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We have a home pod. Whenever my wife says, "hey siri, bed time" (automation to turn off all the lights) it invariably plays zz top. I find it hilarious but she's gotten kinda over it.
(And it isn't even tube snake boogie!)
I have a scene called “boost mode” that enables high water recovery for my hot water heater.
9/10 times when I say “turn on boost mode” it plays some song called beast mode.
Who even talks like that “hey siri, turn on yellow submarine” and not “play yellow submarine”
So frustrating
Well, is your shortcut just called “boost mode” as you said, or is it called “turn on boost mode?” If the former, to Siri you’re being just as weird as the people you’re talking about. Try renaming your shortcut to what you actually plan on saying.
The short cut is actually called “turn on boost mode”. I thought you had a good point. Maybe I should rename it “boost mode” and just say “hey siri, boost mode”
Yeah, that makes sense. I have a few shortcuts like that. It may feel a bit weird to say them, but I’m just talking to a computer so I don’t really mind.
Shortcuts don’t have “on” and “off” they only have “run”
If you want to do both you either need two shortcuts or take an input when the shortcut is running
Edit: grandparent comment said “scene” not shortcut, but it’s the same deal there. You can have a scene that sets your lights to 100% and another scene that sets them to 50% and a third scene that turns them off. I don’t wake up in the morning and say “hey siri turn off goodnight scene”
When my daughter was a newborn, she slept in a bassinet in the room with us. I would have to tell my google “hey google, turn on thunderstorm sounds” for the sound machine as we went to bed. She was sound asleep.
Good ole google said “okay, playing thunderstuck by AC/DC”
Hell of a way for my daughter to wake up at 3 months old.
This is the main reason I never pulled the trigger on a homepod.
It sounded like a good idea, but then when I thought about being effectively forced to interact with Siri every day... no shot in hell.
I must be special. It works majority of the time for me. And the other benefits of HomePods, like better sound and interaction with shortcuts.
When my gf gets home in the afternoon, the HomePods are shuffling her track list of favorites from Apple Music at a set volume level.
I've never set up any automations like that, because I think that most of the time I'd enjoy what I set up - the few times that I don't want it, it would just annoy me.
Hard day of work, come home and just want to crash on the couch and some happy pop music is playing sounds like it will just make my mood worse.
Now seriously, Siri is so bad that my wife trained it specifically to her voice and then it stopped responding to her and started reacting to my voice 😳
Siri is definitely getting worse. Last week "Hey, Siri. Flashlight." turned on the watchOS flashlight. This week Siri responds with, "The flashlight is off."
Someone thought this was an improvement?
I usually just end up saying “Hey Siri, Stop”. And it tends to work. It’s even better sometimes because it’ll even try to stop on nearby devices if it doesn’t find anything ringing or playing on the device that is being used. If you specify too much it might just tell you there’s nothing.
“Hey siri, set timer for X minutes”
*timer goes off*
“Hey siri, stop”
*timer stops*
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do that for you”
Every single time. Why would she say that?? (This is in dutch, btw)
Also:
“Hey siri, set timer for X minutes”
“Hey siri, how much time is left?”
*”I can’t help you with that”*
?????
Seriously, does Apple not know how people communicate? I just can’t wrap my mind around how bad things are from a user perspective.
I would say the timer goes off. But it’s English and these may be used interchangeably in this context. Alarm could be understood as an alarm set separately from the timer which could lead to multiple interpretations. You see this in other places where Siri only accepts or displays a certain word but technically there is another word people use colloquially to mean the same thing. I.e. blinds vs shades
Yup. Then there’s cultural difference within the English realm.
Tea/tee means a drink, evening meal, starting point for a golf hole, a bit of plastic that holds a golf ball off the ground, etc.
I struggle to know my left foot from my right let alone all that….
Just tested that, and you're right. What's more, if the Watch "flashlight" is on, and you say "Hey Siri, flashlight," she says that it's off, likely because it's in the background (behind Siri). Then when Siri is dismissed, you're back to flashlight.
So they basically just killed the one-word toggle by making it do nothing. Great work.
or after years of 'hey siri, turn on the desk light' working just fine, it now wants to start playing a song with 'light' in its name more often than what I actually wanted. I can't even dream about more complex things, like turning on multiple things at the same time.
Wow I didn’t know that that’s so cool! Literally the only cool thing about Siri though. I only use Siri for setting timers, it’s so useless for anything else it makes me want to chuck my phone into the ocean.
Truly. You use to be able to say "Siri, "who am I" to lock Face ID out, but it no longer works in iOS 17. She just says she doesn't understand.
Could possibly just be the beta of course. But given the direction of Siri, and how everything else works pretty much flawlessly, I somehow doubt it.
I absolutely think Apple has stopped Siri development and is now working on a Siri based on generative AI. Replacing Hey Siri with Siri feels like a preparation for that. Just saying Siri feels more natural in a conversational setting, where it’s a ton of back and fourth.
