Of the iPhone 4S users I know, very few are enamored with Siri, the virtual personal assistant Apple touts as the prime feature of its current smartphone. Despite John Malkovich’s clear love for Siri’s quirky conversational style, the feature is more of a parlor trick than anything else.
I’ve written about user disappointment with Siri in the past, and during Apple CEO Tim Cook’s appearance at the opening of AllThingsD’s D10 conference Tuesday night, veteran tech columnist Walt Mossberg asked him about the trouble with Siri.
“When it works, it works really well,” Mossberg said to Cook. “It’s kinda like magic. But a lot of times it doesn’t work, and that’s not what a lot of people have come to think about Apple products.”
Mossberg also asked Cook whether Siri is “up to your standards”.
Cook’s reply was intriguing, though he didn’t really answer Mossberg’s question directly:
“Siri is one of the most popular features of iPhone 4S,” Cook said. “But there’s more that it can do, and we have a lot of people working on this. And I think you will be really pleased with some of the things you’re going to see over the coming months. We have some cool ideas about what Siri can do. We have a lot going on on this. … Sure, it can be broader, and so forth, but we see unbelievable potential here. We’re doubling down on it.”
His reference to “the coming months” is interesting, given that, on June 11, he’ll be giving the keynote address at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. Most observers expect iOS 6 to be unveiled there, and the rumor mill has Siri APIs on the agenda. They would allow developers to use Siri to interact with apps, which could be a game changer for Apple.
Imagine, for example, asking Siri to work with the Open Table app to make a 7 p.m. reservation at your favorite restaurant. Or asking it to add to your Contacts list the person you just chatted with on Skype. Or sending a link to the Web page you’re currently reading to a friend.
You get the idea. As Cook said, Siri could do more. A lot more. And it would be pretty darned cool.
But before Siri can live up to its potential, it has to work better at a more fundamental level, and there’s no sign that Siri on the iPhone 4S is getting better at what it does. If Apple is learning how to improve the feature’s accuracy and reliability, the company doesn’t appear to be using that knowledge to improve the product now.
That’s in contrast to Google, which pushes improvements to its products rapidly. The Chrome browser you’re using today is much better than the one you used just a few months ago. But Siri today is pretty much the same unreliable product Apple shipped on the iPhone 4S back in October.
Improving Siri on the fly should not be hard to do, as most of the heavy lifting is on Apple’s cloud servers. Granted, part of the problem appears to be that they are overwhelmed (which may be why Siri isn’t available on the new iPad), but still, the code that executes on them could be better.
If Apple’s “doubling down on Siri”, let current iPhone 4S users know it by making the feature better right now, not “over the coming months”.