Study Shows Siri May Not Be As Smart As It Thinks It Is
Apple’s Siri app turned a lot of heads and ears when the iPhone 4S first hit the shelves. The voice controlled app looked and sounded like something from an Arthur C. Clarke novel.
However, it may not bring us any closer to having a real HAL 9000 computer (and considering what happened in ’2001: A Space Odyssey,’ maybe we should be thankful for that).
A product analyst with the investment bank Piper Jaffray conducted a study of the popular Apple app. The results would make Siri utter a surprised sounding “What?!?”
Testers asked a series of 1,600 questions to Siri and the Google search engine. The team also asked Siri half of those questions in a quiet room and a public setting on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The results found that Google had a higher average of correct answers than Siri. Google was able to score an 86 percent average of correct answers. Siri, however, scored 68 percent in a quiet area and 62 percent in a noisy, public setting.
The study resulted in a grade of B+ for Google’s search engine and a disappointing D for Siri. It looks like Siri needs to hit the books a bit more. We hear that Google Books is pretty useful.