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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

#131
I think I might be in the minority based on other comments here.

I hate things like Siri and whatever Android phones have.

It's incredibly rude every time I hear someone almost yelling into their phone in public. They get frustrated Siri doesn't work and loudly and slowly say whatever it is again like being mean to a dumb child.

People speak out entire text messages and the replies. I'm not pointing out folks with disabilities. I'm talking about perfectly healthy adults who seem to have no sense of awareness around them.

On my phone, I found it infuriating that Apple just inserted this Siri icon into the keyboard next to the spacebar. It took me a while to figure out how to disable it. I already have large hands, but my typing accuracy is pretty good and fast. When that icon was there, it reduced the width of the spacebar and return keys and made it impossible to type without Siri popping up every few lines.

I think more broadly I have a prejudice against devices listening to me. I've never liked Alexa, Siri, or any other voice based automation system like customer support phone trees. Very rarely I've encounter a phone system that works well, but mostly these devices and systems are just infuriating to work with.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The inability to set multiple simultaneous timers is annoying. I compensate by setting multiple alarms. "Delete all my alarms" works when I'm done, but it's certainly a hack.

On Alexa I run many times simultaneously. Didn't know it was a special feature. I just name them.

Latest update(?) it quit announcing expiration by name if only one was running. Just beeps, and maybe I forgot what it was supposed to be timing. Annoying.

Especially annoying if more than one person in the house is setting timers.

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

#133

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.

"Fast-forward 2 minutes" to skip commercials made watching on the Apple TV way better than watching on my laptop, especially for sports.

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

#134
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…

Gah, my mother has a few Echoes dotted about her house and it’s the only inanimate object I feel compelled to tell to shut the hell up on a regular basis. Give me a direct response if warranted, otherwise a simple chime or acknowledgement. Multiple years into ownership no-one wants a “by the way…” with upsells to other Amazon services. It’s even worse if the reason you were talking to it in the first place is to turn…

Make a routine with these commands. It has to run daily because those cowards at amazon aren't quite ready to let us off the upsell leash.

1. Set volume to 0

2. "Turn off by the way"

3. Set volume back to your preferred.

I wonder what the conversion on 'by the way' is. Like how many BTWs have played and how many customers have taken alexa up on that offer?

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think any of them will ever be the helpful AI that they were initially promoted as, though. I must disagree. ChatGPT-style LLM functionality with ElevenLabs-quality realtime voice synthesis will absolutely supercharge these products. The ability to e.g. answer kids' questions in simplified English according to parental prompt guidelines, or drill down on complex educational topics, or maintain context over m…

Strongly agree, tons of educational and entertainment value will be unlocked.

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

#136

I get that they're wary of an LLM-based Siri making embarrassing mistakes. It would be a bad look if some kid's phone provided helpful instructions for killing themselves when asked. Mummy and Daddy would sue. However, directly answering queries is not the only way LLMs can be used. In fact, when ChatGPT 4 came out, the first thing I thought of was: "Wow, this could make Siri so much better!" For example, an LLM like…

> Another point is that many people don't realise that LLMs re-read their entire input for every word they generate!

Not every word, for every generation (which on something like ChatGPT is a message)

> they can read really fast even when running on mobile device hardware. Think 10K to 100K words per second

That’s definitely not right, I’ll try to find some numbers

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

#137
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm shocked how much the quality of Google Assistant has degraded over time. 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 requ…

See, at least Siri usually is ready to take your input the moment you press the button, even if it then casually discards your input because it can’t reach apple’s servers or whatever.

Google Maps: I swear, about half the time I try to activate voice search, it sits and spins before even accepting any voice input at all. Why can’t it just start reading the microphone right when I activate it, and then submit the saved audio whenever it’s done getting set up? It’s so abysmally poor that it’s usually faster to scroll through recent destinations or literally grab the phone, unlock, and put in a destination.

This is just a market begging to be disrupted. I want to see a startup combine Whisper, GPT, and a competent TTS model into a killer voice UI!

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

#138

I've switched to using a Chat-GPT shortcut in lieu of Siri and it's absolutely amazing. Apple should figure out how to license GPT and run Siri through it.

Hi! Could you please share details of how yours works?

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

#139

"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,…

I have terrible luck with Spotify and Siri. These kinds of specific requests fail.

I tried it with your prompt and Spotify started playing the whole album. Which is better than my usual outcome. Of course, it took three tries. The first two times Siri said it was going to play and nothing happened.

Usually I don't even get the same artist or album I ask for. Admittedly, I stopped trying a few months ago, so maybe they've improved things a bit lately, or maybe I just got lucky.

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

#140
post #44
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.

Huh?

If they have control of door locks, there's a problem.

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