I’ve been critical of Siri in the past, but over the last few days I’ve had several interactions with Siri that impressed me.
While driving, I asked Siri who owns Fiat. I expected to be told it couldn’t display information while driving, but instead Siri audibly told me that according to Wikipedia, Fiat is owned by FCA. When I asked, with an eyeroll, who owns FCA, Siri further explained that it’s a joint European-American company, Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles.
Later I said something like, “Hey, Siri, give me directions to 13353, no, wait, I meant 13553…” It was a foolish act of faith that I even finished giving the address, rather than aborting the process, but It rewarded my faith when it responded by giving me directions to the corrected address.
I just checked Wikipedia, and apparently FCA has been absorbed into Stellantis, so Siri’s version of Wikipedia is slightly out of date. Still, Siri was tracking context enough to know that when I asked about FCA, I mean the one it had just told me about, not any one of the other dozens of things those initials could stand for.
More importantly, I’ve had negative experiences related to both of those use-cases in the past, so there have clearly been recent improvements to Siri’s language-parsing.
The remaining area in which I get the most hit-or-miss results is playing music. Sometimes I am very clear: “play the song with the lyrics ‘correct lyrics,”” for example. Sometimes I give incorrect lyrics, and it’s usually okay with that, too. But every now and again I’ll ask for a particular song or album and it will offer up something that suggests that Siri occasionally imbibes in recreational drugs to excess. Just bizarre responses, not at all what I asked for, presumably related by some tangential path via lyrics in songs I don’t know. I haven’t been asking Siri to play things for weeks now, after a particularly-frustrating exchange, but perhaps I should give it a shot.
