Language, language, language.

One of the more inspired pieces of marketing surrounding the iPhone 4S is the funny answers Siri, the voice recognition/AI technology, gives to philosphical questions. These are all over the web so I will not regale you with them here. The genius of these is that they humanize and personalize a piece of otherwise dispassionate technology.

However, one thing which I at first found to be frustrating was my low success rate in getting Siri to understand me. I was getting maybe a 50% error rate. So I thought ‘Beta release, whatever’ and took the dog for a walk. While conversing with the pup he pointed out to me that I do speak ‘sort of funny‘ and should really know my place in the former colonies. He’s from Yorkshire so that was rather like the pot calling the kettle black, but I let it go.

Then, as luck would have it, I learned that Settings->General->Siri on the iPhone 4S offers no fewer than five language choices. There is The Queen’s English, Former Penal Colony English (there goes my Australian readership!) and what passes for English in the site of George III’s greatest folly, as well as French and German. Ah! I switched to Buckingham Palace and the change was a revelation. Siri’s error rate went to almost zero and sentences were almost always transcribed correctly!

So I got my boy on the job. He hangs out too much with me and speaks sort of funny too. We had been trying to cheat on his homework using Siri and the Wolfram Alpha search engine built into every iPhone 4S and had given up in mighty frustration trying to get it to ‘Define Product’. After no fewer than forty tries, I put on my best American accent, which is truly ghastly at the best of times, and, Bingo!, right first time. Now, seconds later, with Siri switched to The Queen’s English, the computer voice changed from that of a nice American woman to a slightly inebriated-sounding Englishman. Well given the climate over there I could understand and forgive him having a pop or two and I could only approve of the transformation in accuracy. We both tried ‘Define Product’ several times. Yup, you guessed it. Right every time.

So now I decided to get ambitious and asked American Siri for local Mexican restaurants. Once I got the accent right she came up with the goods.

American Siri

Next, switching to Her Majesty’s lingo, I gave the friendly inebriate a shot and what did I get?

British Siri

Oh! dear. Apple has made the error of assuming that British English speakers only reside outside the US whereas in fact there are several million of us refugees here, basking in political and relative economic freedom.

I gave it another shot and switched to French Siri. No go. Location lookup doesn’t even work for French Siri, suggesting again that language is driving lookups, rather than physical location. And, presumably, the Académie française has yet to approve the dictionary, which may take several years.

In any case, now that I was a relative Siri convert, I called the mothership and got Lance at Apple Customer Care in Indiana. He listened hard and concluded I was onto something, passing my findings to Siri’s programmers. Thus, when version 0.1 comes out, all you British English speakers out there residing in America will know whom to thank. The call with Lance actually took 20 minutes. 5 to discuss my findings and 15 of me comparing the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S in aiding him in his buying decision, which has to be one of the stranger conversations I can recall having. He now knows all about Geekbench tests and CPU/GPU specs in the product he supports ….

As for asking Siri about Henri Cartier-Bresson in English, or even in American, fughedaboutit. She/He is clueless. Can’t understand a bloody word.

In the interest of research, I asked an English resident British English speaker to try the test on her 4S using American Siri. Sure enough. Same error. Nice to know Apple is a hotbed of equal opportunity discrimination.