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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

#441

Post by m_st »

KyeRussell wrote: post #411
m_st wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ah, well, if Shrinking has Ted Lasso-tier product placement, I’ll probably move it further down my list.

Yes well too bad, there‘s plenty of Apple product placement. And I still find it strange to have a TV show starting with an Apple logo.

But Shrinking is really worth watching.

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

#442

Post by tarboreus »

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…

I'm also blind. I use airpods, and sometimes I'd like to know where the phone is. I ask Siri, where is the phone? Or "make a sound." Siri just says some stupid joke, or "I'm right here." So not useful, just make a chime or something.

Even basic stuff like changing the lock rotation can't be done with Siri. I just don't understand how it could be that bad. I feel like I could sit and code a better parser that would be more useful. And Siri was the first really big voice assistant, they've had 13 years to get it working.

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

#443

Post by tarboreus »

prmoustache wrote: post #357
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, artic…

Yeah, it's worse.

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

#444

Post by leokennis »

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…

Oof that sucks for you. Siri is an absolute joke. My two major gripes:

- After four years it still doesn’t understand my youngest son’s name. I added a phonetic spelling to his Contacts card. I told Siri 200 times: “my son’s name is pronounced XYZ”’ I religiously corrected his name a 1000 times when text to speech misunderstood it. Nothing. Joke.

- Siri is triggered by anything that even vaguely resembles “hey Siri”: “…they seriously…”, “…ok see here…”, “easier”. And once that dumb piece of %$£~ is triggered she HAS to finish her cutesy “listen to me being a helpful and funny assistant” sentence. Again: sad joke.

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

#445

Post by heleninboodler »

m463 wrote: post #303
hombre_fatal wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There needs to be a way to reset this kind of learned behavior. I must have accidentally corrected "and" into "abs" once because now my iPhone always corrects "and" into "abs" when I use swipe gestures. "Bob abs Katie are here". Since I never notice it until I send the message, it's becoming so cocksure about the correction that there's no going back.

There is someone else I know that always texts me with "abs" instead of "and" I think there was a dictionary you can reset. EDIT: "Settings > General > Reset; Tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary"

Minor correction: Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Reset, then tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary

on mine, at least. Apple does enjoy moving these things around from time to time.

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

#446

Post by thaumasiotes »

Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #379
cubefox wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just because the "th" sound doesn't exist in many languages, like German, they should pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Anthony Hopkins" or "The Beatles" incorrectly? That seems to me a way more "insane" standard. By the way, the Scottish are perfectly able to pronounce "Loch Ness", which has the same sound for "ch" as "Bach".

I lived in Japan for a while. My name contains sounds that just didn't work for them. No one pronounced it correctly. I was not upset, annoyed, or confused. It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life. Be strict in what you send, forgiving in what you receive.

> It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life.

As a point of interest, this is actually backwards. You're born recognizing all the sounds; what you learn is to ignore the difference between sounds that aren't distinct in your language.

You do keep that ability for the rest of your life, but it isn't helpful when you try to learn to recognize foreign sounds.

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

#447

Post by cubefox »

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #419
Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in Japan for a while. My name contains sounds that just didn't work for them. No one pronounced it correctly. I was not upset, annoyed, or confused. It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life. Be strict in what you send, forgiving in what you receive.

Also you want your voice assistant to play you music not hassle you about correct pronunciations.

But that's exactly the issue here when people use the correct pronunciation, which happens to be different than how normal words in their language are pronounced, but the voice assistant assuming normal language, which leads to absurd misfirings. The issue is not people not knowing how to pronounce something, the problem is that it's a hard problem for "dumb" AIs to know how a certain name is pronounced, as long as they are not multimodal LLMs.

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

#449

Post by xp84 »

el_benhameen wrote: post #285
voytec wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Input recognition quality falling all over the place - it's very much noticeable with their onscreen keyboards as well. Some "intelligent" mechanisms know better which button I tried to tap and I'm getting gibberish even with auto-correct off. It's the same on iPhone and Watch. Apple has already forced me to re-learn keyboards once - with th…

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.

What are your talking about? You done like it converting “your” to “your” on every damn time you type the word?

Note: the above paragraph was typed with swipe typing. I actually typed “Y O U” for both of the above instances of “your.”

Apple swipe typing is the opposite of AI: it’s like an idiot is going behind you taking even correct words you swipe and turning them into gibberish. Don’t even get me started about its obsession with “it’s” and “we’re” to the exclusion of the words without apostrophes. Ughhhhhh

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