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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

#391
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…

It's infuriating when I ask Siri to play a song and it decides to pick an obscure remix of the song one day, the actual song another day, then another remix another day. Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a more complex/verbose option from the results list?

I understand this isn’t necessarily Apple’s fault, but I bought a HomePod (which are very expensive smart speakers!) because I assumed it’d be the most convenient “smart” speaker with good audio quality. It does deliver on audio quality, but despite supporting literally every other smart speaker under the sun Spotify has no support for HomePod and instead you have to AirPlay from your phone. So my kid can’t listen to Spotify, and the HomePod is useless to anyone but me or my wife.

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

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's infuriating when I ask Siri to play a song and it decides to pick an obscure remix of the song one day, the actual song another day, then another remix another day. Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a more complex/verbose option from the results list?

One of the most infuriating things about any voice assistant, IMO, is the absolute clunkiness with which you have to try and control music. I use Android Auto in my car for safety. God forbid I'm listening to a song and want to queue up another one right after. I don't think I've ever gotten that behavior to work without either skipping the current song or adding the second song to the end of the queue. And even that…

I switched from Apple Music to Spotify and have yet to figure out how to get it to play a playlist. So it’s either “tap on the screen while hurtling down the highway” or “awkwardly tell it to play each individual song after each one completes”.

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

#393

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.

For some very odd reason, swipe keyboard technology seems to have peaked around 2014, never to reach those heights again. I remember being amazed by how great swiping was, and after using it recently (it's not really great on gboard or samsung keyboard either, not bad but just meh) I was wondering if it was just rose tinted glass. But nope, I booted up my old nexus 5 with a normal gboard (not even swiftkey!) and it w…

I read somewhere that that’s about when they switched from hand coded lists to machine learning for autocorrect.

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's infuriating when I ask Siri to play a song and it decides to pick an obscure remix of the song one day, the actual song another day, then another remix another day. Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a more complex/verbose option from the results list?

I wound up in a screaming match with my Homepod recently. “Siri, play Beethoven” !!!

Hahah yeah I said “Siri play classical music on Spotify” and siri said “I’m afraid I can’t do that” and then starting playing Sabaton (which is Power metal and the exact opposite of classical music).

Then Siri had the gall to claim NO MUSIC WAS PLAYING as this super loud music was assaulting our eardrums. My wife thought my exasperated struggles were the funniest thing, it felt like HAL-9000 with the “I’m sorry I can’t do that Dave” moment.

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

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's infuriating when I ask Siri to play a song and it decides to pick an obscure remix of the song one day, the actual song another day, then another remix another day. Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a more complex/verbose option from the results list?

Ok Google doesn't work well either. 20% of the time it can't play songs on Spotify, and I have no idea why.

I think part of this might be Spotify’s fault. I moved from Apple Music to Spotify Premium and my biggest complaint (aside from literally one SPECIFIC song I really love not being on Spotify at all) is that there is no HomePod support (you have to airplay the music to the HomePod) and Siri support is shoddy.

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

#397
post #395

The skepticism is strange to me because Siri is extremely well positioned. All Apple has to do is add a GPT-like backend, put Siri in everyone's iMessage, and boom ChatGPT is dead in the water.

I’m not sure everyone will get your sarcasm. Just “adding some GPT” is a good meme though.

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

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh dear $deity. Why does it insist on capitalizing "and" in the middle of a sentence?

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

I have a similar problem, but it is literally every English word that is also a common name. I send texts like "I Will run by the store and May grab dinner for tomorrow, Hope to be home by 7". It's infuriating.

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

#399
Siri rarely disappointed me because my expectations were always low and I trained myself on how to talk to it.

But now after some remarkable experiences using GPT-4 I find I’ve lost a lot of patience with all the different voice assistants. They are just so stupid in comparison. How much longer before LLMs and projects like Whisper run the backend?

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

#400
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.

I use both regularly. Google assistant is far superior, coming in at annoyingly bad compared to Sirius infuriatingly bad.
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