Nokia: Apple rigged Siri to name iPhone best phone

Is Apple purposely tweaking Siri to stack the deck in favor of the iPhone? Nokia certainly thinks so.

Siri stirred up some controversy late last week in voicing its view on smartphones. When asked its recommendation of the best smartphone, Apple's voice assistant named Nokia's Lumia 900 the top dog.

However, it didn't take long for Siri to change its mind. As of yesterday, the voice assistant is firmly back in Apple's camp. When asked the same question, Siri now responds: "The one you're holding," or "You're kidding, right?"

Apple can rest easier now, but Nokia is none too happy, accusing the company of playing with Siri's programming to control its responses.

"Apple position Siri as the intelligent system that's there to help, but clearly if they don't like the answer, they override the software," Nokia spokeswoman Tracy Postill told the Sydney Morning Herald.

A Nokia spokesman told CNET that Postill's remark was a "tongue-in-cheek comment that may have been taken a bit too seriously."

But either way, is it a fair accusation? No, not quite, says Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, who also writes for CNET.

Siri doesn't come up with such responses on its own; rather it relies on third-party sites and services, such as Wolfram Alpha, to conjure up the answer. Wolfram Alpha itself taps into reviews from Best Buy and other sources, according to Sullivan.

"The bottom line is that Wolfram has ratings from Best Buy, and it's not trying to weight those in any particular fashion such as number of reviews or number of purchases," Sullivan wrote last week. "The Lumia rates tops on Wolfram because four people gave it 5 stars, versus 86 people who give the AT&T 16GB version of the iPhone 4S an overall rating of 4.7."

I tried phrasing the question a variety of ways, such as "What is the best smartphone according to Wolfram Alpha?" and "What is the best smartphone according to Best Buy?"So does that mean the Lumia 900 is no longer top dog at Best Buy or other sites, or did Apple tinker with the odds to better ensure Siri's tongue-in-cheek response to the question?

Yet no matter how I asked the question, I still received the same jokey replies favoring the iPhone. But Sullivan says that he and other users were receiving the same answers touting the iPhone even last week.

CNET contacted both Apple for comment. We'll update the story if we get more information.

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