Apple Ignorance
February 6, 2025 at 7:45 PM by Dr. Drang
I got in my car a little before noon today to go see my dentist. Because the appointment was in my Calendar and included the dentist’s address, I expected CarPlay to bring up the address and ask if I wanted driving directions there. Instead, it suggested a location in the opposite direction.
This puzzled me, but I needed to get going, so I dismissed the suggestion and started driving in the right direction. But I soon realized what was going on. I had gone to Whole Foods at about this same time yesterday, and Whole Foods is in the strip mall that CarPlay suggested. Siri, or whatever you want to call the machine learning engine behind this silly suggestion, decided that I was going there again. Even though I had just been there. And even though I had a dental appointment in my calendar in just 10-15 minutes.
CarPlay’s suggestions are generally better than this, and have been for some time. When I had an upcoming appointment in my calendar, directions to that appointment were its suggestion. When I used to go to the office every weekday, it would typically offer me directions there when I started the car in the morning. Whenever I get in the car away from home, CarPlay suggests directions home, which is a decent guess even when it’s wrong. It even learned that I tend to go to a local bar for trivia night on Wednesday evenings and started suggesting directions there.
But the bar suggestions stopped a couple of weeks ago. Maybe because I never used them? And today’s disregard of an appointment was a first. I have a sense that whatever Apple is doing to make Siri better is, at least temporarily, making it worse. You wouldn’t have thought it possible.
Sort of update
Before publishing this, my curiosity—and a sense of fairness—took over, and I looked up my credit card transactions for Whole Foods. Maybe Siri was seeing a pattern that I didn’t notice. And yes, my last two visits to Whole Foods were on Jan 16 and Jan 2, both Thursdays and both in the late morning or early afternoon. Aha!
But the visit before that, in December, was on a Wednesday, and the one before that—which really shouldn’t count because it was all the way back in July—was also on a Wednesday. So I’m going to stick with my claim that Siri/CarPlay was being stupid for suggesting a trip to Whole Foods on the basis of just two Thursday midday trips. If that even was the basis. And no matter what, it shouldn’t have overridden an appointment in 10–15 minutes.