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There's a phrase you sometimes see in discussions of artificial intelligence: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." That phrase illustrates some of the problems with getting computers to understand human language.

• "Flies" can be a plural of a common insect, or the third-person singular form of the verb "fly"
• "Like" is either a verb indicating affection, or a preposition indicating similarity.
• Many nouns (such as "fruit") can be turned into adjectives.

See, it's grammatically legitimate to assume that these sentences are telling us that time-traveling insects use arrows as their weapon of choice, and fruit travels through the air in the same way a banana does. The point is that you can't understand human speech or writing without a lot of background knowledge about the human experience. And that's why you should be patient with Siri.

Of course, even other human beings sometimes misunderstand things when the meanings of words and phrases are ambiguous. I find this happens to me often when reading the news scroll on BBC World News. I mentioned this on Twitter a couple of months back:

BBC World, a headline like "French Air Strike" sounds rather more military than what you meant, "Air France Strike"

— Jason Roe (@JasonTRoe) April 8, 2015

But then last night I had a great deal of trouble parsing the headline, "Baby from ovary frozen in childhood." Wait, was the baby frozen? Wouldn't the baby have to be frozen in childhood; I mean, it hasn't experienced any other life stages yet. And aren't all babies from ovaries?

This was followed by the solemn even-harder-to-read news about the Alps plane crash: "Alps crash remains land in Germany." Does no one read these?

There’s also the problem that the scroll is all in capitals, and they are unable or unwilling to use periods in initials. That makes American news hard to read. A visit by the CEO of China’s Alibaba.com to the U.S. comes out as, "Alibaba boss in us charm offensive." Really, he's in us right now? And I thought Amazon was everywhere.

And they just had to decode to refer to ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State as "IS". With the U.S. fighting them, you get a headline like, “Us ‘spends $9M a day’ fighting is.”