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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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He was referring to Google assistant.

But I can second his point of view from a Siri user standpoint. I use it almost every day for two insignificant task, but yet it work and I use it everyday:

- Shutting down the remaining alarm clocks (I'm really not a morning person)

- Setting up timer when I cook

At some point I also used it to control smart lights but I haven't set up the system again in my new flat. And I'm seriously considering reverting to a purely physical and traditional light-switch interface instead of relying on IoT. (Take ages to set up right, rarely changing setup afterwards, waiting for updates to switch light on, flashlight mode when electronic become damaged, etc).

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

#272
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…

The biggest problem I see with Google is that saying "ok Google" feels like a mouth exercise, especially when i have to repeat it so many times in a day.

you can say 'hey google' instead.

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

#273
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…

When it fails you in German, do you switch to English?

I don’t even attempt to talk to assistants in my native language because I know they’ll fuck it up. I just go straight to English.

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

#274
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…

The biggest problem I see with Google is that saying "ok Google" feels like a mouth exercise, especially when i have to repeat it so many times in a day.

Have you tried "Hey Google"? One less syllable.

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

#275
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 not really "embarrassing". It's just old tech that was created in 2003 when the most common platform was Athlon XP CPUs, and that was okay-ish for its time, and it may take time to migrate current dataset.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 litera…

It's one of those products that makes me think: "Do the eng directors in charge of it even use this thing??"

[deleted]

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or Siri is very bad at picking up accents (mine isn't that bad having lived in the US for a while) and background noise. One of the more impressive things about using the Google's voice assistant was, it did very well in noisy environments. Whereas with Siri, that is quite a bit of struggle. This is only about speech-to-text, not text-to-whatever.

It deals with my oven fan and similar regular kitchen noise pretty well. I hold it close to my mouth at parties, so I can't really compare it to e.g. Google Home or Alexa's far-field capability.

The Google Home on my kitchen counter hears very poorly if I talk behind it instead of in front of it.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Well it's clearly better to use non-ambiguous keyword to solve that. Like my scene name equivalent to "watch a movie in the dark" was called "cinema". Another was called "sunset" for instance.

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

#279
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 error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years.

Input recognition quality falling all over the place - it's very much noticeable with their onscreen keyboards as well. Some "intelligent" mechanisms know better which button I tried to tap and I'm getting gibberish even with auto-correct off. It's the same on iPhone and Watch.

Apple has already forced me to re-learn keyboards once - with the MacBook Pro 2017 fiasco when I had to start carrying external keyboard with my "mobile" laptop. Haven't bought a MacBook since.

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

#280
I use an Android phone. Pretty much the only thing I use the voice commands for are setting alarms and timers. It works nearly 100% of the time, even in noisy environments.

My wife has an iPhone and it's hilariously bad at this. She needs complete silence and even then it's a coin flip.

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