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 or not to be) which indicates Siri is trying to be smart and fails totally. I am blind and use this feature when I have a feeling I might have been lost. Very funny if you ask a simply question like "Where am I" and your voice-assistant is fucking with you about pseudophilosophically. "Was läuft gerade" did also just fail a few hours ago. Siri just started to play something from my library, which is not what I wanted. All in all, its a embarrasing failure all around. Oh, and before I forget, when Siri fails to understand the name of the person I want to call, it says "OK, I am calling <your name>" and actually tries to dial my own number. This is so dumb, it feels like a joke put in there by an intern.
I use Siri to turn on/off voice control which lets me control my iPhone without touching it (it's a disability feature).<p>When I no longer need voice control I use Siri to turn it off (I have my voice control set to label all actionable buttons on the screen so I like to turn it off when using my phone via touch.)<p>I'm not visually impaired however I find voice control super useful when I want control of my phone and rather not use touch or in a situation where touch is impractical.<p>Whilst Siri is good for certain tasks it lacks the ability to control every aspect of the phone whereas voice control is literally a replacement for touch control.<p>By combining Siri and voice control I get fine grained complete control of every app when I need it, all enabled/disabled via my voice. Such a brilliant combination.<p>Apple's attention to this disability feature is incredible. I only learnt about it after a visually impaired friend showed me how it works.<p>I learnt that voice control/voice over is the reason most visually impaired people use iPhone due to Apple's dedication to building world leading accessibility features.
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.
I use Siri fairly frequently for setting timers, controlling my smart home and the like, but for me where it falls down is really understanding natural language. Personally I found that google assistant was way way ahead of siri in this regard. I could ask it to do something and it would just <i>understand</i> what I want.<p>One issue I frequently have with siri is that commands that work one day suddenly don't the next. If I ask siri to "lock screen" it tries to find smart home door locks (which i dont have) instead of locking the device screen, eventually I figure out some combination of lock device/screen/phone screen/off etc that works, so siri does know how to do this but isn't smart enough to figure out my intent.<p>The other issue is that siri unlike google assistant can't maintain a train of thought, You can't say "hey siri dim the bedroom lights" and follow that up with "hey siri..a bit more" unlike with google where it seems to be aware of the context of what it did prior.
I’m frankly surprised that Siri hasn’t moved to on-device voice recognition. It’s by far my biggest complaint with Siri: random, unpredictable delays or outright failures to recognize simple messages because the network is unstable or unavailable.<p>There’s other trash too: the other day I tried asking Siri to play a song from my library, but it misinterpreted the song title and proceeded to <i>activate a seven day trial of Apple Music Voice</i> to play some random track on Apple Music. I didn’t ask for that subscription!<p>To be fair, for the tiny subset of functionality I do use - navigate by voice, set timers, get terrible jokes to amuse passengers - it works fine.
Siri is without a doubt in my mind the most embarrassing thing Apple has had on the market in the past 20 years.<p>With ChatGPT it is now feeling like Siri the broken tricycle is being compared to a Lamborghini.<p>Honestly I would have been concerned if Apple employees <i>weren’t</i> frustrated with Siri.<p>Pretty sure they need to take Siri out to pasture and start some LLM-based project from scratch.
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).<p>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 marginal improvements allowed by tools like Siri aren't worth it to me if there is <i>any</i> decrease in reliability.<p>I'm sure there are use cases I'm not considering, but I've also seen perfectly able-bodied folks shout "call Steve" into their phone for 40 seconds longer than it would have taken to navigate manually. Conceptually, the idea of stacking <i>even more</i> engineering onto these tools to get these tasks working reliably is funny.
What bugs me the most about this is how fixable it is.<p>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).<p>It should’ve been possible to bin Siri’s backend and rebuild something better from scratch by now. That Apple is swimming in money just makes things like this more jarring.<p>It’s honestly my greatest gripe with Apple as a software company. They put a lot of effort into polishing what they release but seemingly very little into maintaining it afterwards. macOS is the worst offender, where basic and fundamental things stay broken for years on end (settings not being applied after selection in the UI, permissions being set in the UI but not actually taking effect despite being set, continuity stopping working silently in FaceTime and iMessage. It’s gotten so bad I just accept that some former tentpole features no longer exist because they’ve become so broken and no-one cares to fix them).<p>Back to Siri though, it’s gotten substantially worse than when I used to use it on an iPhone 4S. That’s a decade plus of consistent regression while Google Assistant continues to progress. It’s so bad, and can’t be replaced, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a leading cause of people exiting the eco-system altogether.