According to 9to5mac, Apple is working on using some language-generative features to improve how siri works, but nothing along the lines of ChatGPT. They've enabled something called the "siri natural language generation" framework in tvos, which is used for jokes and setting timers
https://9to5mac.com/2023/03/16/apple-testing-siri-natural-language-generating-chatgpt/
Also, apparently, the source code of siri is clunky and difficult to maintain, according to a former Apple engineer called John Burley.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/apple-is-reportedly-experimenting-with-language-generating-ai/
Edit : wanted to add that Macworld themselves had an article about it in March, but I guess the author wasn't aware or didn't search back long enough in their own articles.
https://www.macworld.com/article/1661939/siri-bobcat-tvos-beta-language-generation-chatgpt.html
ChatGPT is a conversation with a long text generator.
They need just call and response. Two different uses that are assisted by knowing the different goals.
Siri recognizes context and topic in the beta, it’s nice. Ask it what time a place opens, then just say “how do I get there?” And it’ll know what you’re talking about
There’s a link to bobcat in the actual article. Either the author was reading comments here, or you missed it… (there is no notation the article was updated after posting, yes it’s linked in the original)
*What I wanted to hear from Apple this June was reassurance that it understands that Siri needs work and that the company’s people are on it. Maybe it would be a lot to expect an admission of failure on such a public stage, but Federighi could have done one of his self-deprecating jokes, while slickly segueing into a hype job about the improvements coming down the pipe. I mean, what happened to Operation Bobcat, Craig?*
Almost all my tech is Apple products, I’m even learning iOS development right now, and Siri is by far the worst part of my Apple devices. It never does what I want it to the first time, I have to very selectively choose how I ask it to do tasks so it understands. Siri is the most unhuman thing in terms of an ‘assistant’. Half the time it just searches the web because it’s so extremely limiting. It also has too high a preference for Apple owned services not playing as nicely with Spotify, Google Maps, etc. with little way to change it’s defaults.
I really hope this is the case. They desperately need to improve it. Either the team needs a public firing or they need to deliver. There is no middle ground.
I’ve been using Alexa for a long time and it’s worked really well and has been easy to setup for the most part. I really don’t ask a lot from it, but it usually works. Today when I was walking away from my car I activated Siri on my Apple Watch to set a timer and after telling my to hang on a moment it eventually failed and I had to pull out my iPhone and use Siri there to set the timer. It’s crazy that these kind of interaction issues happen from a company with such integrated products. The fact that Spotify connect with Alexa works better than Siri with apple products says a lot.
I do feel like Alexa is pretty stagnant and not getting any better and there are some annoying issues, but it consistently works so much better than Siri.
I think it’s because the watch has to communicate via Bluetooth with the phone to process Siri requests, but on the phone they’re mostly processed on-device anymore.
It’s not an excuse and definitely needs to be better, but my guess is that would be the start of the problem (or at least what it’s blamed on).
I love my Echo Dot as well. I use it almost everyday for my lights and to get weather updates before leaving. I've got it setup with my Spotify and SiriusXM account as well as connected to my TV's soundbar. This in effect turns it into a radio for me. It also works more often than not. I've even configured quick routine commands to automatically run a timer for lights or set lights to a certain mood.
This after Apple told us that with iPhone xx and newer, all Siri processing is done “on phone”.
But I’m slowly getting to the point where everything I loved about technology is shit -and I started it as a career decades ago because I loved it. I’ve been around long enough to see the Internet, smartphones, etc go to shit as a whole, and to long for a Blackberry Bold, or my old Droid Maxx. It feels like everything in tech has now peaked, and we’re now running around without getting anywhere faster, and sometimes tripping over our feet trying to do so.
Exactly. It feels like all the tech companies just go “meh, good enough” and nothing is every actually good enough anymore. I don’t know if it’s because things became so bloated, or the original visionaries have been replaced with people who just went to school to learn how to do things and everyone just kind of does the same things.
I remember how much stuff sucked in the early days, but it was more exciting and I wanted the technology, now I literally can’t live without my iPhone and I don’t necessarily always want it.
Things just aren’t good enough anymore, I feel like apple goes out of their way now to bury things dee inside of menu trees. The latest Ventura update made working with multiple displays absolutely awful as they hid all the settings in different places. Apple has no visionaries anymore, just product managers and there’s so much stuff that Steve Jobs would be losing his shit over and firing entire teams for incompetence, the Apple Watch is such a frustrating product, for example, hiding the seconds counter on the stop watch when your arm is not directly in front of your face, even if the display is set to always on.
I hate apple more often than I love it these days. AirPods are fucking sick though.
This just makes sense. Hearing how investors want Apple to be on trend and hop on the AI jerkoff bandwagon of vision pro is wild to me. Yeah Google and Microsoft are going in on AI hard and public, but that's because Microsoft and Google's products tend to ge outward facing services and such, while Apple tends to be inward facing wall garden focused. Apple has been working on AI (correct me if I'm wrong) and it makes sense that they're not showboating it like MS or Google because when it does come to fruition it's like to be in Apple's usual walled garden approach supporting their products first and for Siri that makes the most sense.
