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How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

mashable.com

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Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#221

Post by uptown »

xiaq wrote: post #67

> "It was slow, when it worked at all," Williamson said. "The software was riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original Siri team, certainly not me." Wow. It those were his original words, I don't doubt a bit that this guy should be responsible for Siri being left behind.

From Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and CEO of Siri:

"@Jessicalessin This statement, wholly false, was made by the architect and head of the biggest launch disaster in Apple history, Apple Maps. In reality Siri worked great at launch but, like any new platform under unexpectedly massive load, required scaling adjustments and 24 hour workdays."

https://twitter.com/Dagk/status/974047743596404737

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#222

Post by swish_bob »

veesahni wrote: post #50
ztratar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri misunderstands me so frequently, I've learned to not use it for most of the above things.

This is what I experienced years ago when I last had an iPhone. Google's voice recognition is exceptional. I can mumble words and it still seems to contextually figure out what I was probably trying to say.

Unless you're picking from a list of options, at which point Google becomes utterly useless to me.

I've literally spent 10 minutes in a "SMS, WhatsApp or Hangout" "SMS" "SMS, WhatsApp or Hangout" loop before, trying every inflection I could think of.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#223

Post by PopePompous »

Twisell wrote: post #28

Something always make me scratch my head. Is there any proof that actual people use and value Google and Amazon assistant more than Siri? Or is the leadership only designed by autoproclaimed experts and funky ad-hoc metrics? I totally confess that I use Siri for only 3 things: -Desactivating all wake up alarm during my morning poo -Setting timers while baking -Sending a « I’m coming » text to my loved one before ridi…

As far as I can tell, the only advantage Siri has over Google Assistant is its integration with Wolfram Alpha. If you ask Siri "What is the angular diameter of Mars?" it will tell you the current angular diameter of Mars. Google Assistant can't do that. Apart from the Wolfram Alpha connection, Siri is inferior in every way, IMHO.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#224

Post by ssully »

eltoozero wrote: post #182

Wow so much Siri bashing in here. I’m a daily driver and I suppose an outlier working on a now aging 6S+ but Siri has been way reliable and generally fast outside of what I’d call “harsh” environments like outside on a busy street or with poor reception. I’m able to consistently perform: - Reminders with or without location tags “add eggs to grocery list” “remind me to check oil when I get home” - Calendar events “cr…

I also use it daily and loathe Siri. I went from Android to iOS with the 7 and Siri is my only regret.

For every timer I set Siri gets about 1/6th wrong and for every text I try to send (short messages like 'on my way home') are almost a coin flip at this point. My biggest annoyance is Siri just doesn't handle natural language cadence like Alexa or Assistant. Everytime I mess up a Siri query, I end up having to repeat it slowly and loud for her to (maybe) get it right. Google Assistant required no changes in my speech to understand me.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#225

Post by xiaq »

rxhernandez wrote: post #199
electrum wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also directly contradicts one Steve Jobs' management principles: > "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP." > In other words, you have no excuse for failure. You are now responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn't matter what you say. http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...

Conversely you get handed a pile of steaming hot shit they call legacy code(and it lacks documentation and the variables lack names that hint at any meaning) and they're telling you it's completely your fault that you couldn't get something to work properly. Getting handed a huge amount of technical debt is a very real problem.

The industry does not lack programmers who can clean up technical debt or outright rewrite a legacy system. At least, I’m pretty sure that Apple doesn’t lack such programmers.

A VP’s job is to find those people and give them the correct incentives. The VP has the rights to hire new people and restructure teams. The VP should use those leverages.

At the VP level, how a particular codebase or team is doing simply doesn’t matter, as the VP has all the leverages for organizational shifts. Blaming a codebase or team only makes sense if the whole company cannot produce quality code, and it’s impossible to hire new employees that can. I am pretty sure that this is not the case for Apple.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#226

Post by billfruit »

I haven't use Siri, so I am guessing here: Perhaps a major advantage of Google Assistant is that Google has more aggressively worked towards recognising and speaking regional accents. Assistant in India quite reliably understands Indian accents and speaks in an Indian 'News' accent.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#227

Post by bjork »

Reason077 wrote: post #187
oarsinsync wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cant speak for the other person, but as someone who's used iPhones exclusively since the original, Siri makes mistakes with sufficient frequency that it's subjectively just bad. I can't quantify what percentage of requests fail to be understood correctly, but it's sufficiently high that the frequency is annoying. It's even worse when using the Apple Watch (Series 3). Unexpectedly, this can sometimes be a positive too…

I often want to set a timer for exactly 50 minutes so I know when my laundry is done. But siri always interprets "Fifty" as "Fifteen". Pretty much every single time, it always makes the same mistake, no matter how clearly or slowly I try to pronounce it. I have to say "Hey Siri, set a timer for five zero minutes" to get it to pick it up accurately.

I also have that problem, but I say 51 minutes instead.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#228

Post by SamBam »

billfruit wrote: post #226

I haven't use Siri, so I am guessing here: Perhaps a major advantage of Google Assistant is that Google has more aggressively worked towards recognising and speaking regional accents. Assistant in India quite reliably understands Indian accents and speaks in an Indian 'News' accent.

And Google was working it that space really early. Did anyone here use GOOG-411? A service you could call way back in 2007, before most people had smart phones, and ask natural questions and get search results back.

Obviously that was early Google Assistant prototyping, and also a huge wealth of voice data to mine.

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#229

Post by SamBam »

jbg_ wrote: post #198
jd20 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an Ike's Sandwiches like literally 30 feet from my office in San Jose, and I always like to ask Siri when it closes. To this day, I've probably tried on a dozen occasions and it has never once gotten it right. I'm a native English speaker with no accent. I tried again just now, this is what I got: Me: "What time does Ike's sandwich close?" Siri heard: "What time does Eichs sandwich close" Siri responded: "Hmm…

OT but what do you mean by "English speaker with no accent"? Clearly every person has an accent, and every system that understands language must be able to understand the various accents that people have.

You know. They mean "an accent like everyone else had where I grew up."

Obviously that's "no accent."

Re: How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

#230

Post by xiaq »

xiaq wrote: post #225
rxhernandez wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely you get handed a pile of steaming hot shit they call legacy code(and it lacks documentation and the variables lack names that hint at any meaning) and they're telling you it's completely your fault that you couldn't get something to work properly. Getting handed a huge amount of technical debt is a very real problem.

The industry does not lack programmers who can clean up technical debt or outright rewrite a legacy system. At least, I’m pretty sure that Apple doesn’t lack such programmers. A VP’s job is to find those people and give them the correct incentives. The VP has the rights to hire new people and restructure teams. The VP should use those leverages. At the VP level, how a particular codebase or team is doing simply doesn…

A hopefull adequate comparison would be this: you are a technical lead of at a company, you get really really high pay and you have a lot of fellow engineers under your command. You get handed a legacy system, and there are all all kinds of problems with it:

1. The system uses a database that is not duplicated.

2. The system has no monitoring.

3. The web frontend is written in PHP.

What do you do?

To fix 1, duplicate the freaking database.

To fix 2, add some freaking monitoring.

3 is presumably the hardest to fix. But remember that you get really high pay and you have a lot of engineers. What did the engineers at Facebook do? They fixed PHP.

Do you blame the previous team that made this horrible system? No. No. No. You own the system now. There are valid engineering approaches to fix. So fix it. It can take a while, but eventually you can fix it. In the worst case, you will have to rewrite. But that's still a feasible thing to do.

Now substitute technical lead with VP.

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