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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

#61
What would Siri’s market share be if you could easily install Google assistant on iPhone? How much more investment would Apple have put into Siri if they had to compete?

I haven’t noticed any improvement in Siri in close to a decade of being in the Apple ecosystem. The most frustrating thing is that every time I ask it to “turn the lights on”, it thinks I’m saying “off”. I grew up in the US and have no notable accent or mumble.

Note that there are hacky ways to add google assistant, but it doesn’t get integrated into the OS in the same way

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

#62

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 is also quite terrible at setting Homekit Scene. I totally gave up on it. For example I have a scene named "Play Music Everywhere" and even if I tell it explicitely with "Hey Siri set scene Play Music Everywhere" it fails miserably. Also simple task like: "Hey Siri play music on all HomePods" ends up with "Ok playing music Everywhere". When did I say everywhere??? I only want you to play on Homepods!

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

#63

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.

It deals with my oven fan and similar regular kitchen noise pretty well. I hold it close to my mouth at parties, so I can't really compare it to e.g. Google Home or Alexa's far-field capability.

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

#64
I find it odd how Apple has seemingly dropped the ball with Siri. Don't all newer iPhones have some sort of neural chip or something that could help Siri expand its capabilities? It's strange that Amazon is so far ahead with Alexa and Siri is lagging.

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

#65
"Even" implies a consensus that I don't think exists except in the minds of people who find hating something recreational. Siri works pretty fucking well in my experience, but that experience is colored by my understanding of what it is, and what it's good at.

You have to be aware of what makes a good Siri question or task. Technical people tend to understand this implicitly; we are, after all, talking to a computer, and computers are notoriously literal and have trouble with implied contexts, etc.

I think I've talked about this here before, but my wife often phrases questions to Siri in a way that results in the dreaded "I can send the results to your iPhone" non-answer. One example I remember happened when we were idly talking about King Charles. My wife asked Siri "how old is king charles" and got the non-answer. I asked Siri "what year was king Charles born" and got hard data back.

It's that kind of thing.

In the narrow case of music there's more to complain about, I guess, but the base problem is specificity and name collision. It doesn't seem to always pull the example of any given non-unique name that I might want; sometimes I wonder if what i get is just random.

If you ask for "Take Five", you MIGHT get Dave Brubeck. I'd argue that, in the absence of something specific, you SHOULD get Dave Brubeck, and moreover you should get the album cut from "Time Out." But Siri doesn't really agree, for whatever reason.

OTOH, if you ask Siri to play "Take Five from the Dave Brubeck album Time Out" you'll get exactly what you want.

Siri excels in simple, discrete asks or tasks, though. We both routinely use it to add things to the shared shopping list we keep in Reminders. That's kind of awesome, and beats the old norm of "go find a pen to add this to the list that you may or may not remember to take with you when you go shopping." Setting timers or alarms verbally is awesome. The list goes on.

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

#66
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?

Generally, you sit down to a meal or coffee with the executive in question; they answer your questions and try to convince you to join.

That conversation might span a few sit-downs or extend into e-mails.

If you eventually say “yes”, you’ll be funneled into the hiring pipeline midstream, skipping the entire front-end process.

It’s largely a formality — HR is told to hire you unless there’s a glaring red flag.

When I’ve been in that position, I wasn’t even asked for my resume until after we’d already negotiated my compensation, solely for inclusion in my HR file.

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

#67

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.

Not on HomePods as far I as know.

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

#68

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.

That’s exactly how Siri is supposed to be used.

If it can do something — well, that’s the usecase. It just works.

If it can’t do - then why would even one be trying to do that! That’s not how it’s done.

That’s the Apple way. And that’s exactly how Siri is perfect!

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

#69

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.

Seems like it does - cool! - but why does it sometimes spin for several seconds when faced with a seemingly simple request? I'm guessing it has some path where it tries to use the network if possible, but if the network is spotty then the requests timeout and it reports a failure?

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

#70
post #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.

If you are betting that Siri will be the same 10 years from now, I will not join you.
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