Mossberg: Why does Siri seem so dumb?

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode. I've been familiar with Siri longer than most people. Way back in 2009 -- two years before Apple incorporated the intelligent digital assistant into the iPhone -- I stood onstage with the inventors of the service while they debuted it at a tech conference I co-produced. At the time, it was just a third-party app on the iPhone App Store. Not long thereafter, Apple bought the company, and the assistant reemerged in 2011 with a splashy introduction as a core feature of the iPhone 4s.