Dubai: Apple’s voice activated digital assistant Siri’s may have beaten its rival Google Now in introducing an Arabic voice command service, but it is facing teething problems that risk alienating users from the start.
The problem lies with the number of dialects spoken by Arabic speakers. While Apple says Siri Arabic is tailored for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it also recognises standard Arabic as well as Levantine dialects at times. But that’s only when it does recognise commands.
Extensive use of the service showed frustratingly confused responses, and some commands given by Apple as examples of possible queries did not work at all, showing search results instead of card-results. Those included searches on currency conversion, calories in pizza, the location of Salah Eldeen’s grave, and the number of Arabic countries. For all those queries, tried in multiple dialects, search results were shown instead of cards.
That is where the problem with recognising colloquial queries lies. Since a large percentage, if not majority, of the Arabic content on the web is in standard Arabic, search results to colloquial queries may omit a significant number of pages.
Use of the service shows that use of colloquial Arabic should be confined to simple tasks such as making calls and checking the weather, whereas more complex queries should be made in standard Arabic — if they are detected at all.
Detection of both colloquial and standard Arabic may even pose problems. For example, a query looking to convert an Omani riyal to dirhams may confuse Siri, since the word ‘riyal’ in standard Arabic can mean ‘man’ in certain Gulf dialects.
This begs the question why Apple would choose to offer colloquial recognition in the first place when standard Arabic is universally spoken and so much less complicated.
