The ex-employee told Fortune that people at Apple are ‘embarrassed by Siri.’ Siri is Apple’s voice-recognition ‘PA’ feature on iPhones that has come under fire recently in a series of lawsuits that claim Siri doesn’t work as advertised. Siri was tagged as beta when Apple launched the iPhone 4S, and yet the company still picked it as the lead feature in its advertisements for the new phone,” Haslam reports. “Fortune has published a report that looks into the ways in which Tim Cook is changing Apple. Siri is noted as an example of a product that doesn’t reflect the normal quality of Apple products (although, we’d note that there were certainly poor products released under Steve Jobs – MobileMe, for example). The report states: ‘The ultimate ‘tell’ of tectonic changes at Apple will be the quality of its products. Those looking for deficiencies have found them in Siri, a less-than-perfect product that Apple released with the rare beta label in late 2011, a signal that the service shouldn’t be viewed as fully baked.’”
Haslam reports, “However, much of the report is very positive about Cook’s impact on Apple. It notes that both Apple employees and Wall Street analysts like and respect Cook, concluding that “as Apple enters a complex new phase of its corporate history, perhaps it doesn’t need a god as CEO but a mere mortal who understands how to get the job done.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We just copied the John Malkovich commercials word for word and Siri responded exactly as advertised.
For us, Siri works just fine (except of Christmas Day when millions of new iPhone 4S units attempted to connect to Siri all at once). Having lived on the west coast, in the northeast, on the east coast, and on the southeast coast of the U.S., we have developed pretty much neutral American English accents. We also usually have a good network connection when conversing with Siri. If you can’t connect to the Internet, Siri will not work, as she requires access to Apple’s data centers. Also, if you speak with a heavy accent, Siri may not work as well for you – although you might be surprised. Siri is meant to learn and improve as more users provide input and as Apple builds more data centers; hence the release as a “public beta.”
Apple has released tens of thousands of betas over their history and not an inconsiderable number of public betas, either. For example, Apple, under CEO Steve Jobs, released a public beta of Safari, the default Mac browser not so long ago.
As for advertising a product that is a beta, we see no problem with it, but we would like to see disclaimers stating as much in Apple’s ads.
Lastly, unless we know the exact circumstances for why someone is an ex-employee, we take their claims of who thinks what or who might do what if they were still alive with at least a grain of salt.
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