Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

mashable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 286 posts

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

#251

Post by torstenvl »

torstenvl wrote: post #145
jannyfer wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sudden increase of movement (via the accelerometer) around the time they usually leave work, for example. If I usually leave work around 5-6 and I start packing up my bag, that could be a signal.

Would you use a Markov model for this?

Interesting. I guess I thought that discussing how to model a software problem would be an acceptable and interesting conversation on HN. Do any of the downvoters care to contribute in a productive way? I'd be curious to hear what people found disagreeable in my question.

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

#252

Post by Reason077 »

ghettoimp wrote: post #220
Reason077 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe saying 49 or 51 would work...

It certainly does work, and I did that until I discovered the "Five zero" trick. It's just "Fifty" that it has a problem with!

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

#253

Post by Reason077 »

nagVenkat wrote: post #231
Reason077 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have any accent? By that I mean are you a second language English speaker? I just presumed that it couldn’t understand my accent heavy speeech.

I'm a native English speaker, though whether I have an accent depends on your perspective! I can do either American or British somewhat convincingly, and I usually don't have any trouble being understood by Siri.

I suspect the problem with "50" is that whatever ML underpins it is heavily tuned/biased towards "15" because a lot of people probably set 15 minute timers all the time. 50 minute timers are much less common, I suspect?

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

#254

Post by scarface74 »

paulie_a wrote: post #213
ddingus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could guess and or extrapolate, based on recent data. For a lot of people it would be effective.

Nest is already pretty effective at learning schedules

Nest doesn't have to be accurate to the minute to be effective. A reminder based on before I leave work would be.

For instance, if I don't know what time aim getting off of work and I wanted a reminder to call my wife when I got to the car, it could do that completely accurately based on phone connecting to the car. It could only guess about doing something before I left work.

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

#255

Post by Jdam »

kerbalspacepro wrote: post #237
iDemonix wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you doing it wrong? I set my alarm every night with Siri in my 4-year old iPhone 6 and I can't recall ever having an issue...

In 2018, the only two ways you can do something that simple wrong, is by 1) not speaking English at all or 2) say something else completely.

Neither, nor. The loading bar or what that is called that appears after the text is recognized but it’s waiting for a response just never finishes. And yes, I’m online.

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

#256

Post by rxhernandez »

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…

Does Apple have the resources for this project in particular? I really don't know. However in the general context, I think you lack understanding of two things:

1. You cannot simply put your standard programmer(or any number of them) with undergrad (even with superb knowledge) of combinatorial algoritms in the former position of someone with a graduate degree that focused on algorithms engineering who didn't give a damn about even the smallest aspects of software engineering like version control or documentation. You have even less ability to do this on an embedded device for numerically sensitive algorithms. I've been in this position (except with a far broader background in mathematics and algorithms engineering) at least a couple times with other engineers with graduate degrees in the requisite areas and (I'm not exaggerating) it is truly a fucking nightmare.

2. Just because you are a VP doesn't mean your managers are willing to approve the amount money that goes into a number of algorithms engineers fixing or rewriting a product that just barely functions well enough. I am incredibly close to a couple people that are VPs at companies with ~10,000 people and you would be surprised with how little power they can have on hiring sometimes. Companies are not bottomless pits of money and the people at the top usually treat it as such.

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

#257

Post by jd20 »

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.

Right, you caught me :) what I really meant to say is American English speaker with no strong regional markers (i.e. Southern, New York). Maybe slightly Midwest, but I haven't been back in decades so it's pretty weak.

More importantly, I was distinguishing because while Siri should be able to to understand various accents, it's struggled with that. When it launched, there were only two English variants (US and UK), so if you were a native Indian or Australian English speaker (for example) your experience would suffer. Now, Siri has support for 9 different English variants so they've clearly come a long way, but I remember it wasn't always the case.

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

#258

Post by breatheoften »

IBM wrote: post #141
breatheoften wrote: post #134

I will believe that someone is trying to improve Siri when the implementation is updated so that the time between when I push the button and when I can start speaking is reduced to the minimum possible with a only a short reliably deterministic delay length. The inability of Siri to provide me a way to know when I can start talking absolutely (waiting for that horrible beep is just insanely terrible) completely break…

You don't have to wait for Siri to respond and you haven't had to for a while. Just say "Hey Siri" followed by the command with no pauses and it will handle it just fine.

I might try 'Hey Siri' again now that I'm on iphone X. I'm not particularly a fan of always on mic's and the experience in the past was never sufficient for me.

(side benefit -- as a result of this conversation I have discovered that its possible to turn off the 'activate siri via side button' mis-feature -- HURRAY! I can count on one hand the number of times where I invoked siri this way on purpose and on 100 hands the times its happened on accident. [Yes that does mean I almost never intentionally invoke siri])

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

#259

Post by speg »

awiesenhofer wrote: post #206
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…

> or with poor reception. Call me oldfashioned but I find it neither smart nor acceptable to require reception for should-be-simple things like time telling, reminders or math/calculations. The last one always irks me in browsers too, when I try to calculate or convert something in the adressbar and it doesn't do anything because my wifi dropped.

FWIW: You can do this with spotlight search without a connection.

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

#260

Post by jacksmith21006 »

chetanahuja wrote: post #159
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…

> "Is there any proof that actual people use and value Google and Amazon assistant more than Siri?" This is a common confusion among iPhone users. I suspect the reason is that if all you're used to is Siri (and it's myriad disappointments), it's hard to conceive of the the quantum leaps that is Google Assistant in product polish and usefulness. First and foremost is the near flawless voice recognition. I, with my Ind…

You nailed it. People think this technology is not that useful because they have only used Siri and Alexa. Use the Google Assistant and you will see it is very helpful.

I have used all three and can say from personal experience the Google Assistant is head and shoulders in front of the other two in UX.

Post reply on HN