At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know.<p>But, yeah, all the voice assistants are pretty bad or at least bad enough that I mostly give up trying to use them for anything other than certain rote tasks. Siri may or may not be marginally worse but none of them are good enough to, say, really use hands-off in a car unless I've carefully pre-defined tasks to perform. (e.g. pick from a handful of memorized playlist names).
I’d love to see a survey of people’s hit/miss rate with Siri, but with the extra dimension of what accent they have and how thick it is. IME, Siri’s speech recognition is actually quite fantastic (I almost <i>never</i> have an issue with a dictated text message saying the wrong thing), but:<p>- I have a very standard midwest american accent<p>- I talk to siri like I’m a pilot talking to ATC: As clearly and succinctly as possible, never saying “umm”, “uh”, or having to correct myself, etc (this is actually an acquired skill that takes time)<p>- I generally know what things Siri can do well and what it can’t (I try to phrase things in ways I know is less likely for Siri to misinterpret)<p>My theory is that most people who have a bad experience either have a thick accent (and importantly don’t set the Siri language to something that matches their accent! there are multiple “English” settings in the Siri language, pick one that matches your accent!), don’t speak clearly/mumble, have a lot of noise in the environment, or some combination of the above.
Two pretty consistent frustrating issues I have are:<p>Me: "Hey Siri, tell my Mike I'll send that document over in ten mins. How about pizza for lunch. I also spoke to Jenny and she would come for lunch too."<p>Siri: "Calling mike."<p>So cannot tell the difference between 'tell' and 'call', however Siri could use context and assume if I'm talking for quite a while after saying maybe tell or maybe call then it's most likely 'tell' because of the sentences afterwards. This is by far the most frustrating.<p>Second issue is:<p>Me: "Hey Siri - what's in my calendar today."<p>Siri: "Playing alternative radio station."<p>Such a tremendous amount of times music has started playing, I think the top thing on their "can't understand" code is to try and play music. About once a week Siri will take something I say about anything and start playing music instead. It's infuriating. I've deleting music from my phone but I can't delete it from TV / Homepod Mini / Mac.<p>Edit: I've thought of a third which isn't so bad.<p>Me: "Ask Hassan has the mortgage has gone out yet?"<p>Siri: "Here's your message. `has the Moorgate has gone out yet.`"<p>It will replace random words in sentences with locations, and locations, in the UK, any word it cannot get, it will first assume I'm talking about any town in the UK and use one of those. It is ludicrous the amount of priority it gives to names of towns, I've even had tiny villages inserted into sentences before.
I wish we didn't have blogspam on HN but theinformation.com, which used to unlock certain articles for HN readers, doesn't answer my emails anymore. Totally fair on their part but the story (and thread!) are interesting and only the blogspam is publicly readable...so here we are.
I get that they're wary of an LLM-based Siri making embarrassing mistakes. It would be a <i>bad look</i> if some kid's phone provided helpful instructions for killing themselves when asked. Mummy and Daddy would sue.<p>However, directly answering queries is not the only way LLMs can be used. In fact, when ChatGPT 4 came out, the first thing I thought of was: "Wow, this could make Siri so much better!"<p>For example, an LLM like GPT coupled with voice recognition was used to create Whisper, an AI that has nearly perfect text-from-audio recognition. One of my biggest gripes with Siri is that it is basically useless in a car because even slight background noise confuses its voice recognition. An LLM would fix this.<p>Another point is that many people don't realise that LLMs re-read their entire input for every word they generate! Their writing speed is so-so, but they can read <i>really fast</i> even when running on mobile device hardware. Think 10K to 100K words per second. An LLM could read through all of the text on your device when prompted for search queries in a fraction of a second. As long as this was carefully set up, it wouldn't be able to produce "bad output", because it would just be matching data to your prompt.<p>E.g.: Imagine GPT being prompted with: "Does this email match the query <q>? Say only YES if it does or NO if it does not. <email>"<p>It doesn't matter if it occasionality hallucinates and outputs gibberish, you just mark that as a "NO" and move on. This is also very easy to train out of a specialised version of the model using reinforcement learning.<p>PS: I just played around with GPT 4 to see how it behaves when asked to recognise requests for creating calendar entries, and it's <i>pretty good</i>. For example, it can correctly compute things like "next long weekend". Interestingly, ChatGPT 4 is <i>already</i> doing some similar prompt injection, and I can't override its sense of "current time".<p>Apple's Siri team has failed really badly. Everyone else is sprinting away while they're not even aware there's a race going on.
