From this Fast Company post:

Every phonemaker on the planet has been gunning for Apple for a decade (and a bunch of them are no longer in business). Apple’s speedy and continuous reinvention has kept the competition at bay. New features, new materials, and new designs are cranked out like clockwork, year after year, and at a scale that has become truly astounding. The difficulty of the engineering, manufacturing, and marketing integration required is hard to overstate. And each year, Apple’s products get better.

Well stated. Apple’s products continue to raise the bar. At the same time they continue to get more complex, more sophisticated.

And with that rise in complexity comes cracks in the process. As Dan Moren points out in Adventures in Siri failures, inconsistency is an issue that bedevils Siri.

But to me, this is not a slam at Apple. It is more a statement about the nature of complexity. If today’s Siri was a beta release, you would marvel at the performance, at Siri’s ability to turn your spoken words into text, then translate that text into commands. Siri does a solid job at both of those things, able to do them via a device on your wrist.

Where the frayed edges show is in the bleeding edge, where Siri is asked to infer context, to walk the tree of commands into unknown territory.

When I say “Remind me at xxx to do yyy”, Siri inevitably gets it right (barring a bad net connection, overloaded server, or background noise). Some syntax is bulletproof.

The stumbles come when Siri is asked to tackle more complex contextual parsing. Try telling Siri, “Remind me when the moon is full to do the laundry”. Siri will gladly create that reminder, but not knowing that “when the moon is full” refers to an event, the whole thing is posted as a dateless generic reminder.

Is that Siri’s fault? Are we right to complain when the cracks show? Should Apple play it safe and only have Siri respond to bulletproof syntax?

My two cents? I enjoy puzzling along with Siri, trying to figure out a way to get Siri to understand the more complex queries. But I also know enough to know what Siri does well, to stick with the reliable when I need to get something done.