Siri shares a lot of problems with Apple Maps wherein it simply gives up on a request shrugs and returns any answer rather than admitt failure.<p>For example sometimes searching Apple Maps for an address like 123 Mountain View in a development where there are similar addresses like Mountain Drive or Mountain Glade it’ll often ignore what you typed (or correctly heard in the case of Siri) and give you the wrong location such as Mountain Wood. This is especially frustrating when it happens to be your home location.<p>For a compounded example I tried to use geofenced reminders on iOS. I had set my home and work addresses in Contacts but edited their location manually on the map because the postal address Apple offers isn’t correct and is useless when using the very useful autocomplete feature in safari. Searching for Home/Work on Apple maps goes to the incorrect location and jumps to the edited location. So when the Reminders App checks for the input location (Hey Siri remind me to do bla when I get home) it only goes to the incorrect location and sometimes another random Mountain location and never checks for the edit.<p>This is not the attention to detail Apple is supposedly known for.
I still see Siri in the “maybe someday” category. I don’t have Siri turned on, but my wife does. I hear her talking to it to mostly look up measurement conversions and such.<p>An anecdote of my favorite Siri incident. One night a couple weeks ago, we had an abundance of dragonflies in our yard. I said that they were there because they are bugs and it was the right time of day for that. She thought dragonflies ate something else, so she asked Siri, “what do dragonflies eat?”<p>Siri told us that we should consult a local zoologist before attempting to care for wild animals.
Steve Wozniak's story of making the Apple ][ floppy disk is an absolute must read, if you have not yet enjoyed it.<p><a href="https://paleotronic.com/2018/05/19/steve-wozniak-talks-disk/" rel="nofollow">https://paleotronic.com/2018/05/19/steve-wozniak-talks-disk/</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17101830" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17101830</a><p>The story was included with many other Woz tales in jl's book "Founders at Work"<p><a href="http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html</a>
FTA: “I bought the first Samsung Gear watch. That’s the only tech product I’ve bought in all these decades that I sent back after one day. I couldn’t get anything out of it except the time.”<p>Pure Woz! He says this at a Samsung event!
>Wozniak got his hands on early versions of Siri, and, he said, “I loved Siri for years. I could ask it: ‘What are the five largest lakes in California?' and get an answer. That’s hard to do any other way on the Internet. Then, Apple bought it and now, if you ask that, it gives you a list of lakeside real estate developers.”<p>Mmm no. It gives you a list of web results, none of which has to do with real estate. Maybe Woz's Google results were influenced by his own real estate searches :)<p>It's still ridicolous that you don't get a straight answer, though.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
> <i>Sunday, 29 June 1975, has gone down in computing history as the day on which Steve Wozniak first showed Steve Jobs a working prototype of the Apple 1, and as the first time that someone typed a character on the keyboard of a personal computer and it appeared on a screen. ... Said Wozniak, “You know I’m a prankster — I actually made up that date and just kept repeating it.” The actual event, as he can best recall, happened weeks or months later.</i><p>I don't get it. How is citing a decades-old date weeks before the real date a "prank"?
I don’t know why I care so much about tech celebrity opinions but I do.<p>I dont care about pop culture celebrities but I eat up Steve Jobs reminisce pieces and Wozniak opinions like candy even if the particular article is banal.
The only thing we have used Siri for is for identification of song that we have heard over the radio, and also for the amusement of my kids on how to spell swear words.
>“I loved Siri for years. I could ask it: ‘What are the five largest lakes in California?' and get an answer. That’s hard to do any other way on the Internet.<p>What does "hard to do any other way on the Internet" mean here? I'm honestly confused because say you Google it then you get the results instantly. Unless he is talking about the definition of "large" which can be the area covered or the volume but then that's up to the question itself and not Siri.
I just searched my home address from where I’m typing this comment, a street name of about 10 letters followed by a 2-digit street number in an European capital city of 2 million people. Google Maps gave me the correct street name after typing 5 of those 10 street name letters and after I also inputed the street number the first result in the suggested list was the correct one. Apple Maps didn’t display the correct address at any point of me inputting the address’s letters and digits, and after I finished writing them down all and clicking the search button it redirected me to an address with the same name located 100 kilometers away. Apple Maps still has a very long way to go.