For me all of the current voice assistants have issues.
Playing music seems to be super hard to get right if you don’t follow mainstream. Either you get a playlist with always the same titles, or it starts playing some obscure remixes.<p>Home automation is in my opinion totally stupid to do by voice. The light should switch on when it is dark and I go into a room and should switch off when none is in the room. But using voice which 99% of the time works is “slower”, and in one percent of the time it is annoying if the light in my kids room switches in.<p>I see use in the Knowledge augmented ChatGPT like assistants, since then I could reliably ask a digital assistant for information. Right now I know the moment the assistant starts answering with “this is what I found on the web” that it’s going to be wrong. Similar annoying is that Alexa for example seems to rewrite some requests, where I ask about “what is X” and I get the answer on “what is Y”.<p>I’m pretty disillusioned and disappointed in all the different voice assistants out there, and I seriously think that voice on top of gpt will actually help me get more often what I want.
What would Siri’s market share be if you could easily install Google assistant on iPhone? How much more investment would Apple have put into Siri if they had to compete?<p>I haven’t noticed any improvement in Siri in close to a decade of being in the Apple ecosystem. The most frustrating thing is that every time I ask it to “turn the lights on”, it thinks I’m saying “off”. I grew up in the US and have no notable accent or mumble.<p>Note that there are hacky ways to add google assistant, but it doesn’t get integrated into the OS in the same way
I think I might be in the minority based on other comments here.<p>I hate things like Siri and whatever Android phones have.<p>It's incredibly rude every time I hear someone almost yelling into their phone in public. They get frustrated Siri doesn't work and loudly and slowly say whatever it is again like being mean to a dumb child.<p>People speak out entire text messages and the replies. I'm not pointing out folks with disabilities. I'm talking about perfectly healthy adults who seem to have no sense of awareness around them.<p>On my phone, I found it infuriating that Apple just inserted this Siri icon into the keyboard next to the spacebar. It took me a while to figure out how to disable it. I already have large hands, but my typing accuracy is pretty good and fast. When that icon was there, it reduced the width of the spacebar and return keys and made it impossible to type without Siri popping up every few lines.<p>I think more broadly I have a prejudice against devices listening to me. I've never liked Alexa, Siri, or any other voice based automation system like customer support phone trees. Very rarely I've encounter a phone system that works well, but mostly these devices and systems are just infuriating to work with.
The claim that somehow LLMs as they stand are somehow the answer is disturbing. ChatGPTs ability to be authoritatively wrong is a serious problem…<p>Just to see what it would do, I gave it a basic word problem the other day (two people drive towards each other) and it had the steps right, but buried in it was a simple logic error (it claimed that the two parties traveling at different speeds would travel the same distance in a unit of time).<p>That it was good enough to seem trustworthy, made it worse…
All voice assistants seem bad, but Siri seems particularly bad. God forbid I ask it to do something simple such as playing a specific artist or album on Apple Music or ask it to turn off lights I've configured in the Home app.<p>"Siri, please turn off all the lights in my apartment."<p>"Sure, which room?"<p>Sigh.
I live 20 miles away from work. 3 times a week, I have to go in. For a while, every morning, I ask Siri directions to [name of my company] to gauge how bad traffic is and how long it will take. Every time, she gives me directions to some pub in Saskatchewan, 18 hour drive away, that shares no part of their name with the name of my company.<p>I just gave up.<p>Alexa is not much better. I set up voice recognition to turn on my espresso machine (Rocket is the brand). Every morning I wake up, I tell her to turn on my Rocket. For about 3 months, things worked perfectly. All of a sudden, half the time, she instead starts playing "She's a Rocket" by Robert Ealey, a thirty year-old song.
Honestly, I find Siri the most powerful popular voice assistant out there. Once you starting using Shortcuts, you can use Siri for literally anything. With just holding the power button, and a couple words, I can start tracking a run, schedule message a friend, record my thoughts, close all my tabs that contain the word "youtube"... And so much more!<p>Shortcuts & Siri is honestly the main reason I switched from Android to iOS.
