[dkyc]

"It also can’t distinguish between the question of “who is” a person and a request for that person’s contact card. For instance, I have a contact card for Apple CEO Tim Cook. When I ask, “Who is Tim Cook?” Siri shows me the contact card, not his bio."

Tech reporter humblebrag of the year.

[LA_Banker]

I don't see it as humblebragging (any of us could create a Cook contact / ReCode readers likely know Walt Mossberg's relationship to Apple) but, worse, a faulty premise.

Odds are, if you have them in your contact database, you already know them; you're not going to want Siri to give you their Wikipedia bio.

Siri has myriad faults, and thankfully someone of Mossberg's stature might push Apple to address them, but this is not one of them.

[bobviolier]

If you are asking specifically for _who_ somebody is, it should tell you who that person is - not give the contact card, because that card does not tell you who somebody is. At least, that's what I would expect if I asked who somebody is.

[LA_Banker]

I'm presupposing the contact card has their job position/title, and therefore still answers the question – also presupposing the original (odd) premise of wondering who someone already saved in your phone is.

The Venn overlap between the set of "contacts in your phone" and "people with Wikipedia bios" is likely rather small. Hence why I think it's a faulty premise to complain about Siri defaulting to contact card when these two sets do intersect.

[shopkins]

That's not the point either. The point is that if I asked you, a human, "Who is Tim Cook" and you replied "123-555-1212" or "[e-mail]" I would be a little dumbfounded.

If I'm asking the question - maybe a friend is nearby who doesn't know them and I'm too lazy to explain - then I want to know who they are, not what their contact info is.

[vilhelm_s]

I could imagine some scenarios when I ask a human assistant "who is Joe Bloggs" and it would be quite reasonable for them to answer "oh you've met him, he even gave you his business card".

[Rzah]

Sure, but only after telling you who Joe Bloggs is, because that's what you asked, you didn't ask 'Have I met Joe Bloggs?', an assistant (human or virtual) that doesn't actually help isn't going to keep their job for long.

[trdrake]

So, here we are arguing over what that utterance means, but we're blaming Siri for not doing the right thing...

[x1798DE]

I don't think anyone's saying that the question "who is x" ever means "give me the contact information for x". They are just arguing as to whether or not Siri's counter-intuitive behavior may be a reasonable response, given that it's a computer and not a human. This is not a hard question for humans.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's a very hard question for humans. Back in the 70s AI had already worked out that conversations take place in "frames" which include a a ton of implied state. It turns out that state is essential to make sense of human conversations, because words and constructs have different meanings in different frames.

Even simple questions like "Who is..." has many different interpretations. A human will understand the context. An AI won't, because you can't derive the context from the words themselves. It's a function of social setting, physical setting, relationship, previous conversations, and so on.

At the moment conversational interfaces are more like a Bash shell with a speech recogniser on the front. The shell needs a precisely formed command and has almost no concept of state or context at all. (I think Siri actually has some, but not much.)

So it's completely unrealistic to expect CIs to be able to do this today. It will only be possible when NLP gets a whole lot more sophisticated and starts tracking context and state - although even that will still be a hard problem, because social state is defined as much by location, physical surroundings, time of day, and custom as by the words being used.

[spike021]

Except the contact card has meta-information like: company they work at, where they're located, etc. (including custom fields you can create).

A contact card could definitely be used for that. If one exists, Siri should give the info from it and then wait to see if the user also wants external information (from Wikipedia or elsewhere).

[mattnewton]

Also that seems like a reasonable failure condition.

[larrik]

Moreso than the bit where his "Siri doesn't understand my questions" examples no longer work because Apple fixed them when he tweet them screenshots?

[eridius]

I'm not convinced this one should even be considered a failure with Siri. If I have a contact card for someone, it's perfectly reasonable to be given that contact card when I ask who they are. If I want to see a wikipedia article, I should just ask for the wikipedia article in the first place!