When Apple’s new iPad was announced, iOS 5.1 was announced alongside it together with a Siri update that will be bringing support for the Japanese language. Undoubtedly Japanese users were looking forward to receiving the update, but it appears that Siri for Japan was somewhat anti-climatic. According to various reports and a YouTube video, it would appear that Siri has some difficulty understanding requests in Japanese.
It would appear that basic commands given in Japanese are not a problem, but when it comes to more advanced and complex commands, that’s when Siri starts to falter. A YouTube video (above) was uploaded and it basically compared Siri side-by-side against NTT DoCoMo’s own voice recognition software called Syabette Concier, and in the video it showed Siri failing to understand some of the commands given by the user, while Syabette was able to execute them with considerable ease.
Could this be construed as the “false advertising” that Apple was recently sued over in the US, or are were merely looking at an unrefined Siri in its beta phase? For those unfamiliar, Siri is currently in beta although it has been a feature that Apple has attempted to market very strongly, but some voice-recognition experts have stated that the beta release was necessary in order for Apple to collect a variety of voice samples to refine the service further. In any case, Siri does hold quite a bit of potential, so here’s hoping that Apple will be able to iron out the kinks soon!
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