Smart computers still have a way to go

“Siri, why did the chicken cross the road?”

“What’s up with humans and their obsession with chickens and woodchucks.”

That’s right, that is the smart-alec response I get from the personal assistant Apple put into my phone.

If you ask Siri how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood, you get an even better answer.

“Well, since a ‘woodchuck’ is really a groundhog, the correct answer would be:

How many pounds in a groundhog’s mound when a groundhog pounds hog mounds?”

I guess the dream of this kind of technology was out there long before there were smart phones, even before Maxwell Smart got his first shoe phone. Wouldn’t it be great to have a computer to answer your every question?

Well, maybe not. The computer Hal in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” was even scarier than Siri. That computer even looked for a way to kill humans on the spaceship. At this point, Siri hasn’t attempted to murder me but she has given some crappy directions that could have resulted in being lost for a very long time.

When I asked her to play some good music, Siri picked “Star Baby” by Guess Who. Wow, I’d just about forgotten I had that song. When I asked her to play Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” she was stumped and wanted to search for an app.

There have been a lot worse cases of machine-gone-mad noted out there though. Take the little girl who got to chatting with the Amazon Echo device’s virtual assistant Alexa one day and managed to order an expensive doll house and a lot of sugar cookies without her parent’s knowledge of the purchase.

That was only the beginning of the story, though, as a TV station reporting the problem caused multiple viewers’ devices to attempt to order the doll house when the reporter repeated the girl’s words.

Just think of the problems and teasing caused for girls named Alexa. Fortunately there aren’t too many kids named Siri but it was reported recently that a New Jersey woman has the name Alexa Seary, which is pronounced the same way. Yeah, she’s real tired of playing everyone’s virtual assistant.

I have warmed up to the use of my own virtual assistant to some degree. I still get pretty frustrated, though, when she mistakes what I say in my Texas twang. It also gets old when she can’t re-pronounce the names of two of the cities I lived in for much of my life. Nope, she can’t comprende Portales and talking to her about Tucumcari gets pretty comical pretty fast.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about talking to Siri, though, is my wife trying to answer my question or saying what, therefore ruining my text string. Really, dear, your name is not Siri is it?

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]