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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

#401

Post by ceejayoz »

BlandDuck wrote: post #365
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…

It's unbelievable that Apple hasn't been able to do better. My 'favorite' Siri 'feature' is when I ask for directions to 'home' it gives me directions to the local Home Depot.... really??? EDIT: After thinking about this for a while, the reason this irks me is that 'directions to home' is one of the most basic asks. I am not asking Siri to play some obscure unreleased track from an underground British punk band. I am…

Every few months, Siri decides I live at 123 East Foo street. Just adds the E when I say “directions to home” and tries to go miles off course. Lasts a week or two, then back to normal.

If I spell or type out the address, it still adds the E, with no apparent way to get to my actual home address.

As a bonus, last night I said “cancel my 6am alarm” and it said “you have 29 alarms around that time”, and proceeded to read through each of them. My wife nearly died laughing as it started to rattle them off.

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

#402

Post by ant6n »

reddog wrote: post #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?

The worst are the telephone chatbots. My bank’s is so incredible obnoxious and stupid that by the time you get to a human, the blood is boiling and its hard to get back to a professional level. If they need to do automatic triage (probably they dont), why not just use a old school “press 3 for x” assistant.

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

#403

Post by brookst »

soup10 wrote: post #330
highwaylights wrote: post #323

What bugs me the most about this is how fixable it is. Apple is now at a point where even the oldest supported devices on their latest operating systems have either decent dedicated ML hardware or are Intel-based machines with enough compute power that they should really be able to do a much better job with inferencing locally (and the server component is irrelevant to local device capabilities anyway). It should’ve…

> That Apple is swimming in money just makes things like this more jarring. This is a common theme. Big Tech Company X is rich therefore they should be able to do Y. But corporations don't really work that way, they build a monopoly around a few domains and then their organization is structured to maintain that monopoly. It's the exception, not the norm, for established companies to gain competency in a new domain, a…

Mostly true, but Apple's whole thing is that their domain is user experience, not any particular technology. That's how you get from GUI to iPod to Apple Silicon. They should be able to do Siri right by focusing on experience.

I think the real problem is that they see Siri as a checkbox compete feature and not a core value prop that must be not just better but categorically different user experience. IMO it's a will problem, not an expertise one.

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

#404

Post by w0m »

reddog wrote: post #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?

Bing app on mobile is functionally that now (kind of). I need it to control my lights though.

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

#405

Post by sofixa »

wincy wrote: post #394
khazhoux wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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).

As a Sabaton fan, I laughed out loud. Technically they have classic music sounding (roughly) songs, e.g. Christmas Truce, but yeah, that's a massive fail.

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

#406

Post by mrbigbob »

xvector wrote: post #289
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.

It's honestly a complete travesty. Strongly considering ditching my iPhone for the upcoming Pixel Fold or whatever it'll be called.

Personally i would higher consider the galaxy fold over the pixel fold. i remember when samsung released their first foldable phone it was a very expensive trainwreck and they are now at a point where i here they are decent

i would not for the life of me trust google with a 1st attempt at any hardware implementation. especially with one that will be pretty expensive

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

#407

Post by BillinghamJ »

m_st wrote: post #300
zer0zzz wrote: post #288

Former Apple Employee here: I still remember for one WWDC my colleague’s talk had to be altered to change all mentions of “A-Series” socs to “A7 and later” to avoid triggering “Hey Siri” on every single person’s phone in the audience.

That made my day! Just a few weeks ago I was watching a 'Shrinking' episode on Apple TV where they said "Hey Siri play " and then my HomePod saying "OK I'll play for you" and me yelling back "Hey Siri stop! I'm watching TV". Modern live...

Surprised for that to happen from an Apple TV+ series. I was under the impression all voice assistants had a standard way to play inaudible sound to briefly disable their activation for this exact situation

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

#408

Post by Izkata »

wincy wrote: post #385
hashtag-til wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when it unexpectedly decides to "call" someone when I asked it to play some song while I'm driving. I'm mindful my English pronunciation is not 100% accurate, but Alexa gives me no problem at all.

I speak midwestern American English and it’s been constantly trying to text the wrong person, which is weird because a year ago ON THE SAME PHONE this never ever happened. If it’s not working for me it’s definitely a degradation. Siri had worked reliably for me for literally a decade! I’ve also noticed my autocorrect has gone bonkers. It’s constantly trying to change the case of the word “guess” into “Guess”, the bra…

SwiftKey on Android does the same thing to me to random words, I think it's learning some words should always be capitalized because I once used them at the beginning of a sentence.

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

#409

Post by ductionist »

nicky0 wrote: post #264
scottyah wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have the same problem with my “blinds” - I started calling them “shades” instead (not the usual term, in my vernacular at least) and have had much better luck. YMMV!

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

#410

Post by KyeRussell »

mitemte wrote: post #317
zer0zzz wrote: post #288

Former Apple Employee here: I still remember for one WWDC my colleague’s talk had to be altered to change all mentions of “A-Series” socs to “A7 and later” to avoid triggering “Hey Siri” on every single person’s phone in the audience.

A scene in the second most recent episode of Ted Lasso, when a character uses Siri on their iPhone triggered Siri on my HomePod Mini in the same room. Siri attempted to follow the instructions spoken by the character but failed miserably. If Apple is going to plug their half baked assistant in their shows, the least they could do is prevent it from being invoked. It may vary by language – I’m in Australia and the cha…

The increasing blatant Apple product placement in Ted Lasso is really really getting to me. It’s utterly tasteless.
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