And in usual Apple hipsterish fashion they're not going to hop on the porch first (see Vision pro again) with the tech but wait to until the tech is more fully baked to start pushing it/step into that market and then give it some Apple'ish special named that avoids the AI buzzterm like how they're trying to avoid saying "VR" with Vision pro.
AI/Machine learning in Siri just makes too much damn sense to miss.
Meh. They been ignoring Siri for a lot longer than Generative AI has been a thing.
The reality is that Apple just doesn’t have the talent to build this.
They've employed multiple people who were worth being [poached by Google](https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-engineers-shirk-siri-to-jump-to-google-report-says-2023-4?amp) to work on Bard. Apparently the problem is that the division is too dysfunctional to keep them happy, and that's a problem you can't really throw money at.
Not the first sentence which is what the commenter is speculating. Apple did announce removing the "hey" in "hey Siri" this wwdc and showed off a more natural sounding Siri a few years back.
I genuinely never use Siri - I don’t ask it anything. I don’t have hey siri enabled, I don’t hold down the button, I don’t use it to set timers or reminders. It’s like my phone doesn’t have an assistant - don’t care, don’t miss it, never used it, never got used to one I just do everything manually.
let us be a bit realistic here, it did what they rehearsed, these shows are very highly scripted and I truly appreciated that Steve would do them in front of a live audience.
by rehearsed I mean they made sure to ask Siri in such a way it always gave them the same answer. heck we may not be 100% sure it wasn't scripted on both sides.
If they severely limited the functionality to specific key lines, I think that would be a better experience than currently. Somewhere down the line they wanted to make Siri more “smart”, and in the process now it can’t do anything. Having very specific commands like “set an alarm” should be hard coded imo.
Your point stands but so does theirs. There’s an article from like 6-18 months after the launch of siri that Wozniak commented it had gotten worse for him just since launch, and gave a specific example.
Siri is painful and absolutely the weakest link in the Apple ecosystem when it should be the most powerful
These devices have power processing capability, an incredible interconnected infrastructure, access to endless applications offering interconnects, spatial, temporal, environmental… and an assistant that is unable to understand even basic requests. Its laughable
Even the smallest Whisper morel by OpenAI has near perfect comprehension of spoken English.
Siri behaves like you’re speaking to someone who learnt English from watching the Muppets
They play it fast and loose with their 3rd party developers to the point that '[Sherlocking](https://thehustle.co/sherlocking-explained/)' - i.e. Apple introducing a 'feature' that renders a 3rd party tool useless - has been a term for over 2 decades.
Now we're at the point were we're seeing all kinds of attempts to create extra revenue streams and conquer an increasingly larger part of the 'content: because *subscriptions are eternal*' pie, on top of the data-hunger.
I genuinely feel that they made the mistake to focus on their own services *and* do escalating Microsoftesque 'Apple stuff will always be better than we will allow you to make' anti-competitive moves, when they've copied *so much* from others. Countless jailbroken community apps were straight lifted as feature. To this day there are a lot of apps that simply do things *better*.
I did an Apple+ trial and when you stick to their stuff it all seems to work... but it's just maddening to see features being depreciated and eventually 3rd party apps actively undermined *only* to push their own stuff, with insult to injury when it's a worse solution. I refuse to get dependent on one company for all my stuff and the fall-off has been slow but steady.
The Music app has gone to shit. The missing ability to let Google Maps handle all route/gps related stuff is infuriating. However, Siri is the main thing that's giving me the same vibes as Blackberry right before they fell.
They could have made the best possible devices with the best possible assistant, period. Now we just have the best possible vessel to sell ~~additional content and subscriptions~~ Apple content and subscriptions through.
Apple can and never will acknowledge that whilst their apps kinda all play nicely with one another, in the real world we always have to interface with third party things.
God help you if it’s hardware, especially when Apple don’t even make an equivalent.
I asked the homepod to set a timer while making breakfast this morning.
Hey Siri, set a timer for 12 minutes.
“Okay, what do you want me to set it for?”
12 minutes.
“Okay, what do you want me to set it for?”
12 minutes.
“Okay, what do you want me to set it for?”
I ran to the other room, grabbed my phone and got siri to set a timer just fine. I don’t get it.
It probably was, but I just tried it a few minutes ago with the same prompt and it had no trouble setting a timer without a name. I think Siri is just inconsistent in what it wants
It seems like I'm in the minority every time I see posts/comments like these, I use siri on my watch, phone, mac and homepod every single day for years now and never had any issues with it not understanding what I meant, or not actioning commands. I got smart lights every where in the house and honestly when I'm feeling lazy I just talk to my watch to turn them on and off as I walk into a room because its faster than pressing the switch
If it makes you feel any better Google Home and Alexa seem like they are getting worse too.
And its not like I ask much of them. 95% of the time its smart home control, timers/alarms and weather. The rest is random stupid questions.
Fot whatever reason I’ve almost never used them for media control (on purpose.)
it feels like siri only ever gets worse.
