Apple slapped with second Siri senility lawsuit Apple has been slapped with a second class-action lawsuit alleging that its ads for the iPhone 4S's Siri voice-activated search feature constitute false advertising. "Through its nationwide multimedia marketing campaign, Apple disseminates false and deceptive representations regarding the functionality of the Siri Feature," …
Here is why I don't like Siri: no context. Everything works great if you get it right in the first go, but if you mess up you have to start the whole dumb command over. "She" appears to have the memory capacity of a gnat as evidenced by the following exchange (paraphrased):
Me: Siri, create a new meeting with Bill tomorrow at 4PM.
Siri: Here's your new meeting: [Meeting, Bill, 4PM tomorrow] OK?
Me: Wait, change that to 3PM.
Siri: Sorry, I don't understand "Wait, change that to 3PM."
Me: *sigh*
That anyone really believed the hype surrounding Siri, I'm even more amazed that people bought into so easily, I'm even more astounded that they think it is a reason to sue over, and I am flabbergasted a law firm has taken it on.
Thank god for our education system here in the UK, something that appears to be lacking in the US where maybe they need lessons on common sense.
I don't think that's entirely fair on some of the petrol queuers - once the panic starts it does make a certain perverse sense to join in if you do need some petrol (obviously those with low tanks, not nutters trying to fill jerry cans). you can be part of the problem, or you can walk round town until the supply chain catches up to the accelerated demand. It's a bit like a run on a bank - if everyone's taking out their cash, taking the moral high ground does you f all good if you can't get money out later.
People believe because the ads told them so. I'm neither here nor there with Apple or Siri but if you advertise something amazing as doing something incredible and it turns out it doesn't do that something incredible properly then consumers have a right to be pissed off, or in the case of the USA, sue somebody.
"Anyone who takes any advert at face value in this day and age needs their head examining. Or they should come see me. I have some excellent deals on London Bridges for them :)"
I don't generally bother with people who can't speak English, but...
Any advert that cannot be taken at face value is illegal and grounds for a lawsuit.
Having seen a lot of the underfunded, badly implemented, badly maintained, crap that passes for IT in schools, I can believe some might look for alternatives. Unless they're getting a seriously BIG discount though, I can't see a move off of Windows (where the majority of the ICT software stack lives) being a clever one.
To be fair, natural language processing is a tough nut to crack on the best of circumstances, and asking a computer to figure out the referent to "that" in that kind of situation requires much more cognitive nimbleness than you might think. Computers are still pretty primitive beasts, and natural language processing on computers is still pretty dicey.
I don't use Siri or any of its competitors; I don't really think that computers are at the point yet where they can be expected to process language with the agility that people want them to.
Talk in monotone like a computer. Remove extraneous words. Enunciate clearly. Speak with an even pace.
That is the nimbleness that a lot of users lack. People jacked up on coffee and dragged down on doziness won't help. Especially long or gnarly accents. (In ~93, I figured that out when dealing with the then-newfangled auto attendants and voicemail/auto response systems. The best fun was dealing with the one that only took button presses, but said "Oh" instead of "zero"; "There IS NO extension: two-three-six nine-five-five seheven-three-ohh-two ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh" Til the company president snapped for me to knock that off and to turn down the speaker volume, heheheh....)
... Back in 1976 I bought your new Apple ][. The "Red Book" code had some penciled in changes. I assume you put them there. I know you are thinking ... he never writes, he never calls ... ok sorry, let me make amends.
Siri works wonderfully for me, but I had to teach her to say "do you want fries with that?" at the end of every session. I suggest Apple do the same (no I didn't patent the patch).
Here's the thing: Siri is a "personal assistant", but that is still a social position far below the most overworked, underpaid, and need I say, under appreciated waitress. Apple knows well that slaves are Chinese, you own a bunch of them, but when you suggest that Siri is worth anywhere close to that waitress she'll spit in your soup, rich guy, you can count on it.
I have a car for sale, has a self drive function, first of it's kind. You just tell it where to go and sit back and go to sleep.
If Honda ran this ad with a link to a website that contained a link to a page explaining where to find the basement with no stairs and a locked cupboard with a filing cabinet containing a piece of paper where the statement "the auto drive thing is a Beta product" on, they would (and rightly so) be sued into chapter 11.
