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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

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because the network is unstable or unavailable All of Apple’s services by and large handle spotty networks horribly . Take Apple Music for example: if you want to play music you’ve downloaded to your device, it’s often better to switch into airplane mode, because with a present-but-poor signal it will still try to load album listings etc over the network, and sit there on a spinner.

Spotify is just as bad in this regard! It used to handle spotty connections flawlessly a few years ago, but at some point it was altered to keep trying to pull album art and track listings from the network even for downloaded albums.

Is there not an option on Spotify to only stream on wifi?

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

#244
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.

Siri does ok for me on this. It also gets the shades right if I say shade instead of blind, otherwise the error rate is higher. Overall, I’d rather live with Siri than without. Google does ok as well, Alexa is utter crap for these tasks.

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

#245
Siri is without a doubt in my mind the most embarrassing thing Apple has had on the market in the past 20 years.

With ChatGPT it is now feeling like Siri the broken tricycle is being compared to a Lamborghini.

Honestly I would have been concerned if Apple employees weren’t frustrated with Siri.

Pretty sure they need to take Siri out to pasture and start some LLM-based project from scratch.

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

#246
For me all of the current voice assistants have issues. Playing music seems to be super hard to get right if you don’t follow mainstream. Either you get a playlist with always the same titles, or it starts playing some obscure remixes.

Home automation is in my opinion totally stupid to do by voice. The light should switch on when it is dark and I go into a room and should switch off when none is in the room. But using voice which 99% of the time works is “slower”, and in one percent of the time it is annoying if the light in my kids room switches in.

I see use in the Knowledge augmented ChatGPT like assistants, since then I could reliably ask a digital assistant for information. Right now I know the moment the assistant starts answering with “this is what I found on the web” that it’s going to be wrong. Similar annoying is that Alexa for example seems to rewrite some requests, where I ask about “what is X” and I get the answer on “what is Y”.

I’m pretty disillusioned and disappointed in all the different voice assistants out there, and I seriously think that voice on top of gpt will actually help me get more often what I want.

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

#247
I asked Siri to call the San Mateo County Public Works Department. It called the Sheriff instead. Normally it will ask to confirm before calling a number/person/business you've never called before, but perhaps with emergency services it's a bit looser? Regardless, I was pretty surprised that it misunderstood my prompt so dramatically.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Siri does ok for me on this. It also gets the shades right if I say shade instead of blind, otherwise the error rate is higher. Overall, I’d rather live with Siri than without. Google does ok as well, Alexa is utter crap for these tasks.

I thought Siri was bad for me because I was on a watchlist for maybe discussing Apple negatively in front of the pod, and they purposely messed with me, doing the opposite of my commands, acting randomly, etc.

Kidding aside, with all those non-deterministic assistants, it will be hard to see when you’re hellbanned from a service.

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

#249
post #245

Siri is without a doubt in my mind the most embarrassing thing Apple has had on the market in the past 20 years. With ChatGPT it is now feeling like Siri the broken tricycle is being compared to a Lamborghini. Honestly I would have been concerned if Apple employees weren’t frustrated with Siri. Pretty sure they need to take Siri out to pasture and start some LLM-based project from scratch.

It's even more embarrassing when you look at the old Apple commercials introducing Siri up to 11 years ago, here's one from the rock when they introduced the iPhone 7:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhLGBY5_0zU

Anyone thats used Siri will watch that and laugh at how absurd it is that someone could get even one of those voice commands to work the first time. I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit for false advertising. I can barely get it to start a timer on my apple watch sometimes.

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

#250
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…

I never bought one of these devices, because I refuse to speak in foreign languages to them.

When I am on the confort of my house, I want to use my native languages as much as I can.

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