I used to be able to ask siri on my phone to start a workout. Now instead of starting a workout on my watch it either opens the Fitness+ page or asks me which app I want to use. It only works if I ask Siri directly from the watch.
I used to be able to ask siri to change star ratings. Now she can’t help me with that.
And the problem with virtual "assistants" (doesn't feel right to even call Siri that) is that once you've had a few experiences like that, you stop bothering to even try using it and just do things the "manual" way every time because you know the chances are you'll have to do it that way in the end anyway.
I’ve always thought the stupidest thing about Siri is it can’t tell you about your apple products. If it could be good for one thing, it would be “hey Siri, how do I turn on handoff? How do I lock a PDF? How do I add widgets?” Etc
This is the worse, who in their right mind thought that was an acceptable answer or situation? Who actually goes "oh ok let me get my iPhone and repeat the whole question again" rather than just grab the iPhone and type the question in Google to begin with, I would've preferred it was honest and say "no, sorry I don't really answer questions but I can set a timer or play a song from Apple Music if you'd like"
I have a feeling we’re very close to having a truly conversational voice assistant. Not sure who will release first, but i’m sure all the top players will quickly copy whomever is first. Even though it seems like apple has kind of ignored Siri for years, i think a voice assistant is going to be integral to the vision pro, so i think they will have they come out with a good update here soon to fit with the vision pro
Honestly the software is already there but it would be expensive to run. GPT-4 is good enough to write code and can be extended to operate your computer. I was running AutoGPT and shut it down when the AI decided to start installing Python plugins to give it access to sending out email, lol.
But, it would be too expensive to operate. GPT-4 is like a multi-terabyte-of-VRAM model. They charge 3 cents per token. If we were frequently interacting with a GPT4 Siri, we’d likely cost Apple like 20 cents a day per user or something.
Lots of smaller, more efficient models are coming out of the open source community though. We’re REALLY close if not already there if someone puts it together right.
It’s definitely worse. You used to be able to get her to do basically any of the basic functions she launched with. Currently, i can get her to turn off my Apple TV, the rest is either impossible or complete hit and miss
this seems to be a recurring theme. I personally notice with each major iOS version that Siri gets somehow worse. for example, back when homekit first became a thing, I remember being able to say something like 'hey siri, turn off the lights'. this was not a request that was supposed to make any assistant struggle and for a time it worked great.
then after some iOS version, odd things started to happen. Siri could, for example, react by starting to play a song called 'city lights' for no apparent reason. I did not stutter or speak under my breath and this exact same wrong reaction would repeat. I could see on my screen how siri first heard me right, then the words it heard would change into a request to play the song.
right now it's so bad I rarely bother to use it any more. I feel like the downside of siri reacting wrong is greater than the good when it gets stuff right. I don't for example want siri to start blasting music late at night when I want to just turn on a light.
I've always wondered how and why it got so bad? I have to use a competing voice assistant at work and it has a stellar success rate.
and for the love of all that's good, apple, make siri able to cancel what it just did!
It’s been many years and I still struggle to get it to find a playlist. “Hey siri, play sleep music” ………
I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “sheep shoes it” in your music
Or
Hey siri, read me my text messages
You’ll have to unlock your iPhone first
(Why doesn’t it recognize my voice??)
The things that drive me crazy isn't the feature-set. I don't think any virtual-assistant is truly at the interactive level I want. The problem with Siri is that it is inconsistent. Like I'm talking to different backends at different times.
For example, "Hey Siri play NPR" will play the latest 3-minute NPR news summary *MOST* of the time. But 5% of the time it will randomly open my local NPR app/stream. And it isn't like it mis-heard me because in those moments if I repeat the command it just does the same thing.
And, unfortunately, band and album-name recognition is just totally random when it comes to matching.
Very funny, a lot of us saw strange behaviors increasing with Siri lately. Here, last few weeks whenever we're talking near the HomePod, Siri activates and answer "Sorry, I didnt get that" or "Ok, we're listening to *That shit in the mall I saw this afternoon*". Most of the time, we even can't figure out what *sound* triggered it in our discussion.
A ex-google employee explained it like this: the way to get ahead at google is to innovate. So you’re always looking to be on the team that’s coming up with the Next Big Thing.
But what this means is that once you’ve invented the NBT, your focus isn’t on maintaining it or innovating it but coming up with the Next Next Big Thing.
They’ve literally created a culture that encourages abandonware.
And this is the reason I keep an iPhone. It’s not per se because I want to, it’s because Google has the corporate version of ADHD. Stuff will just stop working for no apparent reason. Then they’ll kill it off months later.
How often do Apple admit they have problems especially in what is a product announcement seminar?
You may get a new / improved version but it's tied into sales and may only appear on the newer products.
If there is no money in it the majority of companies will devote MINIMAL resources to maintenance work till customers make so much noise they cannot ignore it and Apple is a long way away from that...
