Skip to main content

The Silent Siri Revolution That No Ones Talking About

Image result for siri
Siri, Ah the dunce of the AI class, the butt of many a joke. Siri, over the past few years has got the reputation of being the dumbest smart assistants around. Sure Siri was the first to the game but over the years Siri has ceded ground to the Google assistant and Alexa. Since that day we've been begging for a massive Siri overhaul and so far we haven't gotten it...or have we?


Don't Bite Off More Than You Can Chew

With each WWDC we hope that Apple will work its magic and bring Siri back into the forefront but lo and behold that never happened. Apple here is playing catch-up, but they're playing it carefully. Sure they could put out this massive update that promises to fix Siri, but it could just as easily break it. When tech companies try to do too much at one go the end result is usually a dumpster fire. Remember iOS 11, The Windows Phone or the  Android Tablet? All of the above tech ventures tried to do too much without laying the ground work. iOS 11 added too many features without considering the toll that it would take on a majority of the devices, Windows Phone didn't focus enough on app development and Android was never optimised for the big screen. Things might have gone a lot better if these changes were slowly introduced. The things in iOS 11 could have been slowly brought on over a few updates and that way they could have focused more on the stability of the OS. With Siri however Apple is doing the opposite. At WWDC 2017 we were expecting an upgrade that blew the Google Assistant out of the water, But in reality we got better third party support,a new voice and the ability to understand context. Over night Siri went from sounding like a robot to very human like. Just take a listen to this to understand how much better the Siri on iOS 11 is compared to iOS 10. More over the contextual understanding that Siri gained in iOS 11 helped it answer questions a lot better. iOS 11 gave Siri an impetus in the right direction putting it more or less in the ballpark of the Google Assistant. Over the life cycle of iOS 11 Siri started to be able to answer really obscure questions, sure even now its not as good at the Google Assistant but it is miles better. A small update on its own, but now with iOS 12 Siri has gained new functionality with Siri Shortcuts. Apple is building on the foundation that it laid for Siri in iOS 11. Not the one fell swoop of improvement that we all hoped for but important improvements none the less.


Siri And Sports

If you're reading this from the USA or Canada you might not know or care that the Football(It's not called soccer) World Cup is underway at the time of writing. So being an Avid fan of football I decided to use Siri to keep an eye on games that I couldn't watch cause I was driving or something of the sort. My god Siri has really improved when it comes to sports. 
You can ask Siri complex questions like "Show me Germany's next two games " and it will actually show you the two games.Which the Google Assistant for some reason can't do.

The Same goes for other sports queries, " How many goals did X athlete score" Siri consistently answered those questions while the Google Assistant did not.



When it came to sports the common theme was that Siri outsmarted the Google Assistant in almost every way. Siri could help me find team rosters, Siri provided me with game stats, Siri could even find useful data from previous games.
The Google Assistant Just hits me with a search result. Siri has consistently been better for me when compared to the Google Assistant when it comes to sports. 
Apple has really done a great job improving Siri's knowledge database. Siri can now more accurately answer both sports and non sports related queries. Good job Apple you're finally putting in the work yo save Siri.

Warning Subjective Opinions Ahead

This section of the article is a bit of a rant about some of my major gripes with the Google Assistant.Another field where Siri reigns supreme for me is voice recognition. In my experience Siri's is miles ahead when compared to The Google Assistant's. I can't for the life of me figure out why this is. Google has the best machine learning algorithms in the industry and the voice recognition on my phone is abysmal. Maybe it's my accent but I highly doubt that that's it when Siri can so easily understand me. Siri has no trouble picking up what I'm saying even I wake up in the morning and people have told me that I'm barely understandable right after I've woken up. The matter is even more confusing when I consider that Siri can understand long complex Indian names with no issues whatsoever while the Google Assistant just struggles with it. This shouldn't happen as I've granted the Google Assistant App full access to my contacts and the hardware the Google Assistant runs on is irrelevant as the Google Assistant runs on severely underpowered non android devices and all this processing is done in the cloud anyway. I've found that the Google Assistant just flat out messes up the things I actually said. The frustrating thing is that the Assistant gets it right on the first try and then changes it to something totally different. 
For example I asked the Google Assistant " How much does a chipmunk weigh" and the Google Assistant responded with this.
On another instance I asked the Assistant " Find me information about Italy " and it came up with this:
The most frustrating thing is that it actually did get the word Italy right and then changed it to "Airoli" at the last second. Again these are just my experiences and your mileage may vary.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What Is KaiOS? The Android Competitor You've Never Heard Of

When you think of the smartphone OS wars, we have two warring factions, Android and iOS. For about 5 years this was the way it's been. But in the distant past there were three smartphone Operating Systems. Android, iOS and Windows. The three way battle for OS supremacy raged on and before long the triopoly became a duopoly. With Windows phone being more or less dead the two major Operating systems only had each other to worry about for the longest time. Now the incumbents have a new kid on the block to worry about , KaiOS. But wait if KaiOS is so great how come no ones ever heard of it before? But First Some Background KaiOS is built on the ashes of the Firefox OS , For phones that aren't necessarily smart. You remember those old phones that you used to rock back in 2009? Yeah phones like those. The aim of KaiOS is to bring down the features of a smartphone down to a feature phone. So for that very same reason Kai...

iPhone XR: The Display Is Fine!

Its September and like every year like clockwork Apple has come out with new iPhones and would it be an iPhone launch without some controversy. The iPhone X had the notch and the iPhone 7 didn't have a headphone jack . In true Apple fashion this year's iPhones have stirred up controversy, Well one of them. Apple released the iPhone XS , the XS Max and the iPhone XR. With the two S models being the premium pricey phones that we've come to expect. The real wild card was the iPhone XR but in my personal opinion it is the best possible phone that we could have expected. Why I'm Okay With The Display Most in the tech industry upon knowing about the pixel density of the iPhone XR instantly compared it to the iPhone 4 from 2010. Yes on paper they both have the exact same specs. But paper rarely tells the whole story. While the pixels per inch have stayed the same the underlying ...

When Will Apple Remove The Charging Port?

               Apple's all about that wireless technology and its no secret that Apple eventually wants a port-less iPhone. With the death of the headphone jack , Apple has obviously trained its guns on the lightning port. Surely even Apple isn't courageous enough to remove something as basic as the charging port. Right? If this is the first time you've heard about this you might be feeling a sense of dread. Don't worry thats normal. Yes all those memes that said that the next iPhone might not have a charging port were true. The lightning port's days are numbered. Why This Obsession With Wireless? Apple believes that wireless is the future ( And it is ) and all their design choices and decisions as a company over the past few years have been to wean us off cables and physical media. Starting with the removal of the CD drive, then with the headphone jack, then with very few ports on the MacBook. Yeah Apple has been hinting at us to switch ...