261–270 of 380 posts
I just want whoever is next in line to make Siri perform reliably and consistently. Not 70% of the time of even 90% of the time, 100% of the time for the limited uses cases that most (perhaps just me?) people use it for: - Call "person" - Call "business" (please don't say "I don't see so and so in your contacts" and on a second try, work) - Find "place" (while driving) - Define "phrase or word" (please don't say I fo…
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In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures. All chat bots suffer this flaw. GUIs solve it. CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.
The lack of an advertised set of capabilities is intentional so that data can be gathered on what users want the system to do (even if it can't). Unfortunately, this is a terrible experience for the user as they are frustrated over and over again.
Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.
It's always shocked me how dogshit Siri is. I run into this one every day: "Siri, play some music" "Sorry you will need to unlock your phone to do that" "Siri, play some music"
Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…
Classic Alexa, Gemini and Siri are all just intent based pattern matching systems where you brute force all of the phrases you want to match on (utterances), map those to intents and have “slots” for the variable parts. Like where you are coming from and where you are going.
Then you trigger an API. I’ve worked with the underlying technology behind Alexa for years on AWS - Amazon Lex - with call centers (Amazon Connect).
On the other hand, the capabilities and reliability of both Alexa and Google’s voice assistant have regressed once they moved to an LLM based system. It seems to be a hard problem and I don’t understand why.
I’ve find plenty of free text input -> LLM -> standard JSON output -> call API implementations. It seems like it would just be another LLM + brute force issue.
Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…
Steve Jobs passed away the day after Siri’s release, and I don’t think anyone else had the confidence and internal credibility to push the hard organizational changes Siri needed, similar to when he moved Apple to a single P&L when he returned.
Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…
Uses for Siri: 1. Checking the current temp or weather 2. Setting an alarm, timer, or reminder 3. Skipping a music track or stopping the music altogether roughly 3 seconds after hearing the command, or 1 second after you assume it didn't work
Tell me my next event when I’m driving.
Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.
1. Voice to text transcriptions
2. Text to understanding
3. Adding capabilities where it can do something with #2.
The voice to text that Siri uses seems to be worse than when you are dictating using voice to text from the keyboard.
The latter gets close to 100% with my southern native English accent and does okay when I’m trying to speak Spanish. Siri messes up with English a lot more and it’s a lost cause when I try to speak Spanish.
Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…
Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement. Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not: 1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri is my…
I think this also interacts with countries and states that have (possibly misguided) strict laws forbidding the "touching" of phones "while driving". My experiences suggest that using Siri when driving and the device is locked, it just gives up - I sort of see the start of it working then, bam, it stops. If I retry, I suspect that I've somehow "looked" at the phone in frustration, it saw my attention and unlocked. I now wonder if where I have placed the device is making a difference.
It does seem to work much better (when driving) if the device is already unlocked.
I also see odd things when using Shortcuts for navigation. If I've previously asked for walking directions and then speak the shortcut while driving it won't give directions until I switch to the "car" icon in maps. I think it might be trying to calculate the 15Km walking directions, but it doesn't complete before I tell it, frustrated, to stop.
When Siri doesn't work it is usually the times when I need it to. This is definitely a multiplier in disastisfaction.
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That's a great point and an easy way to visualize it as an outsider, but it's not necessarily that simple. For one thing, the iPad (market-leading tablet) and the iPhone (market-leading pocket touchscreen device) were not their first attempt at doing that. That would be the Newton, which was an actual launched product and a commercial failure. For another thing, even Apple can't just become the market leader by doing…
I see your point, but I see nothing to indicate they’re doing the “polish and wait”. No reason to believe they’re cooking behind the scenes or that this product was a learning exercise for them. Most of their current products seem to be decaying in the dead march towards the next yearly release. ux and ui are becoming more and more poorly thought (see their last design language). They half pursue ideas and don’t mana…
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Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going…
In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures. All chat bots suffer this flaw. GUIs solve it. CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.