I love my iPhone, it's a great device.<p>However, quite literally the only two things I use Siri for are asking "what song is this?" and "set a timer for X minutes."<p>I'm sure there are ways I could be using it for any number of things that might improve some routine process in my life, but I never found them.
Siri is mostly useless. It works about half the time for me. When I ask it to do a task like create a timer, it works, but asking it questions is almost useless. One time I asked "What is a picometer?" and it gave an answer from Wikipedia, but then I immediately asked "What is a femtometer?" and it said it couldn't answer it on the iPhone. My wife gets amused whenever I use Siri because half the time I'll start swearing in frustration at how stupid it is, and yet like Charlie Brown and Lucy, I keep trying to kick that football.
I don't use Siri all day, every day. It's certainly not perfect. But did you know you can say things like...<p>"Turn off the Apple TV."<p>"Turn off low power mode."<p>"Stop navigating."<p>"Open [name of app I don't want to spend time finding in my iOS folders]"<p>"What song is this?" (Listens and usually is able to discover the name/artist of the song in the background.)<p>So when people say things like, "Siri is mostly useless," I think – wow, that is a very hyperbolic statement.
There is one killer application for voice assistants: answering phone calls. I wish Siri could respond to all unknown phone numbers, screen promotional and robocalls, take notes if necessary and report what's important to me (and I need to be able to tell her what's NOT important). This is what the assistants should do, not switching lights or trying to play a random song.<p>Neither Siri nor its competition can do this. Speech recognition accuracy is not really important, it can just take voice notes as a fallback, or ask to "press 1" to talk to me directly.
> <i>The report today explains that Google wanted these three engineers “badly enough that its CEO, Sundar Pichai, personally wooed the group.”</i><p>How do they conduct the interviews, in that situation?<p>Not the usual tech megacorp brogrammer "technical interview" hazing?
Every company has engineers who don't like some products or features. We aren't mindless corporates drones. I don't personally use any of my employer's applications.<p>Some article like this comes up every so often and it's so non-newsworthy. Anyone who's been at a project planning meeting knows there's a small contingent of engineers in the corner muttering that it's a terrible idea and it will never work.
Apple and other mega corps really need to spend some money investing in training/education for these highly specific fields. Advancement in Siri shouldn't be dependent on 3 people that were lost to Google.<p>I know a bunch of capable programmers that would love the chance to go into one of these specialties but don't have the resources nor opportunities (time/money/location) to go back to school.<p>Siri could be so much better.
I asked Siri to call the San Mateo County Public Works Department. It called the Sheriff instead. Normally it will ask to confirm before calling a number/person/business you've never called before, but perhaps with emergency services it's a bit looser? Regardless, I was pretty surprised that it misunderstood my prompt so dramatically.
I tried using Siri for a while, but the amount of miss fires on my watch made me discontinue. The slight convenience of being able to (most of the time) set a timer or something paled in comparison for it to trigger off of random conversation and then try to search for something nonsensical and loudly proclaiming it couldn't find anything.
It doesn't help that Apple doesn't let third party developers use it. The only SDK available for Homepod, is locked behind a bunch of approvals and the only thing it does is allow developers to implement music players. It's very specific to playing music. Not even Podcasts.<p>Why can't an eCommerce app implement, "Hey Siri, tell Online Store to add Tidepods to my weekly order". ?<p>What about Audible implementing, "Hey Siri, tell Audible to add Tale of Two Cities to my reading list." ?<p>There's remnants of a car service interface that never got used or shipped AFAIK. If you ask "Hey Siri, get me an Uber to the train station". It just replies "sorry, I help with rides".<p>Or maybe even work with other Apple stuff better. I can say "Hey Siri, turn on Television" and that works and then say "Hey Siri, mute television" and it will reply, "There are no televisions to control".
I have a homepod in every room in my house. I talk to Siri every day.<p>He (she's set to an Australian male voice) is great if you know exactly what to say to get exactly what you want. He's horrible with general requests that you haven't made before.<p>Particularly with smart home devices.
I find it odd how Apple has seemingly dropped the ball with Siri. Don't all newer iPhones have some sort of neural chip or something that could help Siri expand its capabilities? It's strange that Amazon is so far ahead with Alexa and Siri is lagging.
