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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#81

Post by npunt »

epistasis wrote: post #49
elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going…

Yeah, it's a classic CLI v GUI blunder. If you don't know exactly what the commands are, the interface is not going to be particularly usable.

I've found I appreciate having Siri for a few things, but it's not good enough to make it something I reach for frequently. Once burned, twice shy.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#82

Post by zolland »

DrewADesign wrote: post #21
sfblah wrote: post #11

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods…

The only time I find Siri useful, or I should say ~potentially~ useful, is while driving text, call and to ask basic facts. The amount of times I've heard "I can't show you that right now" after basic questions is insane. I just stopped asking it questions. Recently I asked "what engine is in a 2022 f150". Trying it without Carplay now, it literally just displays text. It should be able to TTS those results. What on earth have they been working on if not things like that?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#83

Post by xvector »

consumer451 wrote: post #54
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…

> From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. Are you referring to https://security.apple.com/com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ ? The only way that AI will ever be able to replace each of us, is if it gathers our entire audio, text, etc history. PCC seemed like the only viable option for a pro-AI, yet pro-privacy p…

They are solving for privacy before solving for the UX.

They should actually make something useful first, and then work backwards to making it private before releasing it.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#84

Post by DrewADesign »

addaon wrote: post #42
DrewADesign wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods…

The very first thing I tried when Siri was released -- "set an alarm for ten minutes before sunset" -- still doesn't work. "What time is sunset?" and "Set an alarm for 5:03 PM" both worked on day one, and still work. Zero progress.

Interesting. I think I probably mentally separate the information retrieval realm and the command execution realm more than makes sense for the interface. There’s no apparent reason that shouldn’t work based on what the user is given.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#85

Post by murermader »

DrewADesign wrote: post #21
sfblah wrote: post #11

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods…

> Siri does what I need it to do

Not true for me at all, it fails at the most basic tasks, sometimes even at tasks it has done before. Three examples:

- "Timer 5 minutes" -> Loading spinner is shown. Siri disappears after a few seconds. No error, no confirmation. I then have to manually check if the timer was set or not (it was not).

- "Turn on the lights in the living room" to which it responds "Sorry, I cannot do that". I have Phillips Hue lights that are connected to Apple Home, of course Siri can do that. It did that before.

- "Add tooth paste to my shopping list". The shopping list is a list I have in reminders. It then tries to search for the query on Google. I then tried "Add tooth paste to the list shopping list in reminders" which worked, but if I have to be this wordy, it is no longer any convenient.

There are many more simple cases in which Siri always / sometimes fails. I also have the feeling that it performs far worse if asked in my native language (German) than in English.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#86

Post by singularity2001 »

scrollaway wrote: post #66
ecshafer wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst drivi…

Asking “what’s the weather” in the morning gets Siri to yell at you about the phone being locked, or even “I don’t know where you are”. It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage. Timers and alarm clocks it is.

"What's the weather in Berlin." "you need to unlock your phone to activate location service services"

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#87

Post by DrewADesign »

drob518 wrote: post #79
DrewADesign wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting— I use that functionality constantly and listen to a wide variety of artists, some of them pretty obscure. Do you use Apple Music or another service? I can think of one time recently where no matter how I prompted it to play an album for (decades old but probably triple platinum,) it kept playing some cardi b song with the band’s name in the title instead… but that’s probably like a 1 in 2000 request prob…

It’s extremely hit or miss for me. Sometimes it works and I’m amazed. Other times it fails to play my main playlist that I’ve played 1000 times before.

Huh. I’d love to see what their UX testing looked like. It clearly missed someone doing what you’re doing with it, sadly.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#89

Post by fragmede »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #59
DrewADesign wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods…

"Siri, play The Dragonborn comes at 25% volume" "Here is what I found about "The Dragonborn comes at 25" on the Internet" opens Safari

"First you have to unlock your iphone"

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#90

Post by npunt »

smelendez wrote: post #55
npunt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed 'set a reminder for x when I leave this location' still doesn't get the 'when I leave this location'. It's clear user expectation created internally (by siri marketing) and externally (by ai tools) has far outpaced capability.

Apple seems weird about that and I'm not sure why, maybe accuracy or creepiness factor? A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.

Apple Reminders has a feature to remind you when you are leaving or arriving at a location. It's super useful! But it's not super low friction to add to a Reminder via UI (it's buried at the bottom of the edit screen), so it's a feature ideally suited for a voice-based reminder. Nevertheless, nobody implemented it.
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