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Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

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Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#21

I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs. I use it to set timers, get the weather, play music via Spotify, occasionally dictate text messages, and look up trivia mid-conversation. It's been my replacement for Alexa ever since I got creeped out by Amazon's audio data retention. In this context I'm suprised to hear Apple employees are unhappy with it.

Hey Siri, “add 2 minutes to the timer”. It can’t even do something so basic as that.

Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#22

I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs. I use it to set timers, get the weather, play music via Spotify, occasionally dictate text messages, and look up trivia mid-conversation. It's been my replacement for Alexa ever since I got creeped out by Amazon's audio data retention. In this context I'm suprised to hear Apple employees are unhappy with it.

Same experience. I use it for the same purposes and it’s great for hands-free, screen-free interaction of these simple tasks.

Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#23
post #9

> The report today explains that Google wanted these three engineers “badly enough that its CEO, Sundar Pichai, personally wooed the group.” How do they conduct the interviews, in that situation? Not the usual tech megacorp brogrammer "technical interview" hazing?

Hopefully they skip that step but it is weird how often a recruiting process goes from having a recruiter cold contact you with platitudes singing your praises and how valuable you would be to their company and then the next step is to have a group of interviewers demanding to know why you're worthy of being in their presence while expecting you operate like a broken clone of Google and also recite CS theory that has never been even slightly applicable to the open position. But at least the 'inside-out condom' brain teaser has finally gone out of favor.

Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#24

I don't use Siri all day, every day. It's certainly not perfect. But did you know you can say things like... "Turn off the Apple TV." "Turn off low power mode." "Stop navigating." "Open [name of app I don't want to spend time finding in my iOS folders]" "What song is this?" (Listens and usually is able to discover the name/artist of the song in the background.) So when people say things like, "Siri is mostly useless,…

It's useless beyond manipulating iDevices, navigation tasks and simple questions. Even then, if you don't ask in the exact right way it often doesn't work.

Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#25

> The company’s senior leaders haven’t shown much stomach for the kinds of headline-grabbing gaffes ChatGPT and similar services have stumbled into over the last several months. Risk aversion from immature tech is a part of Apple’s DNA. It should be no surprise that Apple declined to push Siri beyond its limited capabilities. LLMs are quite new and Apple has plenty of cash to hire star devs to catch things up. Writin…

You can't be apologetic about Apple by using some possible future scenario. Siri sucks, and just about everybody agrees.

Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#26
Ok, maybe I’m an outlier here, but I love Siri on my HomePods. It does what I want in enough cases that it’s useful, multiple timers while cooking, setting them and canceling them when I am putting things in or taking it out of the oven.

Granted, I have very few things I use it for, but I like it. The kids like them in their rooms too. I’m happy with Siri, but maybe I don’t ask it to do much.

Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#27

I don't use Siri all day, every day. It's certainly not perfect. But did you know you can say things like... "Turn off the Apple TV." "Turn off low power mode." "Stop navigating." "Open [name of app I don't want to spend time finding in my iOS folders]" "What song is this?" (Listens and usually is able to discover the name/artist of the song in the background.) So when people say things like, "Siri is mostly useless,…

My favorite is on the Apple TV, "search for [some video] on youtube" will actually open the app and search for it.

I think the big issue is that a lot of these aren't discoverable, and because Siri isn't very smart at natural language you won't discover them by asking for something similar like you could with Google Assistant. An LLM for parsing requests could be super interesting here.

Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#28
Every company has engineers who don't like some products or features. We aren't mindless corporates drones. I don't personally use any of my employer's applications.

Some article like this comes up every so often and it's so non-newsworthy. Anyone who's been at a project planning meeting knows there's a small contingent of engineers in the corner muttering that it's a terrible idea and it will never work.

Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#29
post #24

I don't use Siri all day, every day. It's certainly not perfect. But did you know you can say things like... "Turn off the Apple TV." "Turn off low power mode." "Stop navigating." "Open [name of app I don't want to spend time finding in my iOS folders]" "What song is this?" (Listens and usually is able to discover the name/artist of the song in the background.) So when people say things like, "Siri is mostly useless,…

It's useless beyond manipulating iDevices, navigation tasks and simple questions. Even then, if you don't ask in the exact right way it often doesn't work.

Is this any different than Alexa or Google, though? I guess Google is probably better at looking up facts and Alexa at ordering stuff (if buying things without even seeing a picture is your thing), but neither is that useful. Is this not just a case of voice interfaces being much harder to do right than people originally hoped?

(I say this as someone who has a Google Home that I use regularly, but mostly as a kitchen timer and music player.)

Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

#30
I’m frankly surprised that Siri hasn’t moved to on-device voice recognition. It’s by far my biggest complaint with Siri: random, unpredictable delays or outright failures to recognize simple messages because the network is unstable or unavailable.

There’s other trash too: the other day I tried asking Siri to play a song from my library, but it misinterpreted the song title and proceeded to activate a seven day trial of Apple Music Voice to play some random track on Apple Music. I didn’t ask for that subscription!

To be fair, for the tiny subset of functionality I do use - navigate by voice, set timers, get terrible jokes to amuse passengers - it works fine.

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