"Assistant" type devices which can actually do things besides reply can't yet use large language models safely. LLMs need to get past the problem of making up stuff when they don't know something. Until then, it's not safe to give them power over devices.
Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
31–40 of 533 posts
Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
#32I love my iPhone, it's a great device. However, quite literally the only two things I use Siri for are asking "what song is this?" and "set a timer for X minutes." I'm sure there are ways I could be using it for any number of things that might improve some routine process in my life, but I never found them.
The timer, sometimes, and occasionally I try to get Siri to play something in the car so I don't have to look at my phone. It normally fails -- it will play something random from apple music before it plays anything from my library.
This drives me nuts. I get it, sometimes albums and songs have similar names. It seems like Siri should be able to deduce which I'm asking for given I've listened to one album over a hundred times and never listened to the random thing with the same name it decides to pull up.
Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
#33Outside of driving, I never really understood the popular use case for these voice assistants. In most situations it is easier to type your query rather than say it out loud.
It was a novelty touted as a big leap in technology.
Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
#34I 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,…
Siri's functionality is fine for me, it just seems to really struggle to understand me compared to Google
Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
#35I 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.
I generally find Voice Over Utility to work better, in terms of available commands and what it can do, but it's also harder to use.
Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
#36I 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.
Siri mostly runs on device. Having a LLM needs a much more powerful device or Apple would need to drastically scale up its cloud buys from AWS, GCP, and Azure (which would in turn make the service more expensive).
Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
#37Ok, 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.
That's the trick with Siri. I use it on my Apple Watch when I'm riding my bike with an AirPod in: "Siri, play this podcast," or "Siri, call so-and-so."
I think the secret is low expectations.
Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
#38I 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.
Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are all generally good at those things but honestly not much else. I use my Google Home every day for timers and to turn on/off lights. I don't think any of them will ever be the helpful AI that they were initially promoted as, though.
Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
#39I 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 “[Let’s] go home”, which is what I use to navigate back to my house via Apple Maps.
There’s also sending messages to people - you can send voice messages (“send a voice message to X”), which works decently well and avoids transcription failures.
Re: Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I mentioned an example in another comment - basic manipulation of timers don’t work well - like, adding time to an existing timer. When I’m working in the kitchen this is really useful. There are also major performance issues - “working on it” and “sorry can you say that again” are probably two of it’s most common utterances. Random bus like “there’s nothing playing” and the wrong siri taking over the request from a million miles away and you just can’t even hear is extra annoying.