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

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

9to5mac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 533 posts

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

#41

Post by SllX »

neurobama wrote: post #7

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.

I gave Siri a lot of time and forgiveness before writing it off as an interface to set timers and literally nothing else, and even that Siri fails often enough to annoy me. I can imagine there’s a happy medium for other people, but I’m unsurprised that with as big a workforce Apple has now, there’s a contingent there with exactly the same opinions as a lot of us out here. Siri sucks, unless it doesn’t for you, but it still sucks for the rest of us.

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

#42

Post by noncoml »

ghaff wrote: post #6

At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know. But, yeah, all the voice assistants are pretty bad or at least bad enough that I mostly give up trying to use them for anything other than certain rote tasks. Siri may or may not be marginally worse but none of them are good enough to, say, really use hands-off in a car unless I've carefully p…

> At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know.

I was pretty happy with Alexa until they started that crap. Retired it immediately. Now I only have a HomePod but even on this I have Siri disabled.

Amazon screwed the reputation of the voice robots for everyone

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

#43

Post by OkGoDoIt »

neurobama wrote: post #7

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.

I use Siri to set reminders except it is completely unable to handle reminders like “remind me this afternoon to follow up with Joe about the event on June 25”. It sees the June 25 and the reminder is now for the afternoon of June 25. I manage a theater, so this is a very very common scenario and it’s super frustrating. It speaks to there being no real understanding going on, just pattern matching on things that look like dates. I don’t need GPT4, but surely we can do better than this.

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

#44

Post by valine »

Animats wrote: post #31

"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.

There’s nothing particularly unsafe about LLMs. Giving Sirious access to a weather api and timers is not gonna break the world.

If anything, giving LLMs access to apis makes them less likely to hallucinate.

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

#46

Post by mrbombastic »

nneonneo wrote: post #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…

Yes, incredibly frustrating that to ask Siri to play a song from your library on your device you need a network connection.

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

#47

Post by moconnor »

nneonneo wrote: post #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…

Siri does use on-device voice recognition. Active airplane mode and you can still use it.

Edit: for some commands only it seems. I agree with OP, this is odd.

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

#48

Post by gimme_treefiddy »

neurobama wrote: post #7

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.

Is it just me or Siri is very bad at picking up accents (mine isn't that bad having lived in the US for a while) and background noise.

One of the more impressive things about using the Google's voice assistant was, it did very well in noisy environments. Whereas with Siri, that is quite a bit of struggle. This is only about speech-to-text, not text-to-whatever.

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

#49

Post by jandrese »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #20
purpleblue wrote: post #4

Siri is mostly useless. It works about half the time for me. When I ask it to do a task like create a timer, it works, but asking it questions is almost useless. One time I asked "What is a picometer?" and it gave an answer from Wikipedia, but then I immediately asked "What is a femtometer?" and it said it couldn't answer it on the iPhone. My wife gets amused whenever I use Siri because half the time I'll start swear…

“This is what I found on the web for XYZ”… all the time! At this point, they should just pipe the #1 search result into ChatGPT for a nice summary and have Siri read that out loud. It would be so much better.

Yes! My big complaint about Siri is that she's just the same old "here is a list of preprogrammed actions you can perform, with a fallback to just dumping it in a Google searchbox" but you don't get access to the list. So finding what she can do involves outright guessing, scouring the web, or closely watching Apple demos. She can do quite a bit, but you'll never find 90+% of the options because Apple only shows you a small handful of suggestions.

https://support.apple.com/siri

Discoverability is a huge problem. Also, Siri can't launch apps, which seems like it should be an extremely common operation. "Hey Siri, launch Words with Friends".

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

#50

Post by 8ytecoder »

Animats wrote: post #31

"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.

They can - if we split it into parsing, execution and response. If LLMs only do parsing and response and execution is limited to actions that are prepogrammed, i think we’ll have a much better assistant. Like, it could be interactive and natural. But i agrees that it shouldn’t be given unfettered access to do whatever it wants.
Post reply on HN