51–60 of 533 posts
Outside 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.
That's how people describe it anyways.
I'd have expected speech recognition software to be good enough that you could have direct speech -> gpt type services. It almost feels like traveling to the past when asking things of Siri when I otherwise get very useful responses from chatgpt.
If you say "Buy a two by four" the transcription goes from
Buy
Buy a
Buy a two
Buy a two by
Buy a 2 x 4
For
Four inches
Four inches by
4" by 3
4" by 3"
The issue is that when going to GPT, that's going to cost someone a few pennies each time a request is made. When that's scaled up to the installed base of all Macs and iDevices that gets expensive fast.
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.
timerId = setTimer(float time);
function updateTimer(timerId) {};
maybe wrap that in a class, and use that when using Siri. you just have to speak the class definition first.
Hey Siri! set a timer using myCustomClassTimer!
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.
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.
I have a Mini that consistently misunderstands broadcast requests and says "sorry I'm not playing anything right now". When it occasionally speech-to-text converts a broadcast word, it consistently cuts off the first word or letter, even when it's "I'll be right down" users will get "L L be right down".
It used to support simple offline requests like SMS and Navigate when data was unavailable. No more.
It used to integrate with Google Keep. No more.
No longer recognizes the word "torch" as a synonym for flashlight. Why would I be asking to turn on my phone's "porch"?
Painfully slow replies, even under ideal network environment... Just spinning forever, often until a timeout that it doesn't even have the decency to respond with a proper error message.
It's just amazing how they launched a product with a clear "this is where we are, this is our vision of where we're going" and they still sell it but instead they're going in the opposite direction.
The only times I ever try to use it intentionally (like asking it to take a note, or make a hands free call while I'm driving) - it screws up or requires clarification to which I have to give screen attention, defeating the purpose.
Most of the time it just pops up and annoys me when I call my wife "sweetie".
Recently, when I ask it to "Send a text to that says " it says something like "I notice you often send texts to using Apple Messages, so I will use that for this text. Is that Ok?" before reading me back the text and then sending it. I'm sure that there are people out there who have a rich and complicated mapping of text-communication-app to recipients, but I literally have only one text communication app on my phone, the one that it came with, and I only ever use that. It's already annoyingly slow to interact with Siri on a multi-step process, and adding another step to it is awful.
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 know a bunch of capable programmers that would love the chance to go into one of these specialties but don't have the resources nor opportunities (time/money/location) to go back to school.
Siri could be so much better.
One issue I frequently have with siri is that commands that work one day suddenly don't the next. If I ask siri to "lock screen" it tries to find smart home door locks (which i dont have) instead of locking the device screen, eventually I figure out some combination of lock device/screen/phone screen/off etc that works, so siri does know how to do this but isn't smart enough to figure out my intent.
The other issue is that siri unlike google assistant can't maintain a train of thought, You can't say "hey siri dim the bedroom lights" and follow that up with "hey siri..a bit more" unlike with google where it seems to be aware of the context of what it did prior.
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.