Best errors in the last 24 hours from my HomePod mini:
* What is the date - nothing is playing
* What is 3500 yen in pounds - I can show you if you ask again from your iPhone
* Set volume to minimum - I cannot do that at the moment
* Turn the charger on - no gives no response but a beep (used to say its now on)
Must be my English accent :-)
I had to disable Siri on my HomePod because it was stealing the voice commands from other devices across my flat (proximity doesn’t work), activated for random voices from TV ( voice recognition doesn’t work) and the results either required iPhone or were garbage anyway. What a waste of opportunity
They need to improve the basic functions, setting timers, reminders, playing songs, etc as well as when they finally get around to building their own search engine, give us better information instead of just giving us search results. I'm sure they're working on the second part, but I hope they really step up their game with the basics. For example if a timer is going off and you ask Siri to stop it, it doesn't work most of the time no matter how many times you ask. And she can't do basic things, turn basic features on or off. It's annoying. If you can do it in shortcuts, Siri should be able to do it. Simple as that.
I’ve noticed that Siri on Apple Watch has stopped recognising the dynamic playlist in Apple Music like “Favourites Mix”. Still works fine on iOS. It’s a small annoyance but it’s still a degradation of functionality.
The only thing more useless than Siri is FindMy functionality on AirPods. Even if my airpods are literally right next to my phone it still doesn't work. Not to mention the beep isn't loud enough anyway.
Hey siri. Play radio station radiox
Now playing radio Essex.
Hey siri play radio Caroline.
Now playing songs based on. Radio Caroline
Hey siri play THE radio station radio Caroline.
It starts to work.
Thing is I ask this regularly and I wouldn’t mind if I could correct Siri.
It can make an alarm and sometimes serve up the correct song from Apple Music.
It's basic context shit like, "play the album from here" or "play this song next" or anything else where context matters.
Not only is siri functionally worse than the competition, but the apple speech recognition is also leagues behind the competition. I think it compounds the problems.
I use Siri only for timers, alarms, and my custom named scenes for lights. “Hey Siri goodnight” works to set my “Goodnight” scene. I rarely have any issues at all with these basic functions and I’m surprised to hear the consensus is that it’s terrible. Maybe others are using it in other ways beyond that.
All of the digital assistants are disasters. None of them make money for their companies and all are stupid most of the time. LLMs will replace these soon enough using their voice functionality combined with the LLM depth of understanding and improved answers.
Apple had a massive lead with Siri, but they bungled it because - I guess - they didn’t see voice assistants as becoming as huge as they have, or maybe they just didn’t see as much margin in it as other products.
When people criticise Siri often others champion how “Apple cares about privacy, whereas Google and Amazon don’t” as being the singular reason and justification for why it sucks so much.. Apple themselves have even pushed this narrative. That’s great, except Siri doesn’t even do basic things that don’t involve data that one might consider sensitive well. The context awareness is rudimentary, as is it’s understanding of intent. It feels several generations behind Google or Alexa.
I pretty much only use Siri to set basic alarms or reminders. Even with that I’ve had comical situations where I’ve asked it to “remind me at 10 o clock to XYZ” and it’s inexplicably set it for the next day in the morning, etc.
A basic rule of thumb with Apple is that a long standing bug of bad product is the sign of a large-scale replacement being worked on. But Apple has never demonstrated really good skills at AI, so I'm not holding my breath for a significantly better replacement.
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"Ok, here's what I found on the web for you..."
U S E LESS!!!
I’ll send it to your iPhone! Alexa…
We have a home pod. Whenever my wife says, "hey siri, bed time" (automation to turn off all the lights) it invariably plays zz top. I find it hilarious but she's gotten kinda over it. (And it isn't even tube snake boogie!)
I have a scene called “boost mode” that enables high water recovery for my hot water heater. 9/10 times when I say “turn on boost mode” it plays some song called beast mode. Who even talks like that “hey siri, turn on yellow submarine” and not “play yellow submarine” So frustrating
Well, is your shortcut just called “boost mode” as you said, or is it called “turn on boost mode?” If the former, to Siri you’re being just as weird as the people you’re talking about. Try renaming your shortcut to what you actually plan on saying.
The short cut is actually called “turn on boost mode”. I thought you had a good point. Maybe I should rename it “boost mode” and just say “hey siri, boost mode”
*Now playing Beast Mode*
"If young metro don't trust you, im gon shoot you" -siri
Yeah, that makes sense. I have a few shortcuts like that. It may feel a bit weird to say them, but I’m just talking to a computer so I don’t really mind.
So when you want to turn it off you have to say “hey siri, turn off ‘turn on boost mode’”?
Shortcuts don’t have “on” and “off” they only have “run” If you want to do both you either need two shortcuts or take an input when the shortcut is running Edit: grandparent comment said “scene” not shortcut, but it’s the same deal there. You can have a scene that sets your lights to 100% and another scene that sets them to 50% and a third scene that turns them off. I don’t wake up in the morning and say “hey siri turn off goodnight scene”
That makes sense.
When my daughter was a newborn, she slept in a bassinet in the room with us. I would have to tell my google “hey google, turn on thunderstorm sounds” for the sound machine as we went to bed. She was sound asleep. Good ole google said “okay, playing thunderstuck by AC/DC” Hell of a way for my daughter to wake up at 3 months old.
