Walt Mossberg Asks, “Why Does Siri Seem So Dumb?”

Siri's functionality and competitiveness among the tech giants' growing Artificial Intelligence strategies have been challenged after The Verge's Walt Mossberg wrote an article on Apple's Siri personal assistant.

Walt Mossberg, a veteran tech journalist, is an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Recode. His weekly commentary and reviews column, Mossberg, is on The Verge and Recode.

His article tackled about Siri's limitations, blunders, and inability to answer some simple questions that competing products have no problem with.

According to Mossberg, on his article, 'Why Does Siri Seem So Dumb', he mentioned that it seems that Apple has wasted its lead with Siri.

Currently, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and others are on the march in the coming tech war.

He indicated that Apple has made excited announcements each time it added knowledge domains like sports and movies and restaurants to Siri on the iPhone. However, it seems like it hasn't added any major new topic domains in quite a while.

So why does Siri seem so dumb? Mossberg raised the questions on Siri's limited talents, why it stumbles so often and when was the last time Siri delighted users with a satisfying and surprising answer or action.

Mossberg added that Apple's Siri focuses more on tasks like placing phone calls, sending texts, and finding places rather than "long tail" questions, which aren't as popular with iPhone and iPad users.

Accordingly, he speculated that such questions aren't popular anymore because people "just give up" on asking Siri these types of things due to failed responses.

Nonetheless, he pointed out on some consolations. He indicated that Siri isn't the only element of Apple's artificial intelligence strategy. Its newest operating systems and core apps do some smart things, like guessing an unknown caller's name from information in an email.

Mossberg considers that Siri "seems stagnant" and is 'too limited and unreliable' compared to other services. As the Artificial Intelligence revolution will demand more, Apple needs to become great by delighting customers with features they didn't expect.