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

#111

Post by smt88 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:49 PM UTC

alfalfasprout wrote: post #105

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…

> The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished product

This is absolutely untrue in the Tim Cook era. Apple releases buggy hardware and software all the time.

This article talks about how they released a bad product and know it. Siri is significantly worse than both Google Assistant and Alexa, and even those are comically bad sometimes.

Bugs in iOS and Siri give me rage aneurysms every single day (coming from a long-time Android user who just wanted a small phone).

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

#112

Post by deergomoo » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:49 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #6

At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know. But, yeah, all the voice assistants are pretty bad or at least bad enough that I mostly give up trying to use them for anything other than certain rote tasks. Siri may or may not be marginally worse but none of them are good enough to, say, really use hands-off in a car unless I've carefully p…

Gah, my mother has a few Echoes dotted about her house and it’s the only inanimate object I feel compelled to tell to shut the hell up on a regular basis.

Give me a direct response if warranted, otherwise a simple chime or acknowledgement. Multiple years into ownership no-one wants a “by the way…” with upsells to other Amazon services.

It’s even worse if the reason you were talking to it in the first place is to turn something down so you can actually speak to someone.

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

#113

Post by izzydata » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

It would be funny if voice controlled devices came into being and disappeared before I even bothered to try them.

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

#114

Post by daotoad » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

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.

How do you get Siri to actually work with Spotify?

When I try to use it I get consistently laughably bad results. `Play songs by Albert King on Spotify` yields something like "Playing songs by R Kelly on Spotify". No, thanks.

Even when I ask for songs, albums, or artists I have saved in my library, Siri invariably finds something else entirely unrelated to play.

What's really frustrating is that this used to work reasonably well for me.

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

#115

Post by mrguyorama » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #111

alfalfasprout wrote: post #105

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…

> The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished product This is absolutely untrue in the Tim Cook era. Apple releases buggy hardware and software all the time. This article talks about how they released a bad product and know it. Siri is significantly worse than both Google Assistant and Alexa, and even those are comically bad sometimes. Bugs in iOS and Siri give me rage aneurysms every single day (com…

If you think this is limited to Tim Cook, you weren't paying attention. Every single release of macbooks had issues with heat killing GPUs and similar and apple always denied it being a design defect.

Didn't steve jobs sit behind antennagate and bendgate?

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

#116

Post by claytonjy » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

deergomoo wrote: post #107

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.

Spotify is just as bad in this regard! It used to handle spotty connections flawlessly a few years ago, but at some point it was altered to keep trying to pull album art and track listings from the network even for downloaded albums.

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

#117

Post by pram » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

Avamander wrote: post #97

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 worst part about Siri in my opinion is how it can do bulk actions when it mishears you. You want the ceiling light off? Okay, turning off all the lights. Or the opposite, it turns *everything* on, which can be even more annoying.

They're all complete crap. I use Google Home to ONLY turn my lights on or off and it gets it like 60% of the time. Sometimes it accepts the command and it just doesn't even work and says something went wrong. Pressing the light button in the app is 100% consistent. Incredible.

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

#118

Post by throwaway894345 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:05 PM 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…

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

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

#119

Post by jeromeof » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

I honestly don't know why Apple can't do their own ChatGPT. They have the money / resources to then implement something like the ChatGPT 'plugin' architecture so if someone wants to turn on their lights or get specific 'private' information that apple cannot give as 'training' data. i.e. callout to 'private' API's if appropriate to a sensible LLM generated response

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

#120

Post by khazhoux » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

mostlysimilar wrote: post #104

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?

I wound up in a screaming match with my Homepod recently.

“Siri, play Beethoven”

!!!