I'd have expected speech recognition software to be good enough that you could have direct speech -> gpt type services. It almost feels like traveling to the past when asking things of Siri when I otherwise get very useful responses from chatgpt.
I think Siri could really benefit from some LLM goodness. It's just too stupid. You have to deliver every command in bite-sized exactly worded chunks. Really annoying. But the tech is at a level where it can really improve it now.<p>It also needs some persistence. It needs to know that I never want to play music on my homekit. I tried deleting all the music from itunes but that stupid free U2 album keeps coming back and it often thinks I want to play music instead of doing automation actions.<p>And it should be able to read my texts and tell me if something important comes in. Stuff like that. AI models should be able to deliver those things. All this manually scripted stuff is a dead end.
I use Siri for laundry timers on Apple Watch. A very simple task you'd think, but it occasionally tells me that this doesn't work without my iPhone nearby, even though it's an activate LTE watch and there's even WIFI available.<p>Then I use Siri a lot with my HomePods for music. It works rather well, but when it fails it hurts. Sometimes a new song is playing that I like. So I say "Hey Siri add this song to my inbox playlist." Siri then occasionally tells me "OK, I'm playing some-other-song-you-didn't-ask-for." There is then no way to return back to the previous song or find out what it was.<p>I hate Siri when these things happen.
I use Siri just for playing music, setting alarms, and reminders, but even there I run into bugs on a regular basis. One day she stopped being able to find songs from Apple Music, but could still play anything I'd saved to my phone (wasn't reception or CarPlay permissions or any of the obvious troubleshooting things you'd think, trust me I looked into it).<p>Sometimes she'll also misinterpret commands for unclear reasons. "Tomorrow at 7am, remind me to call John" and she responds "Ok, I've turned on your 7am alarm". I try again, speaking more clearly, and she says "Your 7am alarm is already on"
Siri is Steve jobs’ version of the disastrous Newton handwriting problem.<p>Unlike the Newton they don’t seem to have fixed it … or better yet, replaced it.<p>I’m surprised Giannandrea hasn’t junked it by now.
I honestly don't know why Apple can't do their own ChatGPT. They have the money / resources to then implement something like the ChatGPT 'plugin' architecture so if someone wants to turn on their lights or get specific 'private' information that apple cannot give as 'training' data. i.e. callout to 'private' API's if appropriate to a sensible LLM generated response
I used to have Google Home and moved to Homepod Minis. I should have ran them side by side, but that would have gotten very confusing for other people in the family.<p>Siri is fine at controlling smart home devices, giving weather, timers, etc...but if you ask it questions more times that not it wants you to use your phone. Google Home handled that so much better.<p>We have Apple Music and have Homepods around the house so we use it for that.
Ok, maybe I’m an outlier here, but I love Siri on my HomePods. It does what I want in enough cases that it’s useful, multiple timers while cooking, setting them and canceling them when I am putting things in or taking it out of the oven.<p>Granted, I have very few things I use it for, but I like it. The kids like them in their rooms too. I’m happy with Siri, but maybe I don’t ask it to do much.
And yet Apple still has a massive moat around Siri because there is no official way (as far as I know) to replace Siri by another assistant when pressing the side button or saying "Hey..." I believe if you want to use Google Assistant your best bet is to say something like "Hey Siri, use Google Assistant." (honestly haven't even tried because of how ridiculous that is).<p>So they're clearly still in prime position to make their product better, even if they're behind right now. That's unless they get an antitrust lawsuit for unfair monopoly, which they probably should get considering this seems to me similar to what Windows was doing forcing IE as the default browser back in the days. Just like people should be able to choose their default browser, they should be able to choose their default voice assistant.
Siri seems to be actively getting worse to me. Not necessarily at understanding commands, but at the verbosity of its replies.<p>Recently, when I ask it to "Send a text to <name> that says <content of text>" it says something like "I notice you often send texts to <name> using Apple Messages, so I will use that for this text. Is that Ok?" before reading me back the text and then sending it. I'm sure that there are people out there who have a rich and complicated mapping of text-communication-app to recipients, but I literally have only one text communication app on my phone, the one that it came with, and I only ever use that. It's already annoyingly slow to interact with Siri on a multi-step process, and adding <i>another</i> step to it is awful.
