Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by BulgarianIdiot » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:23 AM UTC

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…

Siri was better earlier on. In fact they were better before Apple bought them than ever after. And the primary reason is optimization of cost and scale.

And something similar is happening to GPT although not to that extent. Bing has gotten worse over time as they use a pipeline of models, where smaller models serve most common and easily predictable tokens, while the full model only handles the hard stuff. Except... you can't tell always what's hard stuff or not, so Bing serves useless distracted answers ignoring user context from time to time.

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

#312

Post by prawn » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:25 AM UTC

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…

I get the impression that Apple makes an effort with accessibility and would be horrified about this blind/“where am I” example. Hopefully there’s an employee here who sees it and can get it in front of the right person.

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

#313

Post by ultrarunner » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:25 AM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #118

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…

If you think Siri is bad, give Apple autocorrect a spin!

My phone has somehow decided that ‘20’ should be changed to ‘2.0’. This is the only combination of numbers to do this (so far).

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

#314

Post by mardifoufs » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:27 AM UTC

el_benhameen wrote: post #285

voytec wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Their swype-style keyboard is an absolute joke—perhaps the most infuriating part of my iphone. I know that it’s easier to criticize than it is to implement, but my god, just a basic markov chain would yield more intelligible results than the shit it comes up with.

For some very odd reason, swipe keyboard technology seems to have peaked around 2014, never to reach those heights again.

I remember being amazed by how great swiping was, and after using it recently (it's not really great on gboard or samsung keyboard either, not bad but just meh) I was wondering if it was just rose tinted glass. But nope, I booted up my old nexus 5 with a normal gboard (not even swiftkey!) and it was still amazing. The contrast was amazing even when I wiped typing data on both phones to make sure that it was a fair comparison.

I guess the most glaring difference was the subtle, but extremely important handling of edge cases or particularly ambigious letter combinations. Even the "bad" modern google keyboard is still 95% accurate, but the difference between that and the 99% accuracy on my nexus 5 basically makes all the difference. It goes from predictive magic to having to swipe across every single letter to make sure it works.

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

#315

Post by ultrarunner » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:28 AM UTC

savoytruffle wrote: post #293

garbagecoder wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does lay some turds. MobileMe. Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called. Maps until recently. Usually they fix them, but Siri never seems to get better. For what it's worth, I think Alexa has gotten worse, but for different reasons.

Alexa has always worked better from across the room, but nowadays an Echo device will do very little aside from weather and timers without trying to sell you a subscription.

By the way—-

Alexa’s inability to just answer a question and go away is why my son didn’t get in trouble for knocking it off its table (and breaking the top), and why we didn’t replace it.

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

#316

Post by nextlevelwizard » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:33 AM UTC

I tried using Siri for a while, but the amount of miss fires on my watch made me discontinue. The slight convenience of being able to (most of the time) set a timer or something paled in comparison for it to trigger off of random conversation and then try to search for something nonsensical and loudly proclaiming it couldn't find anything.

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

#317

Post by mitemte » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:41 AM UTC

zer0zzz wrote: post #288

Former Apple Employee here: I still remember for one WWDC my colleague’s talk had to be altered to change all mentions of “A-Series” socs to “A7 and later” to avoid triggering “Hey Siri” on every single person’s phone in the audience.

A scene in the second most recent episode of Ted Lasso, when a character uses Siri on their iPhone triggered Siri on my HomePod Mini in the same room. Siri attempted to follow the instructions spoken by the character but failed miserably. If Apple is going to plug their half baked assistant in their shows, the least they could do is prevent it from being invoked. It may vary by language – I’m in Australia and the character speaking has a British accent, yet sounds nothing like me.

There was also a period of about 18 months where running water in my shower would trigger Siri on my Apple Watch. Dismissing Siri was pointless, as it’d get triggered again 5 seconds later.

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

#318

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:48 AM UTC

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....

That is completely wrong. People have many names in practice, especially historical persons. Even living people often present themselves differently in different languages.

For some examples:

- the famous Romanian/French modern sculptor Constantin Brîncuși (which uses a vowel that has no direct correspondent in either French or most dialects of English, and it pallatelizes the ending sh, so that it's pronounced in two syllables, brîn-cush with a slightly pronounced ee at the end), but also Brancusi (in French, roughly bran-cu-see).

- in Japanese, since Japanese speakers have relatively few syllables they are familiar with, almost all foreign names are expected to be Japanized; for example, if your name is "Stephen", you would be expected to present yourself as, roughly, "su-tee-ve-n", and write your name with the corresponding katakana characters in certain official documents

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

#319

Post by baby » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:50 AM UTC

doubtfuluser wrote: post #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 usin…

There’s still a huge gap between google’s voice recognition and siri.

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

#320

Post by louison11 » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 8:53 AM UTC

And yet Apple still has a massive moat around Siri because there is no official way (as far as I know) to replace Siri by another assistant when pressing the side button or saying "Hey..." I believe if you want to use Google Assistant your best bet is to say something like "Hey Siri, use Google Assistant." (honestly haven't even tried because of how ridiculous that is).

So they're clearly still in prime position to make their product better, even if they're behind right now. That's unless they get an antitrust lawsuit for unfair monopoly, which they probably should get considering this seems to me similar to what Windows was doing forcing IE as the default browser back in the days. Just like people should be able to choose their default browser, they should be able to choose their default voice assistant.