, when she already uses the plural at the beginning of sentences, and the difference between audible and inaudible s versus is and are is somewhere else...
Don't think about Siri, Siri is software on a computer :-)
Artificial intelligence is dependent on huge amounts of data. It's not as easy as it looks. Besides, it's still a beta version.
I don't know, but Vokul understands me better than Siri, but Wozniak is right, just let him criticize them, at least I will improve it and if he were to yell at them to teach Siri Czech and Slovak, since Bratislava is already his favorite city :)
I noticed that I'm missing the "are" in the screenshot for the lake question, but the result is the same even if the question is asked correctly...
May I ask how your iPhone is set up? Do Yelp reviews work for you in Slovakia?
It doesn't work for me, as I wrote in the article.
Define set… I have Slovak language… if you mean the interface with Siri is US and iOS is 5.1.1…
Do you think that if I set my settings to English, I would get a different answer?
yes, because it will tell you that localization is only possible in US English ;)