[ballenf]

> Machines, on the other hand, hate ambiguity and context.

When I ask my car to call my wife using only her first name, it suggests a list of 3 people who I'm not even sure how they got in my contacts list. Siri, on the other hand, gets it right every time with the exact same request. I wouldn't say my car hates ambiguity, the programmers failed to bridge the gap to human/machine interaction and meet the person halfway. ("If you want to talk to a computer, you have to think like one.")

I'd say it's programmers or deadlines that mean that the extra work of accounting for ambiguous data gets skipped. It doesn't take a neural net to look at the recently called list for the most frequent or even most recently dialed [wife's first name].

One irony of your "Bob" example is that sometimes using someone's last name actually adds ambiguity: "It's Bob Lingendorfer's birthday this weekend!" ... "Who is Bob Lingendorfer? ... Ohhh, you mean your husband!".

Maybe it's not irony, it's just that people read a lot into data and might assume that all of it is relevant to the task at hand. My car kind of does the opposite and lazily stops at the first three "close enough" hits on my wife's name.

[Banthum]

One thing that worries me about computers working with all that contextual information is that they then need to know all that information.

And since computing is so centralized these days, this means that whatever company made the software needs to know that context about you too.

There's something to be said for computers staying dumb. I'm okay with my co-workers knowing my social graph well enough to recognize my spouse's first name by context. I'm not okay with faceless corporations or governments having that same information.

[ballenf]

Very good point. Can't disagree with you. I am ok, however, with a contacts system letting me specify a single name nickname that it prioritizes in matching / searches.

And I'm probably also ok with the computer knowing as much about me as my cellular provider does, since all that is probably hoovered up already. Why should Siri be dumber than the feds?

To take this further afield, it would be interesting to interact with a "smart" assistant that only learned from info likely to be accessible to third party law enforcement and/or aggregator, as a demonstration of the risk & power.

[spotman]

that’s funny. i have the exact inverse problem. when i ask siri to call my wife ( by her first name only ) it gives me a list of two to pick from, whereas my car does the opposite and calls my wife.

darn computers!

[alien_at_work]

Why don't either of you just tell Siri who your wife is? You can say "My wife is" and her name, it was verify that it found the right one and after that you can just say "call my wife", "sms my wife", etc.. You can do the same thing with your boss ("call my boss") and various other tags.