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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

#211

Post by ubermonkey »

daotoad wrote: post #139
ubermonkey wrote: post #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,…

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 the…

I don't use Spotify, so I can't comment, but when I make those requests using Siri + Apple Music they tend to work.

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

#212

Post by cubefox »

khazhoux wrote: post #198
cubefox wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no "English" here, it's a name of a concrete person which has only one correct pronunciation.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/De-Bach....

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

#213

Post by transcriptase »

sorum wrote: post #101
Dennip wrote: post #59

I use Siri fairly frequently for setting timers, controlling my smart home and the like, but for me where it falls down is really understanding natural language. Personally I found that google assistant was way way ahead of siri in this regard. I could ask it to do something and it would just understand what I want. One issue I frequently have with siri is that commands that work one day suddenly don't the next. If I…

> where it falls down is really understanding natural language. I would settle for Siri understanding simple commands. Natural language is something for Apple customers in the 2040s. I want to not have to use creative language skills to decipher things in Reminders. "Who is this Paul Cage I'm supposed to call? Oh, repairing the pool cage." Forget LLM or natural language processing; Siri needs to catch up to 2018's Go…

2023 Google Assistant needs to catch up to 2018 Google Assistant. It has become progressively worse since I invested a great deal into setting it up with smart-home devices in that very year.

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

#214

Post by thefourthchime »

deergomoo wrote: post #112
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…

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…

I HATE that it does that, it made me try to move to Homepods, but even with Homebridge I couldn't get everything to work with Homepods. Also, it has its own drawbacks, like no screen to see a timer.

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

#215

Post by nanidin »

yellowait44 wrote: post #62
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.

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!

Yesterday: “Hey Siri, watch a movie in the dark” “Ok setting scene watch a movie in the dark”

Today: “Hey Siri, watch a movie in the dark” “I can’t find a movie called In the Dark.”

I also had a very frustrating issue randomly start happening because one of my lights had the word “lamp” or “light” in it. Thankfully googling the symptoms found others with the same problem and a solution, but it was baffling as there hadn’t been any changes made by me in over a year prior.

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

#217

Post by mustacheemperor »

nneonneo wrote: post #30

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…

I hunch that on-device recognition leveraging the onboard ML hardware will be a whole new thing. The Siri brand is so damaged now I expect they’ll launch something new instead of “but it’s actually good now!”

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

#218

Post by smt88 »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #124
smt88 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs This is mind-blowing to me because I'd guess that ~50% of my interactions with Siri are buggy. I mostly use it through CarPlay. It even fails to call the correct contact in my phone, which should be the easiest thing it does.

I'd argue that microphones in the car are laughably bad, which probably hurts recognition. But it should be better.

A) This happens whether in the car or not, and in the car I'm often using AirPods to get better noise cancellation. There's no excuse for this. I could talk to my Pixel 5 while driving from across the car.

B) It's not always a recognition thing. Siri often knows what I said and has a completely baffling response to it.

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

#219

Post by smt88 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #115
smt88 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you think this is limited to Tim Cook, you weren't paying attention. Every single release of macbooks had issues with heat killing GPUs and similar and apple always denied it being a design defect. Didn't steve jobs sit behind antennagate and bendgate?

The software was significantly more polished in the Jobs era. I don't know why, because it's not like it's something Jobs obsessed over more than Cook. Apple just doesn't seem to have "good software" in their DNA.

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

#220

Post by mataug »

cubefox wrote: post #200
mataug wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just preference honestly, we have a lot of apple devices, and it's nice to be able to keep things consistent. If we both had Android Phones we would've probably used Google assistant.
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