Bug leaves Siri unable to spell Dog, Cat, and other words
UPDATE (2): The bug that causes Siri to add extra letters to words even when you ask her to spell easy words like Cat and Dog has returned. We asked the digital assistant to spell Apple and she told us it is A-P-P-L-E-T-N-N-O-R-M-A-L. We know that some of our readers have experienced this on their iPhone handsets and iPad tablets. As soon as we hear from Apple, we will let you know what is going on.
We've often criticized Apple for falling way behind Google Assistant and even Alexa when it comes to the capabilities of the digital assistants. Today we were reminded of this when Siri started screwing up the spelling of certain words by adding extra letters to the correct spelling. For example, when we asked Siri to spell Empire, we were told to write E-M-P-I-R-E-T-N-N-O-R-M-A-L.
Even a simple word like dog had the same extra letters included; Siri told us to spell it D-O-G-T-N-N-O-R-M-A-L. Considering that the extra letters spell out TN NORMAL, we assume that it must be some kind of code used by Apple to check on Siri's "mental health."
When Siri was asked to spell Cat, this is what came back
Not all words had those extra letters included, but there were other problems. When we asked Siri to spell Cat, the digital assistant asked us if we meant Cat or Cata. Sometimes when we asked Siri to spell dog it asked whether we meant Dog or Dawg and asked us to tap on the spelling we were looking for. Look, Siri, if we know how to spell a word correctly in the first place, we wouldn't need to ask you.
Luckily, iPhone users can install the Google Assistant app and it spelled Dog and Cat flawlessly without asking us ridiculous questions. And we tested this out on another iPhone model as well and the same exact thing happened. Just as Google got serious with its hardware for the Pixel this year, it's time for Apple to finally do something about closing the gap between Siri and Google Assistant.
Obviously this is a bug that is affecting Siri and as soon as we hear something new about this, we will update this story. Although we might have to feed our dogtnnormal first.
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