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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

#251

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

> Very funny if you ask a simply question like "Where am I" and your voice-assistant is fucking with you about pseudophilosophically.

well sure, not funny for the person actually going through it, but as the premise of a skit seems to hold some promise.

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

#252

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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” !!!

Soundtrack to that dog movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85A2rWA5O3o

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

#253

Post by zwilliamson »

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.

Do you have to say Johan Sebastian Bach. Siri will work with that

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

#254

Post by soperj »

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....

I've had multiple teachers teach me different languages (other than english), not one called me by my english pronunciation. It seems that it's just people who speak English that try to do this.

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

#255

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

ergocoder wrote: post #240
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?

Ok Google doesn't work well either. 20% of the time it can't play songs on Spotify, and I have no idea why.

I assume it’s because as the number of features increased, the accuracy of recognising specific phrases went down. The eggcorn in the machine.

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

#256

Post by inferiorhuman »

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.

The problem I've had with Siri and music has nothing* to do with parsing individual words. What I've found recently is that if you don't give an exact match Apple just puts in random shit. Hey Siri play the album Rubber Soul by the Beatles on Apple Music gets me random songs by the Beatles because apparently I have Rubber Soul named "Rubber Soul [some edition info]". Hey Siri play songs by the band Duran Duran literally just plays the eponymous album because reasons. You don't need AI, machine learning, GPT, LLM, or whatever fucking buzzword is all the rage, you simply need to revert to behavior that was standard in iOS 15 and earlier. The upgrade to iOS 16 completely nerfed Siri on my phone, starting with some mandatory trial subscription bullshit.

It's to the point where I've given up trying to use Siri while driving.

* Almost nothing. I still have to say "play underground eight zero s on soma fm" because reasons.

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

#257

Post by shever73 »

epaga wrote: 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.

A sad, but true, indictment. Siri on Apple Watch is brutally bad, it fails more than half the time when asking it to do something simple like setting a timer. I've disabled CarPlay because my car's voice control is much, much better than Siri.

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

#258

Post by isoprophlex »

0x6c6f6c wrote: post #163
throwaway_ab wrote: post #76

I use Siri to turn on/off voice control which lets me control my iPhone without touching it (it's a disability feature). When I no longer need voice control I use Siri to turn it off (I have my voice control set to label all actionable buttons on the screen so I like to turn it off when using my phone via touch.) I'm not visually impaired however I find voice control super useful when I want control of my phone and r…

This is a surprising testimonial. My wife switched from a Pixel to iPhone and has utterly hated Siri and voice assist on iOS to the point she'd rather just deal with her hand pain. And it's a lot of pain. I've listened to see how bad it can be at understanding her, and it's appalling.

Note that this is probably about an accessibility feature distinct from the horrors of getting Siri to understand that you want to call your mother; there's an option to label every clickable element, interacting with voice becomes much more sane and programmatic. "Click A, scroll down, click B", that sort of deal apple built Very Well.

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

#259

Post by jakey_bakey »

pentae wrote: post #249
epaga wrote: 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…

Great ad though, Apple's always had it

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

#260

Post by schainks »

My kid in the future probably will want to have a conversation with a machine that sounds and talks like a character from a book or school lesson.

ChatGPT has gotten us there in writing, and the AI generated vocals are already really close. Unless apple acquires OpenAI, Siri is doomed.

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