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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#271

Post by bombcar »

kulahan wrote: post #105
elAhmo wrote: post #9

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…

It's actually crazy how they've seemingly managed to do absolutely nothing with Siri in a decade and a half. I legitimately have no idea what features it has had added, but I still try basic things and am shocked at how useless it is. I was excited when I recently got an iPhone 16 Pro - it comes with Apple Intelligence! Surely this is how Siri leaps into the future and starts doing things like translating for me, or…

Siri has changed once it its (her?) lifetime.

When they introduced "machine learning" it started working much worse - things that used to work 99% of the time (if you knew the incantation) now randomly fail in inexplicable ways.

And now it never gets my kids' names right. If I'm doing voice-to-text I will actually see it flash the correct spelling, and then replace it with some random phrase.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#272

Post by bombcar »

gcanyon wrote: post #257

I know one feature Siri has added in the past fifteen years, because I always complained that Siri couldn't "text this photo to my wife." I would demonstrate to people that this doesn't work, complain about the lack of discoverability, and mention how with each new release of iOS I would try it again to confirm it still didn't work. Then one time, in a job interview of all things, (I'm a PM and was asked for an examp…

Siri will sometimes describe a photo sent to me whilst driving, and be surprisingly accurate - "a child holding a can of soup"

And then half the time it's "a screenshot of a social media post" - c'mon, read the damn text from the screenshot at least!

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#273

Post by bombcar »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #267
drewg123 wrote: post #181

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.

We need to separate three separate issues. I work with call centers and I always need to discuss all three 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 ok…

When they switched to "ML" (this was way before ChatGPT ate the world) Siri's speech to text went to absolute shit.

I suspect they had a very carefully hand-crafted model before, and replaced it with an ML model "that will fix itself over time" - and it never did.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#274

Post by esafak »

dboreham wrote: post #145
scoot wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth would you want to accelerate, brake, and steer by voice?

Step on it Jeeves, and go through the park.

You'd better hope Jeeves doesn't use MapQuest or you might have to drive through a river before you get to the park!

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#275

Post by bombcar »

npunt wrote: post #204
shagie wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was driven by privacy and on device compute. Anything you ask an Android device to do, or an Alexa device goes to their clouds to be 100% processed there. Apple tried to make a small and focused interface that could do a limited set of things on device without going to the cloud to do it. This was built around the idea of "Intents" and it only did the standard intents... and app developers were supposed to registe…

I think all of these are true: 1. Apple is big enough that it needs to take care of edge cases like offline & limited cell reception, which affect millions in any given moment. 2. Launching a major UI feature (Siri) that people will come to rely on requires offline operation for common operations like basic device operations and dictation. Major UI features shouldn't cease to function when they enter bad reception zo…

Dragon Naturally Speaking was way more accurate than Siri is now, and it was on-device on ancient computers.

I don't care if I have to carefully say "bibbidy bobbity boo, set an alarm for two" - I just need it to be reliable.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#276

Post by AlexandrB »

epistasis wrote: post #250
highwaylights wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating. I’m looking at you, Photos sync. EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right ( h…

I don't even use Photos, except in extreme situation. It was such a major UX downgrade from iPhoto that I could never get it to work without lots of mystery meat guessing, and every interaction with it was so unpleasant because of that. Knowing that a company had competent product designers that made a good product, but then shitcanned the working product for a bunch of amateur output from people that don't understan…

My biggest pet peeve with macOS Music is that you can't go back a track in the "infinite play" mode. Not only can you not go back to the previous track, but you can't even go back to the beginning of the song - the button is just greyed out. It's a purely arbitrary limitation because the same functionality works fine in iOS.

I don't know why it bugs me so much, but I'm at the point of moving my library into a self-hosted Navidrome instance so I can stop using Music.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#277

Post by bombcar »

torlok wrote: post #35
LZ_Khan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet

Exactly. Looks like everybody's complaining that Siri isn't a better Ask Jeeves, when that's not the design goal. What people expect is an LLM that has full access to the phone. Nobody's even remotely close to shipping that.

I just want "set timer for 5 minutes" and "what time is it" to work reliably, 100% of the time.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#278

Post by bombcar »

murermader wrote: post #85
DrewADesign wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods…

> Siri does what I need it to do Not true for me at all, it fails at the most basic tasks, sometimes even at tasks it has done before. Three examples: - "Timer 5 minutes" -> Loading spinner is shown. Siri disappears after a few seconds. No error, no confirmation. I then have to manually check if the timer was set or not (it was not). - "Turn on the lights in the living room" to which it responds "Sorry, I cannot do t…

The lights thing is insane and annoying.

"Turn on living room lights" - "There are no lights in the living room"

"Turn on living room lights" - lights turn on.

Naming some of my lights Greg has helped a bit.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#279

Post by VogonPoetry »

VogonPoetry wrote: post #268
ianferrel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have experienced some similar issues. I think some of it related to the "locked" state of the device. Siri needs context data to answer, particularly the mom or some destination questions. Specifically for contacts or recent places data. This context isn't remotely stored, but provided by the device to Siri each time. I think when the phone is locked it doesn't have access to the data (reading or writing). When I m…

After writing this I decided to look at my shortcut. The action seems to have been a simple "get directions to " and sent verbatim to Siri.

I was not able to edit / update it! However, there was now a new "maps" option for `Open directions from to `

Where type can now be {driving,walking,biking,transit} and is Current Location by default.

After updating, this now seems to correctly set actual driving directions, even if I'd previously set up a walking route!

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#280

Post by bombcar »

fragmede wrote: post #89
ASalazarMX wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Siri, play The Dragonborn comes at 25% volume" "Here is what I found about "The Dragonborn comes at 25" on the Internet" opens Safari

"First you have to unlock your iphone" (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I swear I've gotten that response, from a nearby HomePod, while holding my unlocked iPhone in my hands.

I don't know what it is doing sometimes.

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