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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

#221

Post by beerpls »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #208
huehehue wrote: post #187

Maybe it's the emerging neo-Luddite in me, but I'm alarmed at how many people begrudgingly continue to use these tools (accessibility reasons notwithstanding, which is an admittedly major caveat). I have a very low tolerance for error in things like setting timers, playing music, getting weather, calling someone. This is because I can complete these tasks simply, quickly, and with 100% reliability by hand. The margin…

Nah, I'll have to disagree with you there. I don't know about Siri, but I am one of those people using the Google Assistant to set timers and reminders, and for me at least, this is reliable (enough), and definitely faster than by hand. The obvious use case is setting a timer while cooking, when the phone is at the other end of the room and your hands may be dirty, but I'm using it even in non-cooking settings. In fa…

So Apple pumps more than a billion dollars into developing and marketing a virtual assistant which fails the vast majority of the time and you’re proud of it because it can set a timer by voice?

I’m just going to say - i’m underwhelmed

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

#222

Post by mataug »

noncoml wrote: post #42
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…

> 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. I was pretty happy with Alexa until they started that crap. Retired it immediately. Now I only have a HomePod but even on this I have Siri disabled. Amazon screwed the reputation of the voice robots for everyone

> Amazon screwed the reputation of the voice robots for everyone

I don't think amazon screwed the reputation of anyone's assistant but their own. Plenty of people I know use voice assistants at home, none use Alexa.

Voice assistants are genuinely useful for some scenarios, especially in the smart home space.

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

#223

Post by huehehue »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #208
huehehue wrote: post #187

Maybe it's the emerging neo-Luddite in me, but I'm alarmed at how many people begrudgingly continue to use these tools (accessibility reasons notwithstanding, which is an admittedly major caveat). I have a very low tolerance for error in things like setting timers, playing music, getting weather, calling someone. This is because I can complete these tasks simply, quickly, and with 100% reliability by hand. The margin…

Nah, I'll have to disagree with you there. I don't know about Siri, but I am one of those people using the Google Assistant to set timers and reminders, and for me at least, this is reliable (enough), and definitely faster than by hand. The obvious use case is setting a timer while cooking, when the phone is at the other end of the room and your hands may be dirty, but I'm using it even in non-cooking settings. In fa…

> reliable (enough)

This is the key thing, and the formula's different for everyone. I know that my strategy of "look at the clock and remember" will work until I'm senile, as will "panic-check the mail every day until my last tax form arrives and file that night"

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

#224

Post by IceWreck »

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…

Whats the excuse for this ? Whisper is open source, resource efficient and can easily work on device. I wonder why they havent switched to that.

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

#225

Post by K7PJP »

snapetom wrote: post #180

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 o…

> 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.

My work address is in my own contact entry. I'd just ask Siri to take me to work.

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

#226

Post by khazhoux »

cubefox wrote: post #212
khazhoux wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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....

The accurate pronunciation in German is irrelevant. Siri is always constrained to one language (Settings > General > Language & Region), and when set to English you get English pronunciations.

Same way Siri understands the english “Los Angeles” even though the G sound is completely different from Spanish.

The english IPA for Bach is straightforward.

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

#227

Post by BoorishBears »

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.

GPT doesn't need to know, I told it to convert possible mistranscribed text to commands, "Play me some back" => "Play me some Bach"

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

#228

Post by jackvalentine »

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” !!!

I take your point but really like the mirth of a man who died 30 years before audio recordings being represented by a hip hop version of one of his pieces! He never recorded a canonical version of anything!

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

#230

Post by jiggawatts »

circuit10 wrote: post #136
jiggawatts wrote: post #78

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

Please do, I was about to include that statement in a presentation, so if I’m wrong I’d love to be corrected!
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