As an Android user, I'm even struggling to get my phone to set a timer, which is the only thing I use Google Assistant for.<p>I can't wait for them to start including LLM-AI voice chatting where one can properly tell the phone what I want it to do.
The reasons sound very Apple-like. The current template-based Siri is not cutting it, but I do get the fact Apple does not want Siri to give wrong or incorrect info. People already go bonkers if an Apple Maps route is incorrect. Given that the current LLM's are routinely giving false information, I'm betting Apple is simply waiting on another leap or two in models, and slowly rewriting Siri in the meantime.<p>I'm having a good time playing with LLM's, but I certainly don't trust any output at face value. I know I would value a correct answer from Siri, or any other service.
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 <i>that</i> 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?<p>Oh yeah, the keyboard replacing fuck with duck even though I never wrote duck until now is enough reason to pop over to Android.
I’ve noticed that the whole the voice to text recognition it pretty good, what’s awful is how that text is interpreted. You see the same problems with search in other Apple services.<p>For example you might search for a street in maps and search will just give up and just give you a half arsed result. Searching for HN Boulevard might instead HN Avenue even though you can see the correct result right there on the map.<p>You see similar behaviour in Music, App Store etc.
I switched to typing to Siri instead of using my voice [1]. I also disabled all triggers for Siri. Now I invoke it by pressing power button then type away.<p>It's more useful than dictating when I need something quick and discretely.<p>When chatbots arrive on iPhone, this is how I'll be talking to it.<p>1: <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/type-to-siri-ios/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/type-to-siri-ios/</a>
I think it's not far-fetched to say that everyone hates brand-promoting voice assistants whose job first is to make money for a company.<p>I don't trust any voice assistant because I know every query is being stored, analyzed, and I don't own my own communications with the asssistant. I also don't get to customize the assistant.<p>It's basically a shitty-future branding assistant who is inclined to send you to product pages and shit to buy.
Siri is not that bad, considering that Google Assistant is not great either.<p>What do people use it for? mostly just to set alarms or turn of lights etc.<p>With all this breakthrough in AI and things like Whisper which brings incredible voice recognition, these tools are ripe for an upgrade even though they have been stagnant for years.<p>ChatGPT like abilities + voice assistant and these 'voice assistants' are relevant again and actually deliver on there original promise.
I love Siri with Apple Maps in New Zealand /s<p>Me: "Siri, give me directions to vaguely ethnic sounding café" where café is about 2km away.<p>Siri: "Getting directions to other cafe in London/Europe/Tajikistan".<p>So theres no line of code that says "If found location if >2000kms away with no direct land route and/or crosses multiple continents, it might not be the right one"<p>Google Maps and voice works pretty flawlessly.
Hey Siri, set a timer for 13 minutes.
Hey Siri, set an alarm for 8:30 tonight.<p>That's about all of Siri I've ever found useful in the past 10 years or so
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I find it annoying, intrusive and not useful for anything at all.<p>The only times I ever try to use it intentionally (like asking it to take a note, or make a hands free call while I'm driving) - it screws up or requires clarification to which I have to give screen attention, defeating the purpose.<p>Most of the time it just pops up and annoys me when I call my wife "sweetie".
I find it the worst when giving driving directions for most streets and towns in New Zealand because Siri has not been trained recognize or pronounce Maori names. So you ask for directions to ie Oneroa (oh-ner-ROW-a) will attempt to find own-ERRR-ua and explain that it doesn't exist. What laziness! How hard is it to train siri in all languages?
Siri rarely disappointed me because my expectations were always low and I trained myself on how to talk to it.<p>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 <i>so</i> stupid in comparison. How much longer before LLMs and projects like Whisper run the backend?
Can tell they downgraded the long range microphones somewhere between iPhone 4 and 7, might be even worse in later models because it really struggles to pick up you shouting across the room at it when it used to work pretty well on the 4.<p>Then again the only thing I've used it for since launch is setting timers, rarely gets that right these days.
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.
What is people’s experience with Tesla’s voice recognition system? I’ve previously used it to activate the windshield wipers, which worked. But recently I tried to get it to play music and various other things, none of which it was able to do… I was driving and haven’t had time to play around with it since.
I use an Android phone. Pretty much the only thing I use the voice commands for are setting alarms and timers. It works nearly 100% of the time, even in noisy environments.<p>My wife has an iPhone and it's hilariously bad at this. She needs complete silence and even then it's a coin flip.
