With the launch of iOS 7 came a pretty significant upgrade to Siri. Apple’s voice assistant got a slick new interface, a new option for a male voice, and full Wikipedia integration. Siri got smarter, with the ability to understand a wider array of queries, and Siri expanded the breadth of what she can do for iPhone owners by responding to new types of commands involving device settings and voicemail.
None of which impressed Apple users, apparently.
A new survey from Intelligent Voice found that a shockingly high percent of iOS 7 users don’t use Siri – and the ones who have aren’t really that impressed.
The survey of over 2,000 users found that 85% had never asked Siri for a damn thing. Yes, less than a fifth of iOS 7 users said they have used Siri – even once.
Intelligent Voice’s survey went on to ask a couple more questions to the 15% that said they were Siri users. When asked whether Apple had “oversold” Siri’s capabilities, 46% said yes. And when it comes to Siri’s accuracy, 43.9% said that it was either hit or miss, not very good, or plain bad.
Intelligent Voice says this is a sign that we need to mitigate our expectations when it comes to voice recognition software.
“All told, not great news for Apple, but probably worse news for the voice recognition industry. We sell it like it’s magic, but as I’ve read elsewhere, it’s still an emerging technology that’s been emerging for 30 years. The sooner we are honest with people about what can really be achieved, the more chance we have of adoption. Back in the early days of OCR, we only got 50% accuracy, but that was 100% more than people had the day before. Perhaps we should reset people’s expectations as to what continuous speech applications can manage out of the box and in the wild,” they said in a blog post.
So, I’ll open it up to you. Are you using Siri?
Image via YouTube