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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

#101

Post by sorum »

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…

> 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 Google Assistant

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

#102

Post by bluejekyll »

robbyking wrote: post #37
bluejekyll wrote: post #26

Ok, maybe I’m an outlier here, but I love Siri on my HomePods. It does what I want in enough cases that it’s useful, multiple timers while cooking, setting them and canceling them when I am putting things in or taking it out of the oven. Granted, I have very few things I use it for, but I like it. The kids like them in their rooms too. I’m happy with Siri, but maybe I don’t ask it to do much.

That's the trick with Siri. I use it on my Apple Watch when I'm riding my bike with an AirPod in: "Siri, play this podcast," or "Siri, call so-and-so." I think the secret is low expectations.

I send text messages with it while on my bike as well. It usually works fine and gets the point across.

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

#104

Post by mostlysimilar »

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…

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?

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

#105

Post by alfalfasprout »

This is a nonstory, tbh.

The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished product. Releasing an LLM-based Siri that makes really bad gaffes would be a PR nightmare. Google already suffered that when it opened up Bard despite pushback from folks working on it.

The fundamentals of LLM architectures, training, etc. are now no longer "secret sauce" tons of major tech companies are working on in-house LLMs at this point. I don't see Apple as not having a future for Siri, it's rather a silly conclusion that doesn't have much behind it at all

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

#106

Post by garbagecoder »

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…

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.

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

#107

Post by deergomoo »

nneonneo wrote: post #30

I’m frankly surprised that Siri hasn’t moved to on-device voice recognition. It’s by far my biggest complaint with Siri: random, unpredictable delays or outright failures to recognize simple messages because the network is unstable or unavailable. There’s other trash too: the other day I tried asking Siri to play a song from my library, but it misinterpreted the song title and proceeded to activate a seven day trial…

> because the network is unstable or unavailable

All of Apple’s services by and large handle spotty networks horribly.

Take Apple Music for example: if you want to play music you’ve downloaded to your device, it’s often better to switch into airplane mode, because with a present-but-poor signal it will still try to load album listings etc over the network, and sit there on a spinner.

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

#108

Post by caycep »

jiggawatts wrote: post #78

I get that they're wary of an LLM-based Siri making embarrassing mistakes. It would be a bad look if some kid's phone provided helpful instructions for killing themselves when asked. Mummy and Daddy would sue. However, directly answering queries is not the only way LLMs can be used. In fact, when ChatGPT 4 came out, the first thing I thought of was: "Wow, this could make Siri so much better!" For example, an LLM like…

I think reading the Information article, there were 2 issues, which it wasn't good at separating. The AI model sophistication and usage are one - and yeah, I think they could be more creative in using LLMs and such. But the other one seems to be a back end issue, i.e. that brief mention of "clunky database slowing down iterations/upgrades". That always seems to be an Apple Achilles heel...and I'd hope also they are NOT using that terrible IT infrastructure company (Agilent or whatever) to outsource their backend...

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

#109

Post by smt88 »

neurobama wrote: post #7

I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs. I use it to set timers, get the weather, play music via Spotify, occasionally dictate text messages, and look up trivia mid-conversation. It's been my replacement for Alexa ever since I got creeped out by Amazon's audio data retention. In this context I'm suprised to hear Apple employees are unhappy with it.

> I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs

This is mind-blowing to me because I'd guess that ~50% of my interactions with Siri are buggy. I mostly use it through CarPlay.

It even fails to call the correct contact in my phone, which should be the easiest thing it does.

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