For a very brief moment in time, the Nokia 900 reigned supreme in the eyes of Siri. When asked what the best smartphone ever is, Siri replied back that the Nokia 900 4G was the best. Apple fixed that problem pretty quickly and made sure that Siri now replies that the iPhone 4S is lord of all smartphones. Now Nokia is pissed and says that Apple is conspiring against the truth, and if Siri’s opinions on smartphones can’t be trusted, what can? It’ll be anarchy.
“Apple positions Siri as the intelligent system that’s there to help, but clearly if they don’t like the answer, they override the software,” said Nokia spokeswoman Tracy Postill.
Nokia, when you’re king of the castle you get to make your own rules, especially when providing answers that are completely subjective. If Apple wants Siri to say that penguins are ostensibly cuter than pandas, or that cupcakes are better than brownies, it’s kind of their call.
There is a lot of truth to what Nokia is saying though. Clearly, Apple tweaked Siri so that it no longer uses WolframAlpha to answer the question, “What is the best smartphone ever?” Now Siri just provides a few preset responses like “You’re kidding, right?” “Wait…are there other phones?” or “The one that’s in your hand.”
WolframAlpha was a bad place to try to find an answer to that question to begin with, because it wasn’t designed to excel at those queries and just looks at rankings in Best Buy’s customer reviews. Maybe in the future Apple will use sites like TheWirecutter, or Gdgt to gather “best of” data, but Nokia will probably cry foul then too because both of those sites have the iPhone 4S ranked as the top smartphone too.
Source: SMH
Via: iDB
