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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

#171

Post by Pxtl »

nneonneo wrote: post #137
Pxtl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 save…

What flabbergasts me is how often the screen will display a successful speech-to-text capture, and then it poops the bed anyways. Like, you did it! You did the hard part! The part that feels like goddamned magic to me, converting the noisy messy reality of sound-waves into text. And then it drops the ball on the simple pile of "if" statements it takes to convert that text into an action.

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

#172

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

Avamander wrote: post #97
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…

The worst part about Siri in my opinion is how it can do bulk actions when it mishears you. You want the ceiling light off? Okay, turning off all the lights. Or the opposite, it turns *everything* on, which can be even more annoying.

The voice commands are worse than touch screens and touch screens are worse than the optimal solution which is a tactile interface of switches/knobs. I stopped using Alexa voice controls for lights since its inconsistent and switched to a bluetooth switch, much more reliable have only had a few instances where it didn't work.

I don't do lots of home automation mostly because the automation isn't practical in a new build house that has switches in appropriate places. There are extremely rare circumstances where I want a light on/off in a room I'm not in. However, it would be a fun project to build a nice remote control with switches and knobs that you can program and have it talk to the home automation solution. To make it even more fun, I'm talking hard flip switches and volume like knobs, really tactile.

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

#173

Post by awisema »

The claim that somehow LLMs as they stand are somehow the answer is disturbing. ChatGPTs ability to be authoritatively wrong is a serious problem…

Just to see what it would do, I gave it a basic word problem the other day (two people drive towards each other) and it had the steps right, but buried in it was a simple logic error (it claimed that the two parties traveling at different speeds would travel the same distance in a unit of time).

That it was good enough to seem trustworthy, made it worse…

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

#174

Post by neilv »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #23
neilv wrote: 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?

Hopefully they skip that step but it is weird how often a recruiting process goes from having a recruiter cold contact you with platitudes singing your praises and how valuable you would be to their company and then the next step is to have a group of interviewers demanding to know why you're worthy of being in their presence while expecting you operate like a broken clone of Google and also recite CS theory that has…

Sigh, I've been on the receiving end of that multiple times. :)

In some companies (the ones that aren't just cargo-culting or on autopilot) I'd bet that someone in HR/compcommittee consciously intends it to be hazing rather than evaluation. Maybe theory like that it makes the company psychologically seem more attractive (the brain thinks, if you're jumping through hoops for them, there must be a reason), and to take candidate's ego down a notch so they're less demanding in compensation negotiation.

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

#175

Post by esafak »

hinkley wrote: post #77

I don't know if it's programmed in or just cargo culting but if Siri accidentally triggers and starts talking to you, "Nobody asked you Siri" is my favorite way to get it to stop interacting. Said in the tone of Cobie Smulders in How I Met Your Mother (Nobody asked you PATRICE!)

I tell google to STFU

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

#176

Post by cubefox »

dxhdr wrote: post #164
khazhoux wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Names are a hard problem though. How would it know how "Bach" is pronounced? It seems you would need pretty advanced multimodal AI, some sort of GPT which is trained both on text and audio.

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

#177

Post by heleninboodler »

Avamander wrote: post #97
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…

The worst part about Siri in my opinion is how it can do bulk actions when it mishears you. You want the ceiling light off? Okay, turning off all the lights. Or the opposite, it turns *everything* on, which can be even more annoying.

It's also surprisingly unaware of how poorly it's performing. I have recently noticed that when you ask it to send text a text message for you, it follows up with a suggestion that you turn on auto-send for siri-dictated messages, even after it took you six tries to get it to understand you.

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

#178

Post by jamil7 »

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 it to set timers

Yeah, literally all I use it for is to set a timer when I've put warm beer in the freezer.

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

#179

Post by heleninboodler »

deepspace wrote: post #169
throwaway894345 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

On my phone, I've somehow gotten into a situation where I can't type "butt" without it autocorrecting it to "Butt".

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

#180

Post by snapetom »

I live 20 miles away from work. 3 times a week, I have to go in. For a while, every morning, I ask Siri directions to [name of my company] to gauge how bad traffic is and how long it will take. Every time, she gives me directions to some pub in Saskatchewan, 18 hour drive away, that shares no part of their name with the name of my company.

I just gave up.

Alexa is not much better. I set up voice recognition to turn on my espresso machine (Rocket is the brand). Every morning I wake up, I tell her to turn on my Rocket. For about 3 months, things worked perfectly. All of a sudden, half the time, she instead starts playing "She's a Rocket" by Robert Ealey, a thirty year-old song.

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