Mocking Apple technology making mincemeat of spoken–or written–phrases is a tradition going back almost 25 years. This is from August 1993:
Today there are entire sites dedicated to how iMessage mangles text through auto-correct. Sure, some of the examples are probably manipulated for maximum comic effect (though it’s really not necessary, as the worst of autocorrect hardly needs a helping hand to look bad), but the fact that there are entire sections of the internet devoted to this stuff speaks to how ubiquitous it is. (Also the best examples are the ones where people keep futilely typing the same autocorrected word over and over. You can almost feel the despair coming though their attempted messages.)
And then there’s Siri. Siri is great when it works properly, which for me is most of the time. But when Siri decides not to work, it gets really stubborn in insisting that you are speaking different words.
Here are two to start, the first I’ve mentioned before.
Pyramid: I try to tell Siri to play the album Pyramid. It tries to play the imaginary album Pure Mind. I was never able to get Siri to play Pyramid. I had to physically interact with my phone to listen to it. How 2007.
Winner: Siri
Pasta: I try to send the message “The pasta will be ready in two minutes.” Siri says, “The pastor will be ready in two minutes.” I keep trying different pronunciations/inflections/accents for “pasta” and get these results:
pasta = pastor
pasta = pastor
pasta = pastor
pasta = pastor
pasta = pasta
I don’t know what finally made it work and I have no confidence it will ever work again. I’m just glad I wasn’t sending the message to a pastor.
Winner: Me
I don’t have a sassy wrap-up for this (it’s my first entry, cut me some slack) but I will note that I just spent half an hour at that stupid autocorrect site, laughing more than I’d like to admit.
