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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

#201

Post by rootusrootus »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #118
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!

We used to laugh about autocorrect mistakes, but over the past few years it has gotten exponentially worse. Instead of just screwing up the word I'm typing, it'll decide I meant a different phrase and change the previous word too. If you're not saying exactly what it expects you to, it can be extremely frustrating.

I've started turning many of the autocorrect-related features off entirely.

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

#202

Post by InitialLastName »

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.

This is a common developer curse. I just ran into an issue at my job where customers were having an issue in the field that we just couldn't reproduce in the office; it took a long time to put together that the issue was related to failing downloads on sketchy networks because all of our networks are stable and fast.

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

#203

Post by pbronez »

awisema wrote: post #173

The claim that somehow LLMs as they stand are somehow the answer is disturbing. ChatGPTs ability to be authoritatively wrong is a serious problem… Just to see what it would do, I gave it a basic word problem the other day (two people drive towards each other) and it had the steps right, but buried in it was a simple logic error (it claimed that the two parties traveling at different speeds would travel the same dista…

Sure, but do you need Siri to solve logic riddles? I don't. I need it to reliably hit other APIs and shortcuts with some basic arguments. Check out OpenAI's ChatGPT plugins [0]. You can connect the LLM system to an external service with just an OpenAPI model and a natural language description of what it does. I want that, via voice.

[0] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins

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

#204

Post by michelb »

The reasons sound very Apple-like. The current template-based Siri is not cutting it, but I do get the fact Apple does not want Siri to give wrong or incorrect info. People already go bonkers if an Apple Maps route is incorrect. Given that the current LLM's are routinely giving false information, I'm betting Apple is simply waiting on another leap or two in models, and slowly rewriting Siri in the meantime.

I'm having a good time playing with LLM's, but I certainly don't trust any output at face value. I know I would value a correct answer from Siri, or any other service.

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

#205

Post by gilmore606 »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #11

> The company’s senior leaders haven’t shown much stomach for the kinds of headline-grabbing gaffes ChatGPT and similar services have stumbled into over the last several months. Risk aversion from immature tech is a part of Apple’s DNA. It should be no surprise that Apple declined to push Siri beyond its limited capabilities. LLMs are quite new and Apple has plenty of cash to hire star devs to catch things up. Writin…

> Risk aversion from immature tech

Boy, that Simpsons episode where they make fun of the Newton really burned them bad.

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

#207

Post by mrtranscendence »

huehehue wrote: post #187

Maybe it's the emerging neo-Luddite in me, but I'm alarmed at how many people begrudgingly continue to use these tools (accessibility reasons notwithstanding, which is an admittedly major caveat). I have a very low tolerance for error in things like setting timers, playing music, getting weather, calling someone. This is because I can complete these tasks simply, quickly, and with 100% reliability by hand. The margin…

It doesn't matter how frequently Siri gets things wrong, my wife insists on using it for everything. The number of times I've heard her repeat herself to Siri five times in an increasingly frustrated tone is pretty high. It's baffling.

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

#208

Post by mmmmmbop »

huehehue wrote: post #187

Maybe it's the emerging neo-Luddite in me, but I'm alarmed at how many people begrudgingly continue to use these tools (accessibility reasons notwithstanding, which is an admittedly major caveat). I have a very low tolerance for error in things like setting timers, playing music, getting weather, calling someone. This is because I can complete these tasks simply, quickly, and with 100% reliability by hand. The margin…

Nah, I'll have to disagree with you there. I don't know about Siri, but I am one of those people using the Google Assistant to set timers and reminders, and for me at least, this is reliable (enough), and definitely faster than by hand.

The obvious use case is setting a timer while cooking, when the phone is at the other end of the room and your hands may be dirty, but I'm using it even in non-cooking settings.

In fact, I just tried it and timed both approaches for setting a reminder. Results:

* Assistant: "Hey Google, set a reminder 10 days from now to file my taxes.": 4.5s to say it (I'm free to focus on other things after this point), 7.5s until reminder is created.

* Manual (pick up & unlock phone, open app drawer, open Calendar app, find the day 10 days from now, click on that day, click create a reminder, type in "file my taxes", save): 17s

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

#209

Post by nanidin »

sorum wrote: post #101
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 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.

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

#210

Post by cubefox »

ghaff wrote: post #195
cubefox wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why they sell these things at a loss. Wouldn't they sell at cost?

Internal cost accounting is complicated.

At 10 billion dollars the accounting doesn't have to be precise.
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