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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

#411

Post by KyeRussell »

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...

Ah, well, if Shrinking has Ted Lasso-tier product placement, I’ll probably move it further down my list.

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

#412

Post by KyeRussell »

qwertox wrote: post #355
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 odd to hear this. As an Android user I've always felt I'm missing out something really great, judging from the keynotes.

I’ve used Android phones in the past, and Google’s tube person. Siri has IMO clearly gotten worse over time, on both my phone and my HomePods. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is better at this point.

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

#413

Post by dspillett »

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…

> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years

This isn't unique to Apple: my Amazon devices have definitely become slower to respond, and less accurate when they do, than they were a while ago.

I think part of the issue is that the companies have not found a way to “properly” monetise the services (my echo thingies where dirt cheap and I've never done anything with them remotely like making a purchase) so they are essentially throwing money at the infrastructure to keep them running due to the fear of the backlash if they just let the services die.

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

#414

Post by mplanchard »

prmoustache wrote: post #357
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…

> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Has it really or have your expectation increased instead? Or is it because they initially only worked well with business us english and have been trained over the years to support many more languages, dialects and even variations of said dialets/language + slang and profanity? Also at the beginning people where talking to these slowly, artic…

In my experience using Siri for only a handful of defined tasks over the years “set a timer,” “remind me to X at Y,” and so son, it has objectively gotten worse.

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

#415

Post by matty22 »

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.

My wife and I bought a VW ID4. It's "smart" voice command keyphrase is "Hey ID". _Every_ time one of us says in conversation, "I have an idea" it kicks on. So, now we have to talk around it and never use the word "idea" in conversation while in the car.

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

#416

Post by cubefox »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #345
cubefox wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Jap…

> > 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 wasn't the question I asked. They will at least try to pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Chopin" correctly, they won't act as if there was a correct German way to pronounce those names.

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

#417

Post by cubefox »

nicky0 wrote: post #263
BoorishBears wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT doesn't need to know, I told it to convert possible mistranscribed text to commands, "Play me some back" => "Play me some Bach"

Yes, GPT is particularly good understanding, even when you misspell things. It would make a good front-end interface to something like Siri. take the human input and make it something that makes sense to the dumb computer.

Yes, but large language models are very compute intensive and require a ton of RAM. So they wouldn't be able to run locally (this is currently possible with Siri), would be relatively expensive and possibly slow. So they might still be a while off.

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

#418

Post by 4rt »

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…

The best bit about that ad is that my homepod replied to every 'hey siri ...' with an error.

"Hey siri read me my last email" "I'm sorry I can't do that" "Hey siri list my reminders" "You can use the photos app to do that" "Hey siri show me my fashion line (?)" "You can try a search in your web browser"

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

#419

Post by kosievdmerwe »

Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #379
cubefox wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I lived in Japan for a while. My name contains sounds that just didn't work for them. No one pronounced it correctly. I was not upset, annoyed, or confused. It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life. Be strict in what you send, forgiving in what you receive.

Also you want your voice assistant to play you music not hassle you about correct pronunciations.

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

#420

Post by rst4455 »

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…

> Siri fails to understand the name of the person I want to call

After too many frustrated attempts, I found a crude fix for people I call frequently - use the shortcuts app to set a single word to trigger that specific call. Use words that are hard to misunderstand, like "newspaper" or "fantastic". Silly hack but so far it's been working flawlessly.

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