by Dan Moren
Apple TV’s recommendations are decidedly impersonal
Speaking of the weaknesses of a decentralized, app-based TV model, Re/code’s Peter Kafka points out the issue of personalized recommendations:
But Apple’s robot assistant can’t give you personal service. The recommendations she gives you will be the same ones she gives everyone else with the new hardware. Siri can’t treat you any differently than she treats me, because for right now, she doesn’t have a choice — she doesn’t know anything about us.
Go ahead: Ask her to find you movies with Brad Pitt. And then the “good ones” with Brad Pitt, as Apple execs tell people to do when they show off the new box. Everyone gets the same list, which Siri puts together using metadata from sources like Rotten Tomatoes.
However, as Kafka points out, that recommendation engine might someday be Siri itself, which could potentially figure out over time the kind of things you end up asking about and use that to build a profile of your likes and dislikes.1
- If that ends up with Siri ordering me cupcakes when I search for sad movies, that is a future I can live with. ↩