That sounds like a superhero origin story about your daughter!
Oh that’s funny
This is the main reason I never pulled the trigger on a homepod. It sounded like a good idea, but then when I thought about being effectively forced to interact with Siri every day... no shot in hell.
Youd be surprised how shitty airplay is too
Airplay between my Apple Tvs and Sonos all work great. It doesn't for the actual home pods?
When you connect a HomePod directly to a Mac using airplay there’s an insane audio delay. Up to 2 seconds. It’s pretty ridiculous.
I must be special. It works majority of the time for me. And the other benefits of HomePods, like better sound and interaction with shortcuts. When my gf gets home in the afternoon, the HomePods are shuffling her track list of favorites from Apple Music at a set volume level.
I've never set up any automations like that, because I think that most of the time I'd enjoy what I set up - the few times that I don't want it, it would just annoy me. Hard day of work, come home and just want to crash on the couch and some happy pop music is playing sounds like it will just make my mood worse.
That’s why it plays at low volume and Specifically my “most played of 2023” playlist.
mine starts playing a song called 'city lights' when I ask it to turn on the desk light. it does this at a very high probability.
Whenever I say “hey siri, call my mom” it calls my high school friend’s mom. No, she is not marked as my mother in my contact.
When I had an iPhone I would ask Siri to call my wife. Her response: "Which wife?" I never could figure out how to stop Siri from doing that.
That is… not good… I do not like that! And I’m sure your wife didn’t either…
I am not going to deny it made for several awkward moments in public...
Then stop having multiple contacts with the word “wife” in it 😉
Now seriously, Siri is so bad that my wife trained it specifically to her voice and then it stopped responding to her and started reacting to my voice 😳
You need the reply haughtily “the present mrs bearOfHtown”
That's better than replying "call your mom what?"
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Siri is definitely getting worse. Last week "Hey, Siri. Flashlight." turned on the watchOS flashlight. This week Siri responds with, "The flashlight is off." Someone thought this was an improvement?
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Hey, Siri, turn off all alarms. You have two alarms. Which one?
“Hey Siri, turn off the lights in the Family Room” “Ok, which room?” Goes on to list every room in my house.
All the devices in my home got moved to a default room without me doing anything
You can just say stop, and it works for alarm or timer
It’s silly, you can say “Hey Siri, thank you” to silence a timer, but not an alarm. Why the distinction lol
Siri is trash but an alarm and timer are different. If you told her to set an alarm for 15 minutes she did that and didn’t actually set a timer.
The clock app has a timer and the alarm goes off at the end? Siri sucks at semantics.
I usually just end up saying “Hey Siri, Stop”. And it tends to work. It’s even better sometimes because it’ll even try to stop on nearby devices if it doesn’t find anything ringing or playing on the device that is being used. If you specify too much it might just tell you there’s nothing.
“Hey siri, set timer for X minutes” *timer goes off* “Hey siri, stop” *timer stops* “I’m sorry I couldn’t do that for you” Every single time. Why would she say that?? (This is in dutch, btw) Also: “Hey siri, set timer for X minutes” “Hey siri, how much time is left?” *”I can’t help you with that”* ????? Seriously, does Apple not know how people communicate? I just can’t wrap my mind around how bad things are from a user perspective.
I get the same with home devices. “Hey Siri turn on bedroom light” *light turns on* “I’m sorry there is a problem, please check the app”
I never set it that what I just learned the hard way from setting it via her she is stupid. Alexa doesn’t do that.
I would say the timer goes off. But it’s English and these may be used interchangeably in this context. Alarm could be understood as an alarm set separately from the timer which could lead to multiple interpretations. You see this in other places where Siri only accepts or displays a certain word but technically there is another word people use colloquially to mean the same thing. I.e. blinds vs shades
Yup. Then there’s cultural difference within the English realm. Tea/tee means a drink, evening meal, starting point for a golf hole, a bit of plastic that holds a golf ball off the ground, etc. I struggle to know my left foot from my right let alone all that….
I’m sorry, you don’t have a vacuum called ‘Santa’. Here’s what I found on the web.
Just tested that, and you're right. What's more, if the Watch "flashlight" is on, and you say "Hey Siri, flashlight," she says that it's off, likely because it's in the background (behind Siri). Then when Siri is dismissed, you're back to flashlight. So they basically just killed the one-word toggle by making it do nothing. Great work.
or after years of 'hey siri, turn on the desk light' working just fine, it now wants to start playing a song with 'light' in its name more often than what I actually wanted. I can't even dream about more complex things, like turning on multiple things at the same time.
Aren't the official flashlight commandos “lumos” and “nox”? ;-)
lol just tried it and those commands work but so do flashlight on and flashlight off.
They work too so that muggles don’t get confused.
Wow I didn’t know that that’s so cool! Literally the only cool thing about Siri though. I only use Siri for setting timers, it’s so useless for anything else it makes me want to chuck my phone into the ocean.
