Live data from Hacker News

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

9to5mac.com

421–430 of 533 posts

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

#421

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".

Well, sure.

I don't know if "th" exists in Polish or not, but a common (perhaps dominant) spoken way to refer to "The Beatles" is[0] "Bitelsi", which not only loses "th", but also like half the other sounds in the name[1].

Thing is, we understand it just fine. More than that, if you overheard me saying to someone, "puść teraz Bitelsów" ("put on the Beatles now"), there's a good chance you'd identify the name from context. If you didn't, you could always ask to verify (well, not if you were actually overhearing me...).

----

[0] - Or at least would look like that written down. Polish is mostly a "you say it as you see it" language, but with foreign names, often enough people write the correct form but use localized pronunciation.

[1] - I'm sorry, I'm not a phonetician.

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

#422
post #237
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.

I’ve had that happen a few times (not recently, probably not since the latest watchOS). It’s just a bug.

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t downvoted, but might be because third-party keyboards have been officially supported for many year in iOS. Your comment gives the impression they’re some kind of hack.

Thank you! No, that wasn't how I intend to mean it. If I recall correctly, the implementation was very restricted when the feature first launched in 2016. And if I recall correctly, it's not a feature which Apple would mention ever again. Therefore, I have the impression that this is not a feature Apple would endorse much.

[deleted]

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

#424
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where it falls down is really understanding natural language. I would settle for Siri understanding simple commands. Natural language is something for Apple customers in the 2040s. I want to not have to use creative language skills to decipher things in Reminders. "Who is this Paul Cage I'm supposed to call? Oh, repairing the pool cage." Forget LLM or natural language processing; Siri needs to catch up to 2018's Go…

Amazon mitigated bad speech transcription by providing a link to listen to the underlying audio. Apple has never offered this and it has led to lots of head scratching at the grocery store as I work through my shopping list. It still beats trying to use the Alexa app while shopping, though.

Amazon is hilariously bad at understanding voices. The number of times it has played "Pure" instead of "NPR" is astounding, despite me going in to the Alexa app to report the error every time.

I'm convinced those error reports are round-filed.

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

#425
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when it unexpectedly decides to "call" someone when I asked it to play some song while I'm driving. I'm mindful my English pronunciation is not 100% accurate, but Alexa gives me no problem at all.

I speak midwestern American English and it’s been constantly trying to text the wrong person, which is weird because a year ago ON THE SAME PHONE this never ever happened. If it’s not working for me it’s definitely a degradation. Siri had worked reliably for me for literally a decade! I’ve also noticed my autocorrect has gone bonkers. It’s constantly trying to change the case of the word “guess” into “Guess”, the bra…

OMG yes, the latest updates to the keyboard are a nightmare. I went so far as to turn off autocorrect as I’d rather have my spelling wrong but the meaning the same. It straight up makes up entirely new phrases I didn’t type.

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

#426

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?

You get the same issues on Android. There is zero intelligence, it's embarrassing. You can have a song in your library that you've listened to every day of your life, but it'll still decide you actually want to listen to some weird track you've never heard of just because the names are similar.

It gets real bad if you listen to music in a language other than the language you have Siri set to. It's attempts at deciphering Japanese punk or Bollywood song titles are terrible.

It also has a habit of invoking whenever I say "Hi sweetie" to my neighbor's dog.

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

#427
post #391

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 understand this isn’t necessarily Apple’s fault, but I bought a HomePod (which are very expensive smart speakers!) because I assumed it’d be the most convenient “smart” speaker with good audio quality. It does deliver on audio quality, but despite supporting literally every other smart speaker under the sun Spotify has no support for HomePod and instead you have to AirPlay from your phone. So my kid can’t listen to…

I think this is Spotify's fault. They're in a weird feud with Apple and won't properly support their app on all of Apple's platforms. I don't know who they think they're winning over but it just makes me dislike them more, I'll pick the Apple ecosystem over their app if push comes to shove.

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

#428

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 m…

Yes!! I would love to work on a startup that creates a new assistant but distribution is not possible at the moment!

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

#430
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…

It's unbelievable that Apple hasn't been able to do better. My 'favorite' Siri 'feature' is when I ask for directions to 'home' it gives me directions to the local Home Depot.... really??? EDIT: After thinking about this for a while, the reason this irks me is that 'directions to home' is one of the most basic asks. I am not asking Siri to play some obscure unreleased track from an underground British punk band. I am…

Yours picks the local Home Depot? Such luxury! It's not uncommon for Siri to navigate my to the other side of the country, even when I speak the entire address.
Post reply on HN