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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

#191

Post by jlund-molfese »

mataug wrote: post #184
ghaff wrote: 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…

This is exactly the reason why I replaced all Amazon echo devices with HomePods. Siri makes many mistakes, doesn't hear me correctly, doesn't understand me correctly, and so many other issues. I can tolerate all these mistakes that Alexa also makes. I just cannot tolerate Alexa talking back to me, especially when I'm trying to do something important. I've lost my train of thought too many times because of Alexa.

Same with Google Home! One too many times, I asked it what temperature it was outside, and it went on some monologue about how I should try asking it to give me a summary of my day or something.

The optimal amount of times a product should interrupt your workflow to tell you about a new feature is 1 or fewer.

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

#192

Post by sarks_nz »

I love Siri with Apple Maps in New Zealand /s

Me: "Siri, give me directions to vaguely ethnic sounding café" where café is about 2km away.

Siri: "Getting directions to other cafe in London/Europe/Tajikistan".

So theres no line of code that says "If found location if >2000kms away with no direct land route and/or crosses multiple continents, it might not be the right one"

Google Maps and voice works pretty flawlessly.

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

#193

Post by robocat »

javawizard wrote: post #148
geuis wrote: post #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 di…

> 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. Careful. It's easy to overlook disabilities that may not be immediately externally visible. I have a friend who's heavily dyslexic. You'd never know it if you ran into her on the street; she's quite successful in her career. Yet she uses voice dictation when sending text messa…

> I'm talking about perfectly healthy adults who seem to have no sense of awareness around them.

There's also a few DSM5[1] diagnostic categories that could cover that behaviour.

However, it is a somewhat cultural behaviour - you see it more in some countries or places within a country - some people are just jerks.

Perhaps they could just add "arsehole" as a new diagnostic category to cover highly inconsiderate people. Just needs better wording.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dsm5

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

#194

Post by rickreynoldssf »

augment003 wrote: post #130
rickreynoldssf wrote: post #85

It doesn't help that Apple doesn't let third party developers use it. The only SDK available for Homepod, is locked behind a bunch of approvals and the only thing it does is allow developers to implement music players. It's very specific to playing music. Not even Podcasts. Why can't an eCommerce app implement, "Hey Siri, tell Online Store to add Tidepods to my weekly order". ? What about Audible implementing, "Hey S…

This is simply false, or at the very least outdated. Apps can definitely implement custom intents for Siri: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Not on Homepod, the most likely device Siri would be used on.

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

#195

Post by ghaff »

cubefox wrote: post #189
HDThoreaun wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"By the way" is alexa's entire business model. They sell these devices at a loss and don't require a subscription for the nlp so they can "by the way" you into buying random shit. I'm surprised they let you mute it at all, especially after devices lost $10 billion last year.

I wonder why they sell these things at a loss. Wouldn't they sell at cost?

Internal cost accounting is complicated.

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

#196

Post by jabroni_salad »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #160
jabroni_salad wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"By the way" is alexa's entire business model. They sell these devices at a loss and don't require a subscription for the nlp so they can "by the way" you into buying random shit. I'm surprised they let you mute it at all, especially after devices lost $10 billion last year.

Then maybe it should try to make a sale instead of blathering on about how I can ask it what sound does a pig make.

They have 15 years of purchase history, prime video usage, and presumably are snooping on what podcasts I play over Echo. They should be able to suck a little less. Any random page of a 20 year old sears catalog would carry more relevance to me than anything Alexa has suggested.

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

#197

Post by PicassoCTs »

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 project has been on the department trading bazaar, selling itself out to survive.

"So we in the MacOs trading station, will push siri enable notifications on powerbutton wakeup, if you push the following answers on keywords up the likelihood.

Deal? Deal!

Thus she existed on, living long and prosperous.. through diplomatic victorys, that destroyed the qualities that could not keep her alive on her own..

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

#198

Post by khazhoux »

cubefox wrote: post #176
dxhdr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Bach” is a word like any other, and unambiguous in English pronunciation.

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

#199

Post by valine »

Animats wrote: post #140
valine wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is that a problem? If you don't want the model to access your doors you disable it at the API level. Siri already has an option for that today.

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

#200

Post by cubefox »

mataug wrote: post #184
ghaff wrote: 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…

This is exactly the reason why I replaced all Amazon echo devices with HomePods. Siri makes many mistakes, doesn't hear me correctly, doesn't understand me correctly, and so many other issues. I can tolerate all these mistakes that Alexa also makes. I just cannot tolerate Alexa talking back to me, especially when I'm trying to do something important. I've lost my train of thought too many times because of Alexa.

Why not use Google Nest? It has Google Assistant, which seems to be better than Siri.
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