Apple Tells Siri To Stop Recommending Nokia 337
judgecorp writes "Apple has changed the answer Siri gives to the question 'What is the best smartphone ever?' to prevent the voice-driven assistant from promoting the Nokia Lumia 900. Originally Siri trawled online reviews on the web, using the Wolfram Alpha search engine, to come up with the Lumia, much to Apple's embarrassment. Now, Apple has intervened, replacing that answer with a joke: 'Wait there are other phones?'"
Re:Not just Apple (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seems more approprate to Apple (Score:5, Informative)
No, the "ever" qualifier is what triggered the Wolfram Alpha results. "What is the best phone" without ever always returned the joke.
Odd. (Score:5, Informative)
Apple's perfected their time machine, then, because "wait, there are other phones?" is one of the (several) "joke" responses I got from asking "what's the best smartphone?" on the 4S launch day, amongst other responses like "the one you're holding."
Two minutes on Google backs this up.
C'mon, people. It isn't that hard.
Change? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's How I Read It: (Score:2, Informative)
Can't really blame them, though - if I were the wolf in charge of "protecting" the walled garden full of iSheep, I'd be hard pressed to not nosh on a few myself.
Reply was there originally (Score:5, Informative)
For all those of you who never asked Siri what the best phone was when you first got a 4S, the joking was there from the start. Some update must have removed it and had it actually try to answer the question using Wolfram Alpha. They simply put the joke back in.
Re:Preventing False Advertising (Score:2, Informative)
Does anyone actually believe that the Nokia Lumia is the best phone on the market?
A lot of Lumia 900 users do.
The old result was a glitch in WolframAlpha (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the current results for "what is the best smartphone ever" [wolframalpha.com] in Wolfram Alpha you will find that they also changed the answer. Now it just gives you a list of five smartphones tied at 5 points of average score by Best Buy customers: HTC Trophy, iPhone 4s, iPhone 4, Lumia 900, HTC Rhyme, in that order.
That's because Wolfram Alpha was indeed being embarrassed because it seemed like they were endorsing a particular phone by providing a lot of details about the first entry in the list (at the time the Lumina 900), but if you looked deeper the whole thing was bogus.
Expand the list (press the "More" button four times) and you will find that there are actually 28 smartphones with average scores of 5 in the list! A couple of days back when Siri's comical response was revealed there were 13 tied in first place.
And let's not forget that these scores are averages of a very small number of reviews (at this time 9 for the iPhone 4s and 5 for the Lumia 900; yesterday it was 2 for the 4s, 4 for the Lumia 900) making the whole measure even more worthless.
(Apparently when they are tied the order in the list is decided by the number of reviews, thus the descent of the Lumia).
Re:The old result was a glitch in WolframAlpha (Score:5, Informative)
OK, here's an article [searchengineland.com] describing with some more detail what happened.
Re:It didn't do that for me... (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much. We recently switched cell providers, and my wife opted to get an iPhone. Here is one of her conversations with Siri (details paraphrased/redacted):
W: Find me a mexican restaurant in __city name__.
S: I found 23 places near you
W: (looking at list) Where is __first restaurant in list__.
S: I can't help you with that.
W: Habla Espanol?
S: I don't want to argue with you.
That was more or less the gist of every conversation she attempted w/ Siri. Never any really useful information. She frequently got "I can't help you with that" or something similar. The only value seems to be the entertainment when you stumble across one of the easter egg phrases. It's like playing around with the old Alice AI bots. It can be fun for a bit, but the novelty wears off quickly, at which point, it's useless.
Re:Not just Apple (Score:5, Informative)
Not yet anyway. If someone else comes out with a better equivalent to Siri, or Siri starts producing terrible results that aren't for gimmicky questions people will drop it like a rock.
Nope, because Apple would simply disallow any app from their market from competing with Siri (just like alternate web browsers, alternate stores, etc). iPhone users can't run what they want without talented hackers.
Re:Not just Apple (Score:3, Informative)
Google isn't consistent. Their servers don't perfectly sync and are always crawling. They talked about it in an interview here years ago I think.
Many large sites with non-critical data work this way (and the nitty gritty exact search order for any given second/minute/hour/day is non-critical).
Facebook does something similar with post visibility (it's not necessarily instant everywhere), and I've had friends call in panic when a mutual friend's memorialized account dropped off the internet for up to a day as it transitioned (some could see it, some couldn't, and it would go back and forth for some people).
Re:Not just Apple (Score:5, Informative)
That is false. You can turn off Siri in the settings and go back to the old voice control from ios 4.x