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

161–170 of 533 posts

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

#161

Post by neurobama »

genericacct wrote: post #135
neurobama wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I'm really excited for LLM D&D dungeon masters.

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

#163

Post by 0x6c6f6c »

throwaway_ab wrote: post #76

I use Siri to turn on/off voice control which lets me control my iPhone without touching it (it's a disability feature). When I no longer need voice control I use Siri to turn it off (I have my voice control set to label all actionable buttons on the screen so I like to turn it off when using my phone via touch.) I'm not visually impaired however I find voice control super useful when I want control of my phone and r…

This is a surprising testimonial.

My wife switched from a Pixel to iPhone and has utterly hated Siri and voice assist on iOS to the point she'd rather just deal with her hand pain. And it's a lot of pain.

I've listened to see how bad it can be at understanding her, and it's appalling.

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

#164

Post by dxhdr »

khazhoux wrote: post #120
mostlysimilar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's infuriating when I ask Siri to play a song and it decides to pick an obscure remix of the song one day, the actual song another day, then another remix another day. Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a more complex/verbose option from the results list?

I wound up in a screaming match with my Homepod recently. “Siri, play Beethoven” !!!

Had the same experience at a friends house trying to get Alexa to play Bach. I gave up after a half dozen attempts.

These products are just hilariously bad.

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

#165

Post by ninkendo »

mgkimsal wrote: post #155
ninkendo wrote: post #144

I’d love to see a survey of people’s hit/miss rate with Siri, but with the extra dimension of what accent they have and how thick it is. IME, Siri’s speech recognition is actually quite fantastic (I almost never have an issue with a dictated text message saying the wrong thing), but: - I have a very standard midwest american accent - I talk to siri like I’m a pilot talking to ATC: As clearly and succinctly as possibl…

Years ago, it seemed Siri would try to understand you via whatever voice accent you'd chosen it to speak in. If you wanted UK Siri, it would understand... a UK accent. Using a Siri UK voice, and speaking with a US midwest accent wouldn't always get you what you expected. I tried an Australian test, and did a (bad) video of it here: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/207295417 Note this was... 8 years ago maybe? I forget…

Your video doesn’t show you changing the Siri voice though, you’re telling it your accent. There’s “Language”, which is your accent (“English (Australia)” in your case), and then “Siri Voice”, which is set to “Australian (Female)”. So of course if you tell it you have an Australian accent, but then speak with an American accent, words like “Light” will get confused, because the en_US “Light” sounds like the en_AU “Late”.

If you have an American accent but want Siri to speak with an Australian one, set “Language” to “English - USA”, but then set “Siri Voice” to Australian. Don’t set Language to something that isn’t your accent!

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

#166

Post by esafak »

daotoad wrote: post #114
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.

How do you get Siri to actually work with Spotify? When I try to use it I get consistently laughably bad results. `Play songs by Albert King on Spotify` yields something like "Playing songs by R Kelly on Spotify". No, thanks. Even when I ask for songs, albums, or artists I have saved in my library, Siri invariably finds something else entirely unrelated to play. What's really frustrating is that this used to work rea…

Same for Google. I don't understand how it's got worse not better, given advances in machine learning.

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

#167

Post by pschuegr »

smt88 wrote: post #111
alfalfasprout wrote: post #105

This is a nonstory, tbh. The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished product. Releasing an LLM-based Siri that makes really bad gaffes would be a PR nightmare. Google already suffered that when it opened up Bard despite pushback from folks working on it. The fundamentals of LLM architectures, training, etc. are now no longer "secret sauce" tons of major tech companies are working on in-house LLMs at…

> The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished product This is absolutely untrue in the Tim Cook era. Apple releases buggy hardware and software all the time. This article talks about how they released a bad product and know it. Siri is significantly worse than both Google Assistant and Alexa, and even those are comically bad sometimes. Bugs in iOS and Siri give me rage aneurysms every single day (com…

Yep. The reality is that Apple cares deeply about slick marketing.

I've had great experiences with Apple hardware, personally, but the software frequently makes me shake my head.

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

#168

Post by esafak »

Pxtl wrote: post #54
jaypeg25 wrote: post #38

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…

My pet theory is that they were launched by the A team, who got replaced by the B team when the A team left for greener pastures. Or maybe they got it working, but in a bid to get another promotion they kept tweaking it, making it worse in ways that matter to us but not the promotion committee.

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

#169

Post by deepspace »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #118
lynx23 wrote: post #91

Siri, don't make me even start. I like much of what Apple does, but Siri is just hilariously bad. The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Keywords are randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have to use a different phrase to get what you want. They even broke "Where am I" at least in German. "Wo bin ich" is sometimes replied to with "Sein oder nicht sein" (to be…

If you think Siri is bad, give Apple autocorrect a spin!

Oh dear $deity. Why does it insist on capitalizing "and" in the middle of a sentence?

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

#170

Post by amelius »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #70
amelius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps, but who cares now?
Post reply on HN