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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

#341

Post by cubefox »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #256
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.

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…

Yeah, some others also had the impression that it got worse over time in some aspects. I wonder whether this was some kind of tradeoff with other abilities. Or perhaps they rewrote the code, which had unintended side effects.

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

#342

Post by bombolo »

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…

> 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.

What if you don't want to disturb someone sleeping? Do you sleep with the lights on? Do you watch movies with the lights on?

Do you need the same amount of light to have dinner and to fix something?

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

#343

Post by michaelt »

devilbunny wrote: post #235
throwaway894345 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just try their swiping. I use it. I don't like it. (I haven't found anything else that's much better, and that's with a fair amount of SwiftKey use; nothing beats now-dead Swype.) Routinely - routinely - I try to swipe out "and". Often, I get "abs" (I don't work out, let alone write about it), but the most common and bizarre one is "Abbas". The only Abbas I know is the Palestinian president, and I don't write about h…

I assume some users are using new names on a daily basis. If you run a plumbing business, you may never have texted Abbas before - but if Abbas asks you for a quote, you'll be doing it today. Although I agree that people write 'and' far more often.

I assume they have some sort of special-case inclusion/handling for names in swipe dictionaries - it'd be embarrassing if your swipe keyboard recognised George and Donald as words, but didn't recognise Barrack.

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

#344

Post by pdpi »

m_st wrote: post #300
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.

That made my day! Just a few weeks ago I was watching a 'Shrinking' episode on Apple TV where they said "Hey Siri play " and then my HomePod saying "OK I'll play for you" and me yelling back "Hey Siri stop! I'm watching TV". Modern live...

One of the guys on the Cracking the Cryptic sudoku Youtube channel keeps accidentally triggering Alexa on his videos. It's pretty funny.

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

#345

Post by thaumasiotes »

cubefox wrote: post #338
thaumasiotes wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a name of a concrete person which has only one correct pronunciation. This is an insane standard. The [x] at the end of the German word doesn't exist in English; most English speakers wouldn't be able to pronounce it if they wanted to. When the demands you're making are literally impossible, the problem is you.

So just because the "th" sound doesn't exist in many languages, like German, they should pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Anthony Hopkins" or "The Beatles" incorrectly? That seems to me a way more "insane" standard. By the way, the Scottish are perfectly able to pronounce "Loch Ness", which has the same sound for "ch" as "Bach".

> So just because the "th" sound doesn't exist in many languages, like German, they should pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Anthony Hopkins" or "The Beatles" incorrectly?

They're going to use the sounds that exist for them, yes.

> That seems to me a way more "insane" standard.

I hope you never get to make any decisions. Dave Barry once wrote about someone thinking "What an idiot I am! Here I am, a Japanese person, in Japan, and I can't even speak English!"

But then again, Dave Barry was joking.

> By the way, the Scottish are perfectly able to pronounce "Loch Ness"

The population of Scotland is 5 million; if you want to talk about "most English speakers", the Scottish aren't even worth noticing.

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

#346

Post by nindalf »

baggsie wrote: post #287
nindalf wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm English and my wife and kids are french so naturally all our devices are set to french - our Google speakers do not understand my terrible french accent but bizarrely work perfectly when I speak English but only if I do a completely over-the-top french accent.

Same with Hindi. Needs a ridiculous English accent to understand Hindi. I call it the British Colonial Administrator accent. Like this guy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6_896OhnaQ

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

#347

Post by dividedbyzero »

dxhdr wrote: post #182
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.

That's kind of my point, it's a product that doesn't work. It's a language interface that can't understand language. FWIW I tried many alternatives like "Bach classical music" etc to no avail.

How do you pronounce Bach?

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

#348

Post by zackkatz »

lbotos wrote: post #237
Dennip wrote: 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…

Does anyone know why I have this problem with Siri on my Apple Watch? “Set a timer for 15 minutes” Siri: “timer app is not installed” Excuse me? It most certainly is. Try again later and it works.

You can just say “15 minutes” and it has a higher success rate for me.

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

#349

Post by georgyo »

mardifoufs wrote: post #314
el_benhameen wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Very much agree!!

I remember not even knowing the spelling of words but being able to swipe in the general direction of letters I thought might be correct and it inputting the correct word.

Now now it seems I have to have near perfect tracing and pathing to get correct words.

It's very disappointing.

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

#350

Post by [deleted] »

MrGilbert wrote: post #340
aembleton wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just change the keyboard on your iPhone?

You can, but it's not really endorsed by Apple. As such, some folks don't even know about that. Personally, I like to use SwiftKey. //Edit: Would really like to know for what I got down voted for?

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