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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

#351

Post by dividedbyzero »

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.

Lots of Americans seem to try to pronounce Bach the composer "correctly", which leads to batch, bash, buck, ... which is fine, the German hard "ch" is very hard to form for English throats, and it's always better and more polite to at least try than to simply pretend foreign words and names are just weirdly spelled English ones, but it's not as straightforward as with a John Bach from Ohio.

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

#352

Post by [deleted] »

c0m wrote: post #309
el_benhameen wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their swype-style keyboard is an absolute joke—perhaps the most infuriating part of my iphone. I know that it’s easier to criticize than it is to implement, but my god, just a basic markov chain would yield more intelligible results than the shit it comes up with.

Totally agree so I installed SwiftKey. It worked great for years and I’ve been super happy! Then in the last year, SwiftKey has been randomly crashing so while I type I swap between the SwiftKey and normal keyboard unwillingly several times per message. The built-in keyboard seems absolutely determined to believe that the word 'fuck' does not exist.

[deleted]

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

#353

Post by qwertox »

As an Android user, I'm even struggling to get my phone to set a timer, which is the only thing I use Google Assistant for.

I can't wait for them to start including LLM-AI voice chatting where one can properly tell the phone what I want it to do.

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

#354

Post by knolan »

I’ve noticed that the whole the voice to text recognition it pretty good, what’s awful is how that text is interpreted. You see the same problems with search in other Apple services.

For example you might search for a street in maps and search will just give up and just give you a half arsed result. Searching for HN Boulevard might instead HN Avenue even though you can see the correct result right there on the map.

You see similar behaviour in Music, App Store etc.

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

#355

Post by qwertox »

epaga wrote: post #245

Siri is without a doubt in my mind the most embarrassing thing Apple has had on the market in the past 20 years. With ChatGPT it is now feeling like Siri the broken tricycle is being compared to a Lamborghini. Honestly I would have been concerned if Apple employees weren’t frustrated with Siri. Pretty sure they need to take Siri out to pasture and start some LLM-based project from scratch.

It's odd to hear this. As an Android user I've always felt I'm missing out something really great, judging from the keynotes.

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

#356

Post by qwertox »

trinix912 wrote: post #301
epaga wrote: post #245

Siri is without a doubt in my mind the most embarrassing thing Apple has had on the market in the past 20 years. With ChatGPT it is now feeling like Siri the broken tricycle is being compared to a Lamborghini. Honestly I would have been concerned if Apple employees weren’t frustrated with Siri. Pretty sure they need to take Siri out to pasture and start some LLM-based project from scratch.

> With ChatGPT it is now feeling like Siri the broken tricycle is being compared to a Lamborghini. Just wait a bit. “Hey Siri call X” -“As an AI language learning model, I cannot know X from your contacts”

I know you say it as a joke, but the contact list could be a part of the hidden prompt, at least the names, so that it could then trigger an action with the proper name, which iOS would then understand.

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

#357

Post by prmoustache »

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 error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years.

Has it really or have your expectation increased instead? Or is it because they initially only worked well with business us english and have been trained over the years to support many more languages, dialects and even variations of said dialets/language + slang and profanity?

Also at the beginning people where talking to these slowly, articulating every word. Now everybody take it for granted they should be understood and talk in their lazier and more natural way.

I've never activated speech recognition on any device I own. But last week I was in a videocall with my partner's mexican family and early in the call they were trying to make my mother in law's Amazon Echo to stop the music and it only really stopped when my sister in law started using profanity words, something like "no mames! chinga to pinche madre Alexa cayate!"

Apparently this stuff became so used/trained by people not using them in a polite way that they eventually only react when you talk badly to them using slang and profanity.

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

#358

Post by mike_hearn »

jiggawatts wrote: post #230
circuit10 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another point is that many people don't realise that LLMs re-read their entire input for every word they generate! Not every word, for every generation (which on something like ChatGPT is a message) > they can read really fast even when running on mobile device hardware. Think 10K to 100K words per second That’s definitely not right, I’ll try to find some numbers

Please do, I was about to include that statement in a presentation, so if I’m wrong I’d love to be corrected!

I don't think that's quite correct. The underlying algorithms start by processing the prompt tokens in parallel, and once that's processed, the intermediate KV vectors are re-used for each new token prediction by the feed-forward.

What you may be thinking of is that once the model stops predicting at the end of an API call the state is dropped from RAM, and if you go back with another message in a chat, then the LLM will re-read the chat log up to that point as part of the prompt. So this is true on a per-message basis, but not on a per-word or per-token basis.

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

#359

Post by knolan »

yellowait44 wrote: post #62
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.

Siri is also quite terrible at setting Homekit Scene. I totally gave up on it. For example I have a scene named "Play Music Everywhere" and even if I tell it explicitely with "Hey Siri set scene Play Music Everywhere" it fails miserably. Also simple task like: "Hey Siri play music on all HomePods" ends up with "Ok playing music Everywhere". When did I say everywhere??? I only want you to play on Homepods!

I’ve a problem with setting scenes with a timer that it often asks who I am. Which is odd because it will identify me just fine normally.

It usually goes like this:

Me: Hey Siri, “bedroom on” in 15 minutes.

Siri: who is speaking?

Me: $Name

Siri: I don’t recognise your voice… setup personal requests bla bla.

Me: Hey Siri, who am I?

Siri: You’re $Name!

Me: Hey Siri “Bedroom on” in 15 minutes.

Siri: Who’s Speaking?

Me: @%#+#!!!

Siri then goes into a loop asking who I am and then ends with “Hi!”

Five minutes later,

Me: Hey Siri, “Bedroom on” in 10 minutes.

Siri: okay $Name I’ve set bedroom on for 12:08.

So it’s not the voice recognition, it’s whatever’s going on after that step.

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

#360

Post by Polyphonie »

c0m wrote: post #309
el_benhameen wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their swype-style keyboard is an absolute joke—perhaps the most infuriating part of my iphone. I know that it’s easier to criticize than it is to implement, but my god, just a basic markov chain would yield more intelligible results than the shit it comes up with.

Totally agree so I installed SwiftKey. It worked great for years and I’ve been super happy! Then in the last year, SwiftKey has been randomly crashing so while I type I swap between the SwiftKey and normal keyboard unwillingly several times per message. The built-in keyboard seems absolutely determined to believe that the word 'fuck' does not exist.

You can easily add fuck into your dictionary: Settings>General>Keyboard >Text Replacement.
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