Piers Fawkes: Siri’s Not Working

This video shows my four year old son trying to use Siri. Apple’s new service doesn’t understand me and I guessed it was my British accent — so I gave the voice recognition system the ultimate user-test: Cy Fawkes. Cy has been able to use the iPhone and iPad for games, photos and video since he was 18 months old so I wondered if the latest Apple interface met the same standards iOS set when the iPhone launched. The video shows that this isn’t the case — Cy really struggles with Siri on the Apple iPhone 4S.

Quite simply, the voice recognition service doesn’t meet Apple’s high standards. Sure, the PR people say that Siri was Steve Jobs’ last hurrah but it’s obvious that he was too sick to be involved in the development. Jobs designed products that were intuitive and exceeded the user’s expectations. This post-Jobs product expects the user to work within the constraints of the system and compromise.

Towards the end of the video Cy starts using his fingers to interface with the phone – and the ‘Huh?’ at the end sums it all up.

The quality of new voice recognition service is more akin to a Google product – Google’s products are rushed and always a little shoddy, the idea better than the execution. Siri is below the standard of innovation that Apple set years ago.

Apple Siri