Getting rejected by a robot sucks. But Siri hates me. The new voice assistant software on the iPhone 4S, Siri doesn't understand my name, my wife's name, or my sister's, which makes it hard to have some conversations with Apple's supposedly groundbreaking speech-powered assistant.
Fortunately, I've learned how to fix Siri's mishearing of my name, and it could work for you, too.
Siri doesn't have uncommon names or spellings in its dictionary. It hears "Sascha" as "Sasha," "Leila" as "Lyla," and my wife's name "Leontine" as either "Lien Tien" or "Lim Team," apparently.
To help Siri understand my name, I went into my contact card. I clicked Edit, scrolled to the bottom, and clicked Add Field. There are "Phonetic First Name" and "Phonetic Last Name" fields. I entered "Sasha" into Phonetic First Name, saved the contact card, and voila: Siri could now understand when I spoke my name.
This solution doesn't always work. It worked for Sascha/Sasha and Leila/Lyla. But I still can't get Siri to understand poor Leontine's name. I ended up having to go with a nickname, or use Siri's relationship feature and just call her "my wife."
Apple has said Siri is in beta and her recognition should improve with time. That's one of the advantages of Siri being a server-based system; as she collects failed queries, the team at Apple will work to fix her bugs. I hope my name is on their list.
Take a look at the slideshow below to see how I fixed some of Siri's problems with name recognition.