Just about a year ago I questioned the opinion of many analysts and bloggers suggesting that Siri was losing the personal digital assistant battle to Google Assistant and Alexa. I reasoned that Apple didn’t care about that ‘battle,’ but instead, it was improving Siri enough so that they could sell more of their devices. If only Apple made the right investments on Siri, i.e., strengthen its apparently weak, some may say funny, ability to understand natural language, fundamentally improve its Natural Language Processing. It turns out Apple didn’t read my post ☺. Siri seems worse in some respect. For all the R&D investments that Apple did in 2018, I continue to be flummoxed by the answers of Siri while I’m driving to get estimated time of arrivals and Siri asking me to look at the screen. ☹ You know I’m driving, why are you asking me to look at the screen? In the meantime, Apple launched the HomePod in February of 2018, and two features stood out: the sound quality and Siri. I decided before the holidays to give it a try and indeed what a sound, wow! Not as good as my smallish Polk stereo speakers, but way better than most smart speakers and as good as or better than the more expensive Google’s Home Max. In regards to the virtual assistant, i.e., Siri, functionality, that’s another story. |
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