Siri - Now Less Accurate Than The Average Teenager
Siri has been available on the iPhone 4s for over 8 months now, so it probably comes as no surprise to many iPhone owners that this app isn’t ac accurate as Apple’s commercials lead you to believe.
A team of analysts at Piper Jaffray have run Apple’s virtual assistant app through a battery of test, and they found that Siri understood the question just over 4 times out of 5.
Siri was asked a total of 1600 questions, half in a quiet room and half on a busy street. The background noise tended to degrade the results, but not by much. Siri comprehended 83 % of the questions asked on the street, with accuracy at 62%. In the quiet room, Siri fared slightly better, comprehending 89% of questions and accurately answering 68% of them.
Some of the questions which quite thoroughly stumped Siri were:
- “What team does Peyton Manning play for?” Siri would respond with the answer to the previous query.
- “Where is Elvis buried?” Siri looked for a person named “Elvis Buried.”
- “Where am I?” Sometimes a map pin would be dropped in the wrong place.
- “When did the movie Cinderella come out?” Siri would attempt to find current theater movie times via Yelp.
- “How do I get from Boston to New York?” Siri responded: “I can only give directions from your current location. I can’t give you directions to a place you are not in.”
As a control, the same questions were typed into Google. Comprehension was naturally 100%, and Google also achieved a higher degree of accuracy (86%). That likely surprised no one. “We believe the most likely substitute for Siri is Google text input on the iPhone, not the Google voice search app,” the analysts explained to AppleInsider.
