Apple doesn’t normally improve the capabilities of Siri outside of a major operating system update, but it has made an exception this time around for baseball. Apple has dramatically improved the knowledge base Siri can draw from for Siri, allowing the voice-activated personal assistant to answer a wider range of questions about the sport. Via The Verge, Siri now covers 28 leagues, not just Major League Baseball, too.
Siri first started answering sports questions with iOS 6. Apple says that the upgrade to baseball, timed alongside the new MLB season, allows users to ask more detailed questions about career statistics and baseball history.
The news comes days after the announcement that Apple and MLB have signed a deal for coaches to use 12.9 inch iPad Pros in the dugout during real games. The deal gives coaches and managers in the MLB iPad Pros to use, equipped with a custom app for statistics, but usage of the devices is not mandatory.
The season has only just begun, so the impact of the Apple-MLB deal is yet to really be seen come to fruition. It’s also worth noting that Siri’s coverage of baseball questions is not perfect. Many queries still resulted in WolframAlpha results or fallback Google searches. The voice dictation also struggled to understand the names of many players.
By the way, T-Mobile is offering a free year of MLB Premium for customers.
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The lamest update ever. It should be smarter about so many more relevant things. Baseball is completely irrelevant outside the US.
Exactly. Like maybe understanding the English language. Siri is the most useless feature on my phone.
Understanding english? What doesn’t siri understand?
I asked it who is in the men’s NCAA basketball Championship and it had no response. It’s getting more informed all the time but it still can’t answer conservationally relevant questions most of the time.
BS.. I just asked siri on my watch who was in the final 4 and it listed the 4 teams, correctly. It also gave me the scores of both of the games. Then I asked it who was in the NCAA championship game and it listed North Carolina and Villanova with the date and time of the game and the station it’s being broadcast on.
As if the rest of the world cares about Baseball?
If that is what counts as important news then I’d hate to think what would happen when there is something really big to report.
So Apple should only do things that “the rest of the world” cares about? What’s with all the snobs here?
It’s not snobbery when the vast majority of the people who line Apple’s pockets (by paying inflated prices for Apple products) have absolutely ZERO interest in Baseball, and would in fact prefer to be able to use little things like Apple Pay which despite launching 18 months ago can still only be used in a tiny handful of countries.
Siri cannot tell the sunrise and sunset times in the future and what they’re working on is a feature for American sports nerds. Someone at Apple is being frivolous with their biases.
Or maybe the MLB backed a dumptruck full of cash on 1 Infinite loop.
Maybe everyone in here has a mouth full of something and expects siri to understand? Everything people have complained siri can’t respond to, it does. And it does so accurately with rich data. I asked siri on my watch what time the sunsets tomorrow and it showed me the time along with my area that it thinks I’m in. I asked it for the sunrise on Friday and it returned accurate information then too..
“Apple doesn’t normally improve the capabilities of Siri outside of a major operating system update”
Which seems silly to me. There should be a balance between saving a few big cool unveils for a show once or twice a year and rapidly evolving one of the technologies that has the most room for improvement. Don’t get me wrong, Siri has progressed and is at the point where I now use it, but I don’t think it’s a feature that should be tied to annual updates given it predominately runs off an online backend anyway.
Besides, in light of what we normally see at WWDC have many people really walked away excited that Siri has added one or two extra providers to Siri over all the other big announcements that get made at that time? It seems to me most of the updates could come out incrementally and no one would be particularly upset rather than them being essentially minor dot points to any iOS update. Many times the Siri updates are a bit of an anticlimax given they are heavily region dependant such as sports or movie session partnerships.
This might be useful if Siri could translate words correctly in the first place…
Wow…so many people bitching about adding features. I personally am happy about this. Reminder to all you people bitching. Apple is an American company in California. A state with with 4 MLB teams. I am sure some people will enjoy this.
Apple is an American company in California which makes 95% of it’s products abroad, keeps most of it’s profits in banks abroad and most of it’s customers are abroad.
Just a small reminder of course.
It also knows some other sports career stats, but when I ask about Michael Jordan, it thinks I mean someone who plays college football…
Awesome update, now if Siri could just manage to call Mitty’s Pizza (in my contacts) when the kids want pizza for dinner I’d be a happy man.
(Yes there is some sarcasm in there…)
I turn Siri off. It’s nothing but a joke. It’s amazing that Apple even releases such a pre-alpha grade software in the wild when it hurts their credibility every time you use and people are watching it embarrass itself.
Not impressed. MLB Baseball is irrelevant in most countries around the world.
Apple must focus much more in integrating Siri and Map Information services for countries outside the US.
Color me THRILLED! I google baseball stats/info multiple times a day, and just a couple of weeks ago was using Siri to show off to some elderly friends that I could ask who the coach of Wichita State was and Siri answered. Sounds like that is going to be even better! HORAY SIRI/MLB!
There are so many things to include into Siri, and yet Apple decided to push Baseball focused update in Siri. -_-