Daring Fireball★ Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber
https://daringfireball.net/2025/01/siri_is_super_dumb_and_getting_dumber
https://daringfireball.net/2025/01/siri_is_super_dumb_and_getting_dumber
Timo Hetzel@daringfireball you should try non-US specific sports questions. It’s even worse.
MattLeidholm@daringfireball North Dakotan here! The answers that involve "Dickinson High" or "Dickinson Midgets" (don't get me started) are even more wrong than you think, because Dickinson High (the public school with the unfortunate nickname) is a *different school* from Dickinson Trinity, a private Catholic school whose sports teams are the Titans (much hated by the underfunded small schools it competes against in class B, like my hometown Hillsboro Burros)
Jason V@daringfireball Building and iterating Siri seems orthogonal to Apple’s abilities in every way.
It’s been consistently terrible and qualitatively stagnant for so long, we’ll probably be stuck with bad autocorrect and Siri forever.
Delric@jvagner @daringfireball i don’t understand why autocorrect still sucks, especially after their announcement that it was going to stop ducking suck. can’t i just have access to the dictionary!?
James Scariati@daringfireball asking the exact same question multiple times and getting different answers is one of my biggest frustrations with Siri (and this happens with “old” Siri too). And why aren’t the Siri-with-ChatGPT answers identical to the answers provided by ChatGPT itself?! It’s embarrassingly bad and nonsensical.
Jérôme Leroy@jscari @daringfireball To be fair, that's an issue with ChatGPT as well. If you ask it the same question, you will consistently get different answers—sometimes just worded differently, but also sometimes vastly different in content. That's a big issue—on most subjects machines should give the same exact response every time you give it the same query (like a human likely would).
HalfCap@daringfireball Huh - Kagi gives me only the Quick Answer for class B. I can only get it to spit out the class A result if I specifically ask for it. If I ask ChatGPT, it gives me results for both class A and B - but doesn't know who actually won the game. Siri is bad, but the inconsistency on all these platforms is just horrendous
dsparil@daringfireball The weird thing is that asking "when did ___ last win the super bowl" seems to work better. The double weird thing is that Siri on iOS will provide an answer, but macOS Siri just brings up search results.
Josh 
wqoq@daringfireball Is Canadian Siri smarter or is it because I have an iPhone without Apple Intelligence (13 Pro)? It got all of the ones I tried—stopped after a dozen or so (also can only attach 4 pictures).
danny_wonglh@daringfireball Apple Intelligence Summary for this post - Siri is a piece of garbage.
MichikaSerious question: do you think someone at the Siri team read this and made immediate, very specific fixes? Because I got correct answers for all 20 Superbowls I asked about. Then I tried the South Dakota question and got the same results as DuckDuckGo.
dmitriidImagine if you could run your own assistant instead of Siri (perhaps tailored to your requirements).
4d tommie@dmitriid @daringfireball Hmm, setting a default assistent app, don't give the EU any ideas 😜
@daringfireball Why do you compare Siri with google web/ai search results. Have you tried Gemini 1.5, Gemini 2.0 or Gemini Pro as an assistent? Soon it will be integrated in google assistent and its quality is iterated on very fast if you compare these 3 versions. And it's pretty amazing if you ask me.
Shenyen@daringfireball A decade ago, somebody would have been Forstall‘ed for the performance of Apple Intelligence (though to be honest, a lot of the AI-systems by other companies as well as well).
Leon Zandman@daringfireball Finally 😀 For years us listeners to the Talk Show have heard you as the sole defender of Siri. Claiming it had become better, but nobody wanted to try Siri again after initially being disappointed by it. Even when guests on your show didn’t agree with you on that.
Siri is indeed very, very bad. Even more so in non-US countries. Besides bad answers, it’s also very bad at voice recognition. It makes many apps on CarPlay unusable, as they only provide voice input.
Simon Jacquier@daringfireball Here is the result from Perplexity (Pro Search): https://www.perplexity.ai/search/who-won-the-2004-north-dakota-j2ljXfxDRn6b2MwTdxhMYA
Martin the paranoid android
@daringfireball The last time Apple released something so buggy (ie. Maps) someone (Scott Forstall) got fired over it. (I'd even argue, at this point, that Apple Intelligence is worse than Maps ever was.) Did something change in Apple's commitment to quality and holding those responsible for rushed releases to account?
Brandon@daringfireball could you please replace that special-ed student analogy? it’s really unnecessarily punching down given the post title.
SupremePeter@daringfireball I tried this and it got it right 100% of the time
@[email protected] not just the AI stuff but lately just basic dictation. Ask it to navigate to “Home Depot in Colma” (while in SF) and it does Tacoma, even when corrected with “Colma, CA”. Lots of similar mistakes
@daringfireball Asking about random high school titles is certainly not a prime use case for me and seems more tied to web crawled results. Not what I use Siri for, which is maps, homekit, short texts, timers, etc. Use a computer if you need more detail.
