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

281–286 of 286 posts

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

#281

Post by knightofmars »

xiaq wrote: post #230
xiaq wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with this, the one thing I'll add is that you may also have to contend with the competing priorities of every other VP. Specifically in that Business Development VP may be saying, "We don't have time to do any of those things! We need X done now otherwise we won't get our customer!" And the technical VP response might be, "If we don't fix this now then we won't have _any_ customers." But in the end the financial state of the company will make the decision for you. If you're on the edge and you immediately need more customers to survive then you're going to forgo doing 1 & 2 and instead implement X that BD was requesting. Hoping that you can get enough breathing room in the near future to actually do 1 & 2.

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

#282

Post by konradb »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #241
konradb wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to say what lock you got? Would be interested in getting a decent one.

I have a Kwikset Kevo that I enjoy. If I have guests they just install the Kevo app and I can send them temporary keys that expire. I don't use the integration, but apparently it's integrated with Alexa.

Thanks!

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

#283

Post by rajington »

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…

I see us at the beginning of a path that grants magic powers, controlling everything with our voice, or even our intention.

That requires machine learning, which requires data, which requires data collection, and the closest one to Google there isn't Apple or Amazon, it's Facebook.

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

#284

Post by sjwright »

ak217 wrote: post #236
sjwright wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Maps is like Bing: almost as good as the #1 service, but almost is not enough to make anyone care. Apple Maps is remarkably good today, doing nearly all of the important things well. Here in Australia, it's on par with Google Maps for driving (slightly worse for novel route planning, slightly better for guidance) and when travelling to major world cities I've found Apple Maps is frequently better than Google Ma…

In reality Google Maps is farther ahead of its competitors than most people realize. Google Maps now provides wholly personalized points of interest and attention affordances in its UI. It's also well on its way to 3D scanning and annotating POIs in every structure in the world, including very large pedestrian-only interiors. It also has realtime transit and traffic feeds, and more pedestrian trails and venue detail…

You might be right, but most of those reasons don’t actually matter. To be frank, the only things I miss when not using Google maps is their highlighting of high activity areas.

Both maps have similarly good cartography where it matters. In most countries, both maps are similarly accurate.

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

#285

Post by londons_explore »

ams6110 wrote: post #54
veesahni wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's voice recognition is excellent. I trust Assistant to help me throughout my day with a number of things now: - Cooking & laundry timers - Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home) - Directions (Take me to the nearest X, take me home, etc) - Checking hours of business (what time does X close today) - Initiating phone calls (Call X) - Checking weather (is it going to snow today? How cold is it right now?) -…

Android's voice typing has been weird for me. It used to work pretty well offline, then a few months ago all the punctuation stopped working. Now it's working again and the overall recognition is better than ever.

same here. Last year punctuation didn't work for a few weeks.

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

#286

Post by photojosh »

konradb wrote: post #234
photojosh wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently got a certified smart lock, and it's been superb. Any communications outside my network are handled through Apple/HomeKit and I trust them a lot more than some random Chinese IoT supplier. > That said, for engineers in the crowd I know that I and others get around it by making a HomeKit RPi adapter for things that don't support it... Yep, they're using HomeBridge. [0] I'm planning on doing this for my gara…

Are you able to say what lock you got? Would be interested in getting a decent one.

Sorry, slow to reply. It's a Schlage Sense. Major selling point for me was that it has a keypad, so I can give non-tech savvy folks an easy in (plus backup in case of flat phone). If you don't want that, there are nicer looking one.
Post reply on HN