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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

#261

Post by khazhoux »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #256
cubefox wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Names are a hard problem though. How would it know how "Bach" is pronounced? It seems you would need pretty advanced multimodal AI, some sort of GPT which is trained both on text and audio.

The problem I've had with Siri and music has nothing* to do with parsing individual words. What I've found recently is that if you don't give an exact match Apple just puts in random shit. Hey Siri play the album Rubber Soul by the Beatles on Apple Music gets me random songs by the Beatles because apparently I have Rubber Soul named "Rubber Soul [some edition info]". Hey Siri play songs by the band Duran Duran litera…

It's one of those products that makes me think: "Do the eng directors in charge of it even use this thing??"

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

#262

Post by nicky0 »

khazhoux wrote: post #226
cubefox wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "English" here, it's a name of a concrete person which has only one correct pronunciation. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/De-Bach....

The accurate pronunciation in German is irrelevant. Siri is always constrained to one language (Settings > General > Language & Region), and when set to English you get English pronunciations. Same way Siri understands the english “Los Angeles” even though the G sound is completely different from Spanish. The english IPA for Bach is straightforward.

You’re talking as if there is an anccepted standard English pronunciation of Bach. The only one I know is the German one which I would use when speaking English. Perhaps I would soften the ending.

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

#263

Post by nicky0 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #227
cubefox wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Names are a hard problem though. How would it know how "Bach" is pronounced? It seems you would need pretty advanced multimodal AI, some sort of GPT which is trained both on text and audio.

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.

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

#264

Post by nicky0 »

scottyah wrote: post #145
pram wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been superstitiously switching between "turn the lights off" and "turn off the lights" (also with music). It seems like every few weeks or days it prefers one over the other.

I say to Siri “close the blinds” eyes and it replied “I don’t see anything like that in your home”. I say again five seconds later “close the blinds” and it closes the blinds.

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

#265

Post by nicky0 »

claytonjy wrote: post #116
deergomoo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have an issue with the Spotify app on the Apple Watch. I’m not sure if it’s an apple or a Spotify problem, but I have loads of trouble when I’m using the watch app to play music when I’m at home, near my phone and near my Wi-Fi network. However if I leave the house and walk away without my phone, leaving the watch to use this 4G connection only, it works flawlessly.

If I come back from my run Spotify will often stop playing as soon as it gets home in range of the phone.

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

#266

Post by princevegeta89 »

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…

The biggest problem I see with Google is that saying "ok Google" feels like a mouth exercise, especially when i have to repeat it so many times in a day.

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

#267

Post by mikelward »

pram wrote: post #117
Avamander wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it works if the Google Home and the lights are configured in the same room, otherwise it goes crazy and does the whole house.

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

#268

Post by crooked-v »

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…

> Keywords are randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have to use a different phrase to get what you want.

The most striking example for me is that the word "half" - as in, "Hey Siri, set the lights to half" - stopped working for six months, then started working again.

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

#270

Post by mikelward »

majormajor wrote: post #181
heleninboodler wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my phone, I've somehow gotten into a situation where I can't type "butt" without it autocorrecting it to "Butt".

"well" and "we'll" here

Android GBoard turns "were" into "we're". "Ill" into "I'll". "Its" into "it's". Makes me look illiterate with all the extra apostrophes.
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