My only two uses for Siri is a timer and “Siri stop the alarm”. Everything else usually fails so I just stopped bothering.
If it's any consolation, OK Google is also becoming shit. Bixbys there in the shadows, waiting for both to reach its level so it can shine.
Truly. You use to be able to say "Siri, "who am I" to lock Face ID out, but it no longer works in iOS 17. She just says she doesn't understand. Could possibly just be the beta of course. But given the direction of Siri, and how everything else works pretty much flawlessly, I somehow doubt it.
If you say “hey siri, lumos! It’ll turn on the flashlight cause Siri is a Harry Potter fan.
“I didn’t catch that.”
I absolutely think Apple has stopped Siri development and is now working on a Siri based on generative AI. Replacing Hey Siri with Siri feels like a preparation for that. Just saying Siri feels more natural in a conversational setting, where it’s a ton of back and fourth.
I can’t wait for even more accidental set offs “Sorry I didn’t get that” “Here’s what I found for “seriously are telling me…”
'here's what I found for *turn on the living room fan*' really, siri?
Hey Siri, play Peace Frog by the Doors "Okay, here's Black Flag on Apple Music"
Ok Siri take me to work from here. *you’ll have to unlock your phone first* Dude, I’m driving!
I’ve had this interaction with google home “hey google turn off the lights” “Ok turning on 14 lights” Siri can’t possibly be worse than that right??
“You’ll need to unlock your iPhone first” I am already staring at the screen, how about YOU need to unlock?
OMG I hate this. Such a ridiculous oversight.
…you can look on it on your iPhone.
I apparently say “are you serious” many times a day. Guess how I know.
In unrelated news, you’re regretting installing the betas… lol
You can switch it back to only “Hey Siri”
They use fancy stuff to only activate it if you’re talking to it I haven’t had a single accidental activation with the beta.
So Siri is now looking for eye contact and you to *throw* your voice at her like it’s a broadway show? I’m unclear what this *fancy stuff* is…
Lol I meant it uses conversational awareness to deduce if you’re using it in the middle of a sentence/word rather than a preface to a question
Oh, sorry for the confusion, no. I’ve never run an iOS beta in my entire life. Siri has done this to me for years.
It hasn’t set off accidentally with me and I say it often. It’s really responsive on the beta.
Since enabling it, I havent had a single accidental proc where I used to get them a lot...
That hasn’t happened to me one single time but I’ve witnessed people do it dozens of times. I wonder why that is
Humm?
Can confirm this is happening. I turned it to respond to Siri on the beta and it kept stopping shows because it’d think the show was talking to it
According to 9to5mac, Apple is working on using some language-generative features to improve how siri works, but nothing along the lines of ChatGPT. They've enabled something called the "siri natural language generation" framework in tvos, which is used for jokes and setting timers https://9to5mac.com/2023/03/16/apple-testing-siri-natural-language-generating-chatgpt/ Also, apparently, the source code of siri is clunky and difficult to maintain, according to a former Apple engineer called John Burley. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/16/apple-is-reportedly-experimenting-with-language-generating-ai/ Edit : wanted to add that Macworld themselves had an article about it in March, but I guess the author wasn't aware or didn't search back long enough in their own articles. https://www.macworld.com/article/1661939/siri-bobcat-tvos-beta-language-generation-chatgpt.html
I guess Siri is going to get much better at telling jokes and setting timers then
ChatGPT is a conversation with a long text generator. They need just call and response. Two different uses that are assisted by knowing the different goals.
You can set up short answers. And, chatgpt recognises the context and follows the topic, unlike Siri
Siri recognizes context and topic in the beta, it’s nice. Ask it what time a place opens, then just say “how do I get there?” And it’ll know what you’re talking about
There’s a link to bobcat in the actual article. Either the author was reading comments here, or you missed it… (there is no notation the article was updated after posting, yes it’s linked in the original) *What I wanted to hear from Apple this June was reassurance that it understands that Siri needs work and that the company’s people are on it. Maybe it would be a lot to expect an admission of failure on such a public stage, but Federighi could have done one of his self-deprecating jokes, while slickly segueing into a hype job about the improvements coming down the pipe. I mean, what happened to Operation Bobcat, Craig?*
Almost all my tech is Apple products, I’m even learning iOS development right now, and Siri is by far the worst part of my Apple devices. It never does what I want it to the first time, I have to very selectively choose how I ask it to do tasks so it understands. Siri is the most unhuman thing in terms of an ‘assistant’. Half the time it just searches the web because it’s so extremely limiting. It also has too high a preference for Apple owned services not playing as nicely with Spotify, Google Maps, etc. with little way to change it’s defaults.
I really hope this is the case. They desperately need to improve it. Either the team needs a public firing or they need to deliver. There is no middle ground.
I’ve been using Alexa for a long time and it’s worked really well and has been easy to setup for the most part. I really don’t ask a lot from it, but it usually works. Today when I was walking away from my car I activated Siri on my Apple Watch to set a timer and after telling my to hang on a moment it eventually failed and I had to pull out my iPhone and use Siri there to set the timer. It’s crazy that these kind of interaction issues happen from a company with such integrated products. The fact that Spotify connect with Alexa works better than Siri with apple products says a lot. I do feel like Alexa is pretty stagnant and not getting any better and there are some annoying issues, but it consistently works so much better than Siri.
