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, Interesting)
Just did the same, Mozilla is the second spot. Spot #5 says "You really can't go wrong with any Web browser choice these days. Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, all are fast, standards ..."
The thing is, if Google gives you bogus results they're going to lose your eyeballs; that's one of many things that makes Google superior to Bing. Bad search results hurt their bottom line, while Siri's answers aren't going to stop anybody from buying another iPhone.
Ranked by Best Buy customers... (Score:4, Interesting)
Wolfram Alpha, "Mobile phones ranked by Best Buy customer review average and customer review count:"
Currently HTC Trophy is first followed by an iPhone.
The winning phone has maybe 23 reviews (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1&_dynSessConf=-1144113708518003664&id=pcat17071&type=page&st=htc+trophy&sc=Global&cp=1&nrp=15&sp=&qp=&list=n&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960). Which must be highly significant .
The most interesting thing to me here is, that BestBuy.com reviews can be exploited to influence Siri users....
Re:Change? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to corroborate this, the original joke phrase was "What is the best cell phone?" and would get answers like "the one you're holding!"
By adding "ever" to the end, you used to trick SIRI into going further into its algorithm and could get the Wolfram Alpha answer. Apple just added "ever" to the end of the joke phrase.
I wonder if there are other words you can still add to get the query to go through again? Like "created" or "made" or things like that? I'd try, but I get very little cell reception where I am right now, which translates to SIRI failing more often than not.
Re:Not just Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Imagine if you could inject ads directly into Siri for example, queries would give preferential results based on the location you queried from and common terms were bid for (say optometrist, and the highest bidding optometrist within 10Km would get their result) that could, in the long run, seriously undermine the credibility of a project like Siri. Right now it's experimental, it can fail humourously and no one gets to fussed about it. But if there are competitors on the market, that could be a problem.
Re:Not just Apple (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually the Android fanbois foam at the mouth when I point out how androids voice control is seriously lacking. I should be able to set my android phone out of my reach and have a conversation with it only using the BT headset and the single button on it's side to activate the Voice control.
I hear that ICS fixed how bad the voice system is in android, but my current android phone running 2.3.3 is utterly useless even for voice dialing. it gives ZERO response to my command "Call home" I get no feedback other than the phone call starting. And calling my friend dave always fails if I say "call dave" as Android does the epic fail of displaying a list of daves to choose from, and then home,work,cell choices. Hello? tell me in a voice in my ear and listen for my response.
complete epic fail if I have to look at a screen and touch the phone.
Re:Not just Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate siri 1.0 because it removed the standard apple voice control that was in the 3GS and 4.0 that works when you dont have a internet connection. siri does not work when you have no net connection. so voice dialing or voice control of the music fails when out of service range.
another epic failure of cloud crap.