Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Apple’s Siri virtual assistant is choking when asked the simple question, “what month is it?”
- While Siri claims not to understand, both Google Assistant and Gemini nail their responses.
- Apple is reportedly assigning new Siri management internally.
At this point, we’ve all seen AI pull off some wonderous feats, engaging in conversation that sounds convincingly human, demonstrating the ability to break down complex topics, and and even generating photos and video that could be mistaken for the real thing. But for all it does well, lots of people still seem to have an almost morbid fascination with the gaps in AI’s ability. They want to see the fails: the six-finger hands, the confidently asserted abject falsehoods. And right now, Apple users are having somewhat of a field day pointing out everywhere that Siri manages to come up short.
Earlier this week, Reddit user Guitar_Scary got a thread going that eventually caught the attention of sites like Daring Fireball, highlighting just how spectacularly Siri fails when asked one of the simplest questions in the world: What month is it?
We put the same question to Siri, Gemini, and the Google Assistant, and you can see their responses above. Siri just immediately throws its hands up in the air, unable to even process the question. Gemini, meanwhile, gets right to it, answering “March” without hesitation. Assistant understands we’re talking about the date, too, but volunteers a little more information than we actually asked for. And that’s fine, but of the three, Gemini feels like it best understood the precise question.
Maybe some fresh blood will help things, though, and Apple is apparently shaking up its AI leadership, as Mark Gurman shares on X. Apple’s Mike Rockwell, who had been heading up Vision Pro development, is being reassigned to oversee Siri. While this move has supposedly been in the works for months, and isn’t directly in response to these delays, it still sounds like a very promising development for any Apple users feeling anxious for change sooner rather than later.
