LOS ANGELES — Once again, Apple wants us to believe that Siri can be ready for prime time finally, with a more chatty, robust personal digital assistant. You know, unlike the one who debuted in 2011 as a novelty, and has been touted every year since as new and improved.
Skeptical? So are we.
At Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, which begins Monday in San Francisco, Apple is expected to tout the better Siri and open her up to third-party developers, to make it available to say, apps like Uber and Airbnb for voice-activated booking of cars and overnight stays.
But do we believe that Apple is really up for the task, and can succeed, when the company has let us down so many times before?
“I’m not buying it,” says Phoebe Hayman, CEO of Seedling, a company that makes virtual reality games for kids.
Hayman guested on the weekend edition of the #TalkingTech podcast, where we talked Siri and previewed what’s expected to be announced at WWDC, We also talked Seedling's upcoming VR maze game, chatted with James Niehouse, the director of photography for A Beautiful Planet, the first IMAX film to be shot digitally and cracked jokes with Mike Reiss, a writer for The Simpsons.
Niehouse says he argues with Siri all the time to the point of giving up on her.
“I’ll get an occasional answer or two that I want, but most of the time it’s things I have to read,” he says. “I don’t want to read a website while I’m driving.”
Reiss is a luddite and proud of it, so non-tech savvy that he doesn’t even own a cellphone. So this week he had his first experience with Siri when we placed an iPhone in his hand, and asked him to start posing questions.
Ever the comedy writer, he asked Siri to name Bart Simpson’s fictional elephant (Siri didn’t know) and when he asked her to locate the name of Bart’s mom, Siri reached into our contact list on the iPhone looking for a Mrs. Simpson.
Siri doesn’t even know who Marge Simpson is!
"This thing sucks," Reiss said.
Apple has some competitive reasons to try and make Siri smarter and more relevant. Amazon’s Echo speaker, with the Alexa voice assistant, is a runaway hit and open to working with third party app developers like Uber and Domino’s PIzza.
Google is launching a similar speaker later this year, Google Home, which the Internet giant is selling as a more responsive, talkative and way smarter device than Alexa or Siri.
As for that new, better Siri, "I'll believe it when I hear it answer me correctly," says Niehouse.
Apple didn't respond to our request for comment.
Follow USA TODAY Tech columnist and #TalkingTech host Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham, and listen to the podcast on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
