Siri has a problem with broad, comical foreign accents.
Not that the guy in the video has one, you understand. He’s just a non-native speaker.
Our fearless Cult head Leander, on the other hand, speaks exclusively in Cockney rhyming slang, and he’s always going on about how he wants to have a butcher’s down at Tottenham Court Road to stick his hampton in some Berkeley Hunt. How’s Siri going to deal with that, I wonder?
In light of that, something tells me Leander’s iPhone 4S review (coming later today!) isn’t exactly going to be glowing.
Still, Siri’s a work in progress, and Apple’s not going to rest until it can talk to everyone.
[via 9to5Mac]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
24 responses to “Non-Native English Speakers May Find That Siri Has A Curious Obsession With Telling You About ‘Linda’ [Video]”
Well. Siri is in beta format. It only learned a few English speaker languages. It doesn’t understand Weatha from Weather. Plus he is not speaking a long phrase. “What weatha for today?” As opposed to just saying “Forecast” or “Today’s Weather” or “Will it rain in my city?”
This is just plain stupid.
What weather for today … riiiight. How about some correct English? Btw, it seems pretty noisy there – is it? I’m pretty sure with a headset it would be at least much better.
Edit: at 1:20 a guy is laughing like a child in the background and the microphone indicator is showing it to max. Meaning, it’s too loud.
there are people talking and laughing in the background and use proper english stupid!!!
this sentence no verb
He’s off to a rocky start with Siri..
She sounded pissed!
no way you can blame siri for this. it would be hard for me to understand this guy sometimes
because it’s plain stupid that not everyone in the world speak English as their native language? what a prick
yes. Obviously if you try to speak floppy and broken english to a device, its not going to get it. not news brownlee.
 the only part of this video worth showing was the ending, in which a normal person could actually understand what he was saying, but Siri couldnt. This is probably because all over america, we say “See” very clearly, followed by whatever slang (yah, youse, yall, yeh). This guy is saying “seew tomorrow” which is why its getting tomorrow, but having trouble with the see. Thats the ONE thing in this video that may be relevant, as most second language speakers have that same trouble. But this guy is one of those who learned words but not grammar, and expects the world to think he’s speaking english correctly.
no, because you cant speak broken english to a COMPUTER and expect it to put it together like a human can. Learning the words of a language is only half the language. You have to know the grammar of it too, otherwise you will alway sound off and technically what you say wont make any sense.
 i know in spanish, certain words are actually combination verb/nouns/adjectives…ect. So some times two words in spanish transilate to a 6 word sentence in english. If you speak spanish, you will often run into americans who say thhings like:
 “i question do you maybe happen to to have knowledge know where your personal public bathroom is located?”
 a spanish speaker would pick that up as stupid american spanish, and direct them to a bathroom. but try asking that to a machine that speaks spanish and you get the same result as this video. Thats why its stupid.
Hey Buster, get a clue you tool.
well he isn’t exaclt speaking english