I don't know if it's programmed in or just cargo culting but if Siri accidentally triggers and starts talking to you, "Nobody asked you Siri" is my favorite way to get it to stop interacting.<p>Said in the tone of Cobie Smulders in How I Met Your Mother (Nobody asked you PATRICE!)
"Assistant" type devices which can actually do things besides reply can't yet use large language models safely. LLMs need to get past the problem of making up stuff when they don't know something. Until then, it's not safe to give them power over devices.
My kid in the future probably will want to have a conversation with a machine that sounds and talks like a character from a book or school lesson.<p>ChatGPT has gotten us there in writing, and the AI generated vocals are already really close. Unless apple acquires OpenAI, Siri is doomed.
I often leave home with just my Apple Watch, and for the simple things I do with my watch voice control via Siri and some tapping on the screen is definitely good enough for me.<p>I think that all the deep learning models for handling speech on the Apple Watch are run locally on the watch.
I'm excited for a GPT or similar voice assistant. Asking siri basic questions and having it tell me it will send me some links on my phone is annoying. I have homepods in the living room and they aren't good for much besides music.
Here is the original article:<p><a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-siri-chief-struggles-as-new-ai-era-begins" rel="nofollow">https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-siri-chief-st...</a>
As a former Apple employee working on Siri, it is safe to say many Apple employees hated Siri even 10 years ago. Many tried to introduce new ideas to improve it, but, at least while I was there, nothing changed.
"Even" implies a consensus that I don't think exists except in the minds of people who find hating something recreational. Siri works pretty fucking well in my experience, but that experience is colored by my understanding of what it is, and what it's good at.<p>You have to be aware of what makes a good Siri question or task. Technical people tend to understand this implicitly; we are, after all, talking to a computer, and computers are notoriously literal and have trouble with implied contexts, etc.<p>I think I've talked about this here before, but my wife often phrases questions to Siri in a way that results in the dreaded "I can send the results to your iPhone" non-answer. One example I remember happened when we were idly talking about King Charles. My wife asked Siri "how old is king charles" and got the non-answer. I asked Siri "what year was king Charles born" and got hard data back.<p>It's that kind of thing.<p>In the narrow case of music there's more to complain about, I guess, but the base problem is specificity and name collision. It doesn't seem to always pull the example of any given non-unique name that I might want; sometimes I wonder if what i get is just random.<p>If you ask for "Take Five", you MIGHT get Dave Brubeck. I'd argue that, in the absence of something specific, you SHOULD get Dave Brubeck, and moreover you should get the album cut from "Time Out." But Siri doesn't really agree, for whatever reason.<p>OTOH, if you ask Siri to play "Take Five from the Dave Brubeck album Time Out" you'll get exactly what you want.<p>Siri excels in simple, discrete asks or tasks, though. We both routinely use it to add things to the shared shopping list we keep in Reminders. That's kind of awesome, and beats the old norm of "go find a pen to add this to the list that you may or may not remember to take with you when you go shopping." Setting timers or alarms verbally is awesome. The list goes on.
At the very least, make it work in the car! I have an iPhone and a Pixel and my car supports AA and CarPlay. When I travel, I much prefer AA because the Google's voice assistant nails AA interaction.
Outside of driving, I never really understood the popular use case for these voice assistants. In most situations it is easier to type your query rather than say it out loud.<p>It was a novelty touted as a big leap in technology.
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.
Siri recently started mispronouncing simple words that it never mistook before on my iPhone. Phrases like "It's 65 degrees outside" now sound like "It ess 65". Really odd.
I'm a screenwriter and my focus is on character NO MATTER WHAT. We watch movies because we love the characters inside the plot, inside the universe, and how they relate to each other. CHARACTER is the CORE DRIVER of all stories, be it the story of Beowulf or Star Wars or Succession. Period.<p>Today, I am fortunate enough to be developing 'characters' and backstories for AI companies, and I think its working; the new prototypes I've been working on really feel more warm (or more logical, or more relatable, or more philosophical, depending on what we're trying to transmit).<p>I think a lot of AI companies are really missing this important point, and I think Apple, of all companies, should have got this!
Although Siri needs much improvement I have found that voice typing on iphone has actually improved dramatically the last few months.<p>I have been using it more and more to send email and messages.
