Has Apple Dumbed Down Siri In Its New Commercials?

On Monday evening, Apple released a new television commercial featuring Martin Scorsese and Siri, its voice-activated assistant for the iPhone 4S. In the ad, Scorsese plays a frazzled parody of himself, sitting in the backseat of a taxi and barking orders at both his cabbie and his iPhone, with Siri calmly helping the hyperkinetic director maneuver an otherwise hectic day.

It's a familiar script, both for Scorsese (typecast once again as a frenetic control freak) and for Siri: Since the first iPhone 4S ads were released in October 2011, Siri is always either the hero or the hero-behind-the-hero, saving Christmas, launching a high school rocker's music career, helping Samuel L. Jackson achieve coitus on a dinner date and so on and so forth.

But while Siri's advertised heroics have never faltered over these nine months -- she even made John Malkovich giggle -- one writer has (intriguingly!) suggested that the feature's advertised capabilities have.

Has Siri been dumbed down? Matt Burns of TechCrunch (which is, like The Huffington Post, owned by AOL) thinks it has. In his brief recap of the Scorsese/Siri spot, Burns writes:

The latest Siri commercial just hit, and like recent ad spots, Apple turned to a celebrity to endorse the lackluster iOS feature. And, also like the other commercials, the dialog between Siri and the user seems a bit more simple, almost mundane, in comparisons

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