Siri’s Incompetence in Canada

If you have an iPhone 4S and have interacted with the voice control personality “Siri”, then you likely already know about its limited functionality outside the US market. So when the news came out a few days ago about Siri’s improved responses for queries about weather and time, it still left me feeling a bit underwhelmed.

Voice recognition technologies have been around for many many years now. In the legal space, because of lawyer dictation technologies, we know better than most about the slow rates of adoption. For 20+ years, there’s been a small community of lawyers dedicated to voice recognition; balanced by both a younger generation of lawyers who type proficiently, and (yet) another technological direction – simple digital voice recordings.

Of course, voice recognition is much more than recordings, and many see it as the future for interfacing with our tech-devices — both personally and professionally. Siri is often held out as the shining example of that future, and it may still be. But if there’s something the “legal community” can tell the “technology community”, it would be this: if users don’t trust voice recognition technologies, they will quickly shy away from using them. And it can be very difficult to bring them back.

Why is that? Here’s my theory… It’s one thing to type instructions (sometimes repeatedly), and fail to get the desired response. It’s quite another to verbalize those instructions, repeatedly, and get an error message. Programmers will hit their head against an error message for hours, and keep trying until they get it. But if we ask Siri how the traffic is on Robson Street in Vancouver? Or, you try to initiate a hands-free call to your mother while driving, and Siri can’t understand or complete the instructions — you give up trying. If there’s another human being within listening distance, you give up trying even faster. Simply put: we’re embarrassed. Not after twenty requests, not after ten. But two tries. Maybe three.

Users don’t care if Apple has access to Canadian maps, or whatever the excuse is that’s propping up Siri’s incompetence. We just stop using it.