Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

9to5mac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 533 posts

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

#451

Post by sethaurus »

dpkirchner wrote: post #424
nanidin wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon mitigated bad speech transcription by providing a link to listen to the underlying audio. Apple has never offered this and it has led to lots of head scratching at the grocery store as I work through my shopping list. It still beats trying to use the Alexa app while shopping, though.

Amazon is hilariously bad at understanding voices. The number of times it has played "Pure" instead of "NPR" is astounding, despite me going in to the Alexa app to report the error every time. I'm convinced those error reports are round-filed.

What does "round-filed" mean?

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

#452

Post by awill88 »

Don’t really rely on Siri that much. I absolutely hated Apple as a kid, but I dunno. Apple can take their time rummaging through my data in my humble opinion. Like, do they need to be the leader of ML when we all know what it takes to improve the models.. all of our data.. so, yeah.. I’m good with this.

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

#453

Post by anonzzzies »

Siri and the Apple mobile keyboard are both jokes. It often seems like a joke what they produce. Even before LLMs predicting the next word was not that hard in 2-3 word phrases. But now that we have LLMs that are pretty good, Siri seems like a real joke. Is the manager of this product permanently drunk or something?

Oh yeah, the keyboard replacing fuck with duck even though I never wrote duck until now is enough reason to pop over to Android.

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

#454

Post by lostlogin »

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…

> autocorrect has gone bonkers.

It’s gone feral with punctuation, and things like “they’re” get changed to “there” or “their”. Common misspellings seem to appear when they weren’t typed.

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

#455

Post by lostlogin »

khazhoux wrote: post #198
cubefox wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Names are a hard problem though. How would it know how "Bach" is pronounced? It seems you would need pretty advanced multimodal AI, some sort of GPT which is trained both on text and audio.

“Bach” is a word like any other, and unambiguous in English pronunciation.

> Bach” is a word like any other, and unambiguous in English pronunciation.

There is another pronunciation if you want a holiday in New Zealand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_(New_Zealand)

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

#456

Post by lostlogin »

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"

I wish you could selectively edit it. I use “The” (obviously), Te (Māori) and “TE” (echo time, I use MR scanners a lot).

Everything is a mess when I type.

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

#458

Post by adamkochanowicz »

sethaurus wrote: post #451
dpkirchner wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is hilariously bad at understanding voices. The number of times it has played "Pure" instead of "NPR" is astounding, despite me going in to the Alexa app to report the error every time. I'm convinced those error reports are round-filed.

What does "round-filed" mean?

I've also never heard this term before.

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

#459

Post by adamkochanowicz »

huehehue wrote: post #187

Maybe it's the emerging neo-Luddite in me, but I'm alarmed at how many people begrudgingly continue to use these tools (accessibility reasons notwithstanding, which is an admittedly major caveat). I have a very low tolerance for error in things like setting timers, playing music, getting weather, calling someone. This is because I can complete these tasks simply, quickly, and with 100% reliability by hand. The margin…

Number of seconds is not a relevant metric for some people.

More relevant for me is how much and often I need to switch my physical and cognitive task at hand to briefly use my device. If I'm in a focused mode going back and forth in my house getting things done, it's a huge benefit to just verbalize my thinking in the moment rather than come to an abrupt stop and switch to visuospatial navigation to drill down to the timer app, and fine tune the amount before I can switch back to what I was doing before.

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

#460

Post by adamkochanowicz »

beerpls wrote: post #221
mmmmmbop wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, I'll have to disagree with you there. I don't know about Siri, but I am one of those people using the Google Assistant to set timers and reminders, and for me at least, this is reliable (enough), and definitely faster than by hand. The obvious use case is setting a timer while cooking, when the phone is at the other end of the room and your hands may be dirty, but I'm using it even in non-cooking settings. In fa…

So Apple pumps more than a billion dollars into developing and marketing a virtual assistant which fails the vast majority of the time and you’re proud of it because it can set a timer by voice? I’m just going to say - i’m underwhelmed

I just read it again and I never read them express pride in the tool or say they were using Siri. The comment is about the impact for them on using a voice-based interface to set a timer. Bad faith argumentation.
Post reply on HN