The Ads I have seen with Siri in, show it as being a unique selling point. Unique selling points should really live up to expectation.
I reckon some 'skank' lawyer has a fair chance of winning a law-suit over a beta product being sold as a USP, if those adverts are misleading. Beta, or otherwise, false advertising is false advertising. Apple put so much spin on their products that it was bound to come to this sooner or later. They might get away with it this time, but even if they do, they won't learn, and they'll get caught out eventually. How much the lesson costs them in the end is another matter. I would imagine the only winners will be lawyers.
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The whole point in having an Apple is having something others do not have. Obviously the excludes the millions of other individualists/
So whilst Sire might be useless and Retina could makes for squinting hey no one else is going to copy it. Well for our sake, let's hope not.
Oops, too late for your wish. Google already started their photocopiers on that one:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/16/google_siri_will_be_called_majel/
Yeah, I guess you are right, that must explain it, all those 10 of millions must be deluded for not agreeing with some arse-wipes opinion that Apple can't produce an objectively good product ever. I just wonder what level of Dickery we will descend to in the comments before the idiots become embarrassed.
The comments at the end of the story that Siri used to be capable of listing prime numbers over 87, but now just gives you places to find prime rib, make me wonder if it was designed to be "learning" from usage data.
Since the majority of people are astoundingly, mindbogglingly stupid, it should be no surprise that Siri is now beginning to reflect the minds of its users.
They should have only let it get training data from their own employees. Soon Siri will be automatically ordering cases of Pabst and initiating sports streaming video.
There are infinitely many prime numbers greater than 87. Each time Steve Wozniak asks Siri for them, it starts another everlasting process to work them out. Soon this will be the only thing that Siri is doing.
In Star Trek somebody finally invented a computer, unfortunately an evil one, that could recognise a stupid question and ignore it.
As far as I remember - radio version, anyway - Arthur Dent locked up the Nutrimatic Drink Machine, and then the spaceship's main computer, by asking the drink machine a rhetorical question - "do you know -why- I want a cup of tea" - causing it to go nuts trying to calculate the answer.
"That anyone really believed the hype surrounding Siri, I'm even more amazed that people bought into so easily, I'm even more astounded that they think it is a reason to sue over, and I am flabbergasted a law firm has taken it on."
Apple fanbois believe anything they are told.
As for being astounded, why? False advertising is illegal, so if Apple is misrepresenting the functionality of their product in an ad, then people have a case to sue over it. Scientific and R&D advancements bring new products onto the market all the time, it's not up to the customer to know "Oh, well, language processing hasn't advanced that far yet." It's up to the advertiser to not claim the product does things it can't do. Not saying they should win, or whatever, but certainly there's cause to potentially sue.
"To be fair, natural language processing is a tough nut to crack on the best of circumstances, and asking a computer to figure out the referent to "that" in that kind of situation requires much more cognitive nimbleness than you might think. "
Infocom had that problem licked by the late 1970s for the common case. See Zork and almost every interactive fiction ever made. It's not tricky at all to look back 1 item in a conversation, to understand "Schedule foobar at 4PM..... Make that 3PM." means you want to schedule foobar at 3PM.
Siri can do any of the following things for me:
Open the weather app and show the location I ask for (about 50% of the time)
Tell me the time in other time zones (about 40% of the time)
Tell me what the time is 'here' (about 10% of the time, it uses the GPS to figure out where 'here' is and keeps getting it off by about 20 miles then telling me it doesn't know the time in *address across town*
Do a google search (roughly 70% accuracy)
Play songs or albums from my library (pretty good 90% accuracy but then there is a set word list there)
When I see the advert that shows people checking their email and messages or asking where their brother is (presumably he had to check into the place first?) it makes me angry that they can blatantly lie about it's capabilities like that and get away with it.
From all the guff surrounding it I thought it was a finished V1.0, just the 'beta' thing alone is misleading, surely, given the hype that emanated from Cupertino's marketing strike clones.
Never mind the fact that it doesn't actually do what is claimed to the standard that is claimed/implied.
