You may recall a story we covered over the last weekend, in which Apple’s controversial voice-controlled assistant, Siri, said that Nokia’s Lumia 900 was the “best smartphone ever,” when users consulted the application for an answer. We covered in our story that Siri used WolframAlpha to achieve its answer, like it does for many other questions, like how deep is the ocean or how many feet are in a mile. However, WolframAlpha based this conclusion on information it gathered from BestBuy.com, in which the Lumia 900 received a 5-star rating, however, the Lumia 900 only had four reviews, which is clearly not enough to proclaim the device “the best ever.”
When this story broke, we had a feeling that it wouldn’t sit well with the folks in Cupertino and low behold this week it looks like Siri has somehow has forgotten what other smartphones are, in fact, when questioned as to what the best smartphone is; she answers with, “there are other smartphones?” or she might say “the one you are holding,” as well as a few other new responses. When asked, Apple denied doing anything to change Siri, but one of Nokia’s PR reps isn’t buying it.
Nokia spokeswoman Tracey Postill spoke with the Sydney Morning Herald and said, “Apple positioned Siri as the intelligent system that’s there to help, but clearly if they don’t like the answer, they override the software.” Sounds like an anqusation, so obviously, Nokia went into damage control and said that Ms. Postill’s comments were light-hearted and taken out of context (let’s be honest, they were not) so another Nokia rep, Doug Dawson, stepped in and said that Nokia was flattered and honored.
So did Apple change Siri’s answer? That could be a yes or no answer, depending on who you ask. Apple didn’t change the results of the question, they simply didn’t use the same resource to obtain it. As we said in our previous post about this whole situation, it’s nothing to get up in arms about, the best smartphone is objective and based on personal opinion, there is no right or wrong answer.
Source: WP Life (TechHog sister-site)