Yesterday I had lunch with a friend, whom I’ll identify as Pamela in order to protect her identity. Pamela disclosed to me that she’s pretty sure that Siri (the new iPhone voice recognition technology) has it in for her. There are some personalities that just don’t hit it off and when these personalities are forced together for a period of time bad things happen. This is my friend Pamela and Siri. She demonstrated repeated attempts to get Siri to text, email, or call someone. Pamela’s conversation went something like this:
Pamela: Call Amy.
Siri: Your music library is empty.
Pamela: Find coffee shops.
Siri: Dialing the IRS “Please Audit Me” department.
Pamela: @#$%&@#!!!
Siri: Calling your mother because I know you haven’t talked to her in a month since she told you that your thighs looked heavy in that skirt.
Pamela: Text Bob.
Siri: Locating all nearby porn retailers.
Then Pamela gave me her phone and I gave Siri a similar series of commands. Siri responded immediately and correctly to my requests. I even told Siri to "find fun" and she came up with a list of 25 "fun" places nearby in less that 3 seconds and over half of them had a full service bar.
So what can we learn from this? Be nice to Siri. She has a lot of power.
I have a feeling you are completely creative and this post is hilarious. Thanks for the smiles!
ReplyDeleteThe Desert Rocks - Thank you for the compliment and for stopping by my blog. I love hearing from you, and not just because you flatter me! :)
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly why I stay away from "smart" technology. Didn't anyone learn anything from the Cylons?
ReplyDeleteLOL! This is hilarious- I've listened to my friend have an all out verbal war with her GPS and it's like watching a free show! Great post, really enjoyed this one ~ Jess
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As part of my engineering training, I took a number of courses on artificial intelligence..... for TEXTUAL translation (for example) the best results so far are 70% accepted accuracy.... on algorithms that took 20-30 years to build!!!!
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to vocal recognition... I could make you laugh with the experiments I've done to assess language training software, purposely making it fail with the right thing and purposely making it "succeed" with gobble-di-gook!
No, the iPhone and Sync (in the car) are not any better, in fact they're dealing with FAR GREATER challenges (accents, background noise....)!
Makes me wonder how Siri is behaving around the errr... American "accent-ually" challenged? I shall name no races, even though I'm allowed since I'm Asian. ^_^
ReplyDeleteHahaha...Scary. I've heard similar complaints about Siri's snarkiness. I've often said that AIs will take over the world, and right now, their first form is in cellphones...
ReplyDeleteWow, Kayfey - good point!
ReplyDeleteWhat were those rules from I, Robot?.....
I think so. The 3 Laws of Robotics
ReplyDelete