I ride a motorcycle and rely on voice commands to interact with my phone since I keep it in my pocket.<p>Siri’s most common response to me: “You have to unlock your iPhone to do that”. Not helpful.
I found voice controls in <i>anything</i> to be so clunky in the early 2010s that I just rolled my eyes at things like Siri and smart speakers. I've never even tried them.
Because it sucks. I tell it to turn off all of my alarms and instead it ends up calling my mother at 4 in the morning, causing her to panic, thinking there's an emergency.
I've switched to using a Chat-GPT shortcut in lieu of Siri and it's absolutely amazing. Apple should figure out how to license GPT and run Siri through it.
> The company’s senior leaders haven’t shown much stomach for the kinds of headline-grabbing gaffes ChatGPT and similar services have stumbled into over the last several months.<p>Risk aversion from immature tech is a part of Apple’s DNA. It should be no surprise that Apple declined to push Siri beyond its limited capabilities.<p>LLMs are quite new and Apple has plenty of cash to hire star devs to catch things up. Writing off Apple’s AI future is premature.
sigh. While there's some exception, in general I really feel Apple makes crappy software, especially the ones that human input.<p>They do a much better job of unifying device experience through software.
MacRumors’ related article [0] has some more interesing details:<p>> By 2018, the team working on Siri had apparently "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant." Siri's leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse Siri's usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained about Siri coming from the data science and engineering team was simply not being used, with some former employees calling it "a waste of time and money."<p>> Many Apple employees purportedly left the company because it was too slow to make decisions or too conservative in its approach to new AI technologies, including the large-language models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT. Apple CEO Tim Cook personally attempted to persuade engineers who helped Apple modernize its search technology to stay at the company, before they left to work on large-language models at Google.<p>> Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give Siri the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to control and gimmicky.<p>> Cook and other senior executives requested changes to Siri to prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers Siri's responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to exclude information such as iPhone prices from Siri to push users directly to Apple's website instead.<p>> Siri engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released.<p>> Engineers claim to have spent months persuading Siri designers that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a limitation that made it impossible to scale up Siri to answer the huge number of questions asked by users. Similarly, Apple's design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to report a concern or issue with the content of a Siri answer, preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding mistakes, because it wanted Siri to appear "all-knowing."<p>> In 2019, the Siri team explored a project to rewrite the virtual assistant from scratch, codenamed "Blackbird." The effort sought to create a lightweight version of Siri that would delegate the creation of functions to app developers and would run on iPhones instead of the cloud to improve performance and privacy. Demos of Blackbird apparently prompted excitement among Apple employees owing to its utility and responsiveness. Blackbird competed with the work of two senior leaders on the Siri team who were responsible for helping Siri understand and respond to queries. These individuals pushed for their own project, codenamed " Siri X," for the 10th anniversary of the virtual assistant. The project simply aimed to move Siri's processing on-device for privacy reasons, without the lightweight, modular functionality of Blackbird. Hundreds of employees working on Blackbird were assigned to Siri X, which killed the ambitious project to make Siri more capable.<p>This seems completely dysfunctional.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2023/04/27/report-details-turmoil-behind-siri-and-apple-ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/2023/04/27/report-details-turmoil-...</a>
not only can voice input never be a universal input mechanism that is seamless (so limits reach of application), Apple's specific implementation is just janky.
My favorite<p>Me: 16 minutes<p>Siri: your timer is set for 16 minutes<p>Me: 17 minutes<p>Siri: 17 minutes and counting<p>Me: 18 minutes<p>Siri: I don’t understand that
I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs. I use it to set timers, get the weather, play music via Spotify, occasionally dictate text messages, and look up trivia mid-conversation. It's been my replacement for Alexa ever since I got creeped out by Amazon's audio data retention. In this context I'm suprised to hear Apple employees are unhappy with it.
This is a nonstory, tbh.<p>The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished product. Releasing an LLM-based Siri that makes really bad gaffes would be a PR nightmare. Google already suffered that when it opened up Bard despite pushback from folks working on it.<p>The fundamentals of LLM architectures, training, etc. are now no longer "secret sauce" tons of major tech companies are working on in-house LLMs at this point. I don't see Apple as not having a future for Siri, it's rather a silly conclusion that doesn't have much behind it at all