[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.