Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster recently put Siri through some paces and came back with some interesting results
I’ll admit it, I’m not that big a fan of Siri. Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be the flagship software feature of iOS 5, but I’ve always found its functionality to be a bit stunted. More often than not, a Google query seems to yield more accurate results much more quickly. What’s more, Siri’s ability to understand syntax still needs a little bit of tweaking – and of course this all assumes that you’re using Siri when the servers aren’t overloaded.
Now, the revamped Siri we can expect to see in iOS 6 admittedly seems a whole lot more promising and useful, but we’ll have to wait to see how it performs sans the beta tag before we get too excited.
RELATED: Tim Cook on Siri: “You’ll be really pleased with the things you’ll see over the coming months.”
In any event, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster recently put Siri through some paces and came back with some interesting results. Testing Siri out on the busy streets in Minneapolis, Munster tested out various queries in noisy and in quiet conditions. He found that Siri understands about 83% of queries in noisy conditions and 89% of queries in quieter conditions. More telling was that Siri’s accuracy in noisy conditions checked in at 62% while rising to a still paltry 68% in quieter conditions.
“In order to become a viable mobile search alternative,” Munster wrote in a research note to clients, “Siri must match or surpass Google’s accuracy of B+ and move from a grade D to a B or higher.”
Ouch, a D is not a solid vote of confidence for Siri and again, I wish I could disagree but I can’t. I suppose it’s not at all surprising that Siri still has that Beta label draped over it.
Once iOS 6 drops, Siri will be given a few new talents thanks to the integration of Open Table, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, and Yahoo Sports. This, ideally, will make Siri significantly more useful as its talents really lie with answering specific questions tied into specific services rather than being the destination for any and all types of questions.
via CNN
