Apple's Siri is both great and annoying, so I'm not using it much

David Sparks of the excellent MacSparky blog recently wrote a post called The Siri Problem, which makes the point that Apple's Siri service s great yet unreliable. I totally agree.

I love Siri and periodically try to use it. If it works it's magic. But just often enough it fails, and it fails just enough that I am giving up on using it. Before Siri I used the voice command feature to dial people's numbers by simply speaking their name. Siri made the success rate of this feature better, but only if the network that powers Siri is available.

The old system didn't require a network connection. So now when Siri isn't working I can't use the voice command at all. Yes, I can go back to the voice command, which doesn't rely on the network, but then I lose Siri functionality (and Siri forgets all your history if you turn it off).

I don't know what the problem is, but I know that if Apple doesn't fix it soon they'll be losing a lot of momentum. When Apple aficianados like David Sparks and me throw up our hands that's a bad sign. Too bad Steve Jobs isn't still around to go kick some ass. There is no excuse for Siri being this unreliable. And don't remind me that Apple says "it's in beta," because they've hyped it extensively in commercials such as this one.

Comments

[Steven J Fromm]

You would think if you put something out there that it would work, beta or no beta. This is really frustrating but seems to happening more and more.