Spend enough time on any Apple related forum and you will inevitably find someone complaining about the quality of Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri. While upon its original introduction it seemed like Siri was ripe for a world of endless possibilities, the reality almost 13 years later is much different. While there’s a lot Siri can do, there’s a lot it can’t do and that is causing it to lag severely behind Google’s own assistant.
Make no mistake, this is Apple’s fault that Siri is held back as much as it is, but I wonder if there’s a solution. Here in the United States, Apple bills itself as a privacy-focused company. Your mileage may vary around the rest of the world as they have taken actions in other territories that they operate in that are antithetical to the front presented when they refused to build a backdoor into iOS in the US. That’s a conversation for another day, though. Today is a day to talk about Siri and if it can be fixed.
The issue at the crux of all this is that Apple doesn’t want to harvest all of your data to the extent that companies like Google do, which inevitably holds back the usability of their virtual assistant. That being said, I find it hard to believe that there’s no middle ground between where we are now and where Google Assistant was even a few years back. I never hid the fact that I had a dark period where I abandoned the iPhone for several Android devices instead and one of the things I constantly noticed was how Google Assistant is a first in class quality product. Yes, it comes at the cost of Google knowing everything about you, but it was infinitely more useful than I find Siri to be even today.
Years ago, I was known in my social circles for being the guy that joked that Apple should look into just licensing Google Assistant for their devices (yes I know you can use assistant as a standalone app, but it’s just not as seamless) but I do now realize how stupid that sounds. What sounds less stupid to me, however, would be licensing Google Assistant as a backend for Siri on iOS devices. Normally this is something I would have given up on by now, but it’s 2023 and Siri still seems hindered by the little Apple does with it.
Seriously, whatever device you’re on, try it now. Ask Siri how old an actor is, any actor will do. Notice it tells you their age just fine. Now ask “What was his/her/their first movie?” Did you get the same result I did on my Mac? The result I got was a web search for what was the first movie ever made. Again, it is 2023 and Siri can’t even handle remembering that my last query was about Robert Downey Jr. and now I just want to know what his first movie was. Honestly, I would have been more impressed if it had leveraged Apple TV and took a guess at what the movie might have been. That would have shown some level of intelligence.
I’ve got one more for you, though, that I’ve had to deal with several times. I live in Southern New Jersey a bit outside of Atlantic City (where I previously worked) so it’s not uncommon for me to be curious about the weather in Atlantic City. Sometimes, I ask Siri for the weather in Atlantic City and I get a response just fine. Lately, though…
There’s two places in the United States that are named Atlantic City. The first is about a half hour drive from my home here in New Jersey. The other, I kid you not, is a “small mining settlement in a gulch near South Pass in southwestern Wyoming” with a population, as of 2010, of 37 people! Here’s the Wikipedia article on it. My HomePod mini is in my bedroom, connected to the wall by a power cord. My phone is always in my pocket. My MacBook and iPad are either home or with me. And of course my watch is always on my wrist. I just asked my watch and MacBook for the weather in Atlantic City at the same time, in the same breath. Wouldn’t you know, Siri hedged its bets: the watch gave me AC and my MacBook gave me the little mining town.
These are just two gripes with Siri but the list goes on and on, from calling wrong contacts when requested to not being able to set multiple timers with your voice. These are basic things this product just can’t grasp. It’s 2023, Apple. Please, figure something out to do with Siri to make it an utter pain in the ass to use. Please!
Dan Stransky 