"There is no SiriGate". OK, we'll pay out. History repeating ?
I didn't buy an iPhone for Siri. If you have half a brain you know that the computing power required for this work cannot live inside the iPhone, so you end up exporting your life to Apple's servers, plus a nice voice print to accompany all the other data they already have on you. On Android clones it's even worse because you have little idea what they do with the data (Apple has at least been reasonably sensible with my personal data - up until now - but it's still a US company).
So, thanks but no thanks. I can do perfectly without Siri (et al).
As much as I would like to see Apple (one of the vilest tech companies out there) get hammered, this lawsuit is utter nonsense. So SIRI doesn't work as advertised (and you were gullible enough to believe that in the first place). The only reasonable course of action (if this was your main reason for purchasing) is to return the phone as not fit for purpose and get a proper one instead. Win Pho 7 and Android all have perfectly functioning voice interaction. But a lawsuit? This should be kicked out of court immediately and the plaintiff slapped around the head with a couple of herrings.
Siri's a gimmick for the gullible, but I would like to point out that another tech giant's favourite thing in the universe is to keep production products in "beta" for years so they don't have to concern themselves with such petty concerns as whether or not they work correctly.
How many years was Google Maps in beta, anyway?
Claiming that Siri is in beta is trying to make people believe it will get better once released. However, the underlying tech is simply not nailed down yet. This is ongoing R&D and I would even say that the R&D is pretty much stalled. We are at 20% of where we need to be to have a computer truly understand spoken language and chances are in 10 years, we will be at 21%. If what Apple claimed in their advert was true, it would be a groundbreaking, earth-shattering, mind-boggling advance in AI science. Unfortunately, it is just marketing hyperbole. They deserve to go down for false advertisement.
"As The Reg noted in our coverage of the earlier lawsuit, others have complained that Siri is not only crap, but getting crappier."
Maybe so, but The Reg's reviewer noted something else: "It’s highly sophisticated and though at times it seems to be a glorious, cool gimmick, this will change.... [in summing up product] the upgraded performance and coolness of Siri and the improved camera are pretty compelling"
I don’t think I saw any bad reviews about Siri and seem to recall that all were good or glowing. (It’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of reviewers, not El Reg’s, mind, did say that Siri was in beta and some said that Apple had been very clear about this. )Perhaps it’s not just Apple’s adverts that were “fundamentally and designedly false and misleading”?
Were these reviewers talking out their proverbial or was there (at least some) honest reporting going on?
If user experience is inconsistent, it’s a shame that there doesn’t seem to be any actual research by hacks. Similarly, although there are claims that Siri’s performance has taken a hit (servers being unable to cope is one reason that’s been touted), I haven’t read much in the way of researched articles. Surely publications are missing a trick here? Then again, slapping ‘Apple’ in a headline is guaranteed linkbait – two out of the top five articles for ‘Most read’ and ‘Most commentated’ this morning are Apple stories – so why bother?
"When I see the advert that shows people checking their email and messages or asking where their brother is (presumably he had to check into the place first?) it makes me angry that they can blatantly lie about it's capabilities like that and get away with it."
I use it to check my emails and messages quite regularly.
It's never managed to correctly tell me where my brother is, but as I don't have one that's more of a philosophical question than anything else.
I'd agree that Siri is a bit rubbish, but the complaint being leveled by the lawsuit is that it *can't* do the stuff in the advert, which is clearly something that can be proven one way or the other in court.
I could buy a motorbike, but I can't ride one and that wouldn't give me the right to sue the manufacturer for making claims about the bike being able to take me places.
(Yes, yes, lots of downvotes.)
The advertisement was indeed misleading.
Siri was the primary "selling point" Apple was trying to make - passing off a functionally and visually identical device "as the new best thing". (other "s" enhancements under the hood were a mild point release, and neither apparent nor relevant to an ordinary buyer).
Let alone Siri is a piece of code capable of running perfectly well on a lowly 3gs (or indeed any device with a sound input and an internet connection, since the processing is done on the server side)
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Being labeled as beta, or the difficulties of natural language processing are beside the mark. If a product is not capable of performing as advertised the maker of the product is liable. Plain and simple.
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