Siri will no longer tell you that the Nokia Lumia 900 is the best smartphone ever, as Apple has apparently updated the Voice Assistant on the iPhone 4S with more witty responses and fewer recommendations of a direct competitor's product.
(Apple is infringing on Siri's right to free speech! Occupy! Occupy!)
You might recall that on Friday, in a mini-Internet-kerfuffle, it was discovered that when you asked Siri the question "What is the best smartphone answer?" the assistant would answer that the Nokia Lumia 900 was the all-time greatest. Sometimes it answered that the best smartphone was "the one you are holding"; other times, it would scoff: "Are you kidding me?"
But if you were persistent you could get it to respond in favor of the Lumia 900, the flagship Windows Phone battling the iPhone for sales in America on AT&T.
Now, this Lumia 900 recommendation hadn't been programmed into Siri's knowledge base: Rather, for mathematical questions, Siri sometimes consults Wolfram Alpha, a quantitative search engine. When you search Wolfram Alpha for a product recommendation, it consults Best Buy's user ratings to find the highest-ranked device and then recommends that one. So occasionally, when you ask Siri for a product recommendation, it goes to Wolfram Alpha; and thus occasionally, when you asked Siri for the best smartphone, it would launch a Wolfram Alpha search rather than get back to you with one of its trademark snappy retorts.
Thus Siri's shocking betrayal.
Following the Deception of Siri, however, many news outlets are reporting that Apple has tinkered with Siri so that the bot no longer heads to Wolfram Alpha for the answer to the best smartphone question. Our tests confirm this: Though we were able to get our iPhone 4S to recommend the Nokia Lumia 900 last Friday, on Tuesday evening Siri was all snark when we asked for its pick for smartphone supremacy:
And what about the Lumia 900? We know that Siri no longer favors that smartphone over the phone she calls her home -- but has her opinion on Nokia's hot-selling smartphone changed?
From thinking that the Lumia 900 is the best smartphone ever to not even being able to spell its name correctly: How the mighty have fallen, huh?