When I talk to Siri on my iPhone, her responses often make me wonder what the hell she is thinking. She comes up with some really weird interpretations of what I say. I'm not so much interested in fixing the problem (although that would certainly be nice) as I am in figuring out the reasons behind the idiosyncratic behavior.
I've had my iPhone for about two years, and I've noticed a distinct degradation in the quality of Siri's speech recognition. I prefer to speak my text messages, rather than type them in. (Incidentally, I'm a native speaker of American English, and I don't think I have any speech impediments). Here are some examples of what Siri has been doing:
For a period of a few weeks (or maybe longer), Siri would interpret normal, English words as if they were in a foreign language -- possibly German. I never bothered to do any Google searches on them, but I'd guess that the words were the names of towns or areas in Germany. The problem resolved itself.
I recently spoke a text message that said, "Pick up some ginger ale". The result was, "Pick up some ginger Al". Given that Apple's algorithms are supposed to pick the most-likely interpretation of ambiguous speech, I find this result to be especially surprising. Surely "ginger ale" is a much more common phrase than "ginger Al"?
Today, Siri spelled the name "Michelle" in two different ways within the same text: "She's going to find out from Michelle if Michele can make it tomorrow".
Siri has recently started changing past participles into present-tense verbs, with the word "it" following them: e.g., "I walk it home last night", instead of "I walked home last night".
Also lately, the word "message" has been coming out as "iMessage".
Siri sometimes types out a whole text correctly, only to automatically back-space over it, start it from scratch, and then interpret it incorrectly.
Anybody know why this might be happening? |