Siri, Next Monday isn’t Christmas

On Wednesday, December 13th last year, I created a reminder with Siri for the “next” Monday, and to my surprise Siri responded that I now had a reminder for December 25th.

I checked my calendar and sure enough Monday, December 18th came before Monday, December 25th. Someone pointed out that the 18th is “this” Monday so the 25th would be “next” Monday.

Perhaps Siri is being more precise with “this” and “next”. I do wish, however, that I could tell him (British valet voice) what I meant, and he would forever understand me.

While we can debate the semantics of how a computer should interpret ambiguous language, this ambiguity might lead to problems as Siri, or a close relative, starts to do more important jobs.

Imagine, for instance, that Siri is driving you to work, while you spend time talking on your phone. A subtle misunderstanding might wreck your day.

We’re at the start of an arm’s race between Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google, Jarvis, and the thousand new AI’s about to be born. It’s exciting, but expect a lot of “next Monday” issues.