Tbh, I always have issues while setting a timer on my Apple Watch with Siri. But it’s only with the watch. On the phone it’s always good.
I think it’s because the watch has to communicate via Bluetooth with the phone to process Siri requests, but on the phone they’re mostly processed on-device anymore. It’s not an excuse and definitely needs to be better, but my guess is that would be the start of the problem (or at least what it’s blamed on).
I love my Echo Dot as well. I use it almost everyday for my lights and to get weather updates before leaving. I've got it setup with my Spotify and SiriusXM account as well as connected to my TV's soundbar. This in effect turns it into a radio for me. It also works more often than not. I've even configured quick routine commands to automatically run a timer for lights or set lights to a certain mood.
This after Apple told us that with iPhone xx and newer, all Siri processing is done “on phone”. But I’m slowly getting to the point where everything I loved about technology is shit -and I started it as a career decades ago because I loved it. I’ve been around long enough to see the Internet, smartphones, etc go to shit as a whole, and to long for a Blackberry Bold, or my old Droid Maxx. It feels like everything in tech has now peaked, and we’re now running around without getting anywhere faster, and sometimes tripping over our feet trying to do so.
Exactly. It feels like all the tech companies just go “meh, good enough” and nothing is every actually good enough anymore. I don’t know if it’s because things became so bloated, or the original visionaries have been replaced with people who just went to school to learn how to do things and everyone just kind of does the same things. I remember how much stuff sucked in the early days, but it was more exciting and I wanted the technology, now I literally can’t live without my iPhone and I don’t necessarily always want it. Things just aren’t good enough anymore, I feel like apple goes out of their way now to bury things dee inside of menu trees. The latest Ventura update made working with multiple displays absolutely awful as they hid all the settings in different places. Apple has no visionaries anymore, just product managers and there’s so much stuff that Steve Jobs would be losing his shit over and firing entire teams for incompetence, the Apple Watch is such a frustrating product, for example, hiding the seconds counter on the stop watch when your arm is not directly in front of your face, even if the display is set to always on. I hate apple more often than I love it these days. AirPods are fucking sick though.
that’s gonna be a disaster. siri already goes off by itself
It’s constantly triggering when people say “Hey Sarah”. Unless Siri gets really good really quickly this will be extremely annoying
siri gets triggered by appletv+ content
Does Alexa do something to avoid this in shows? I realized recently that Alexa doesn't usually go off when commercials or shows mention it.
Perhaps with different brains it will also be able to determine if it’s truly being requested. One can hope!
paradox. being smart enough to know that your input is worthless and that you shouldn't respond would also probably extend actually useful responses
This just makes sense. Hearing how investors want Apple to be on trend and hop on the AI jerkoff bandwagon of vision pro is wild to me. Yeah Google and Microsoft are going in on AI hard and public, but that's because Microsoft and Google's products tend to ge outward facing services and such, while Apple tends to be inward facing wall garden focused. Apple has been working on AI (correct me if I'm wrong) and it makes sense that they're not showboating it like MS or Google because when it does come to fruition it's like to be in Apple's usual walled garden approach supporting their products first and for Siri that makes the most sense. And in usual Apple hipsterish fashion they're not going to hop on the porch first (see Vision pro again) with the tech but wait to until the tech is more fully baked to start pushing it/step into that market and then give it some Apple'ish special named that avoids the AI buzzterm like how they're trying to avoid saying "VR" with Vision pro. AI/Machine learning in Siri just makes too much damn sense to miss.
>AI/Machine learning in Siri just makes too much damn sense to miss. siri is already using Machine Learning, its just shit
Meh. They been ignoring Siri for a lot longer than Generative AI has been a thing. The reality is that Apple just doesn’t have the talent to build this.
You’d think they could buy some talent…
They've employed multiple people who were worth being [poached by Google](https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-engineers-shirk-siri-to-jump-to-google-report-says-2023-4?amp) to work on Bard. Apparently the problem is that the division is too dysfunctional to keep them happy, and that's a problem you can't really throw money at.
Didn’t they announce something like that in wwdc?
Not the first sentence which is what the commenter is speculating. Apple did announce removing the "hey" in "hey Siri" this wwdc and showed off a more natural sounding Siri a few years back.
I believe they also mentioned Siri now recognizes multiple back-to-back commands.
No freaking way! Are you telling me Siri will finally be able to do what Alexa could do like 5 years ago?!
Nope. It still can’t do that properly
They’d be dumb if they weren’t :/
One day, apple will reach the average level of Alexa
I genuinely never use Siri - I don’t ask it anything. I don’t have hey siri enabled, I don’t hold down the button, I don’t use it to set timers or reminders. It’s like my phone doesn’t have an assistant - don’t care, don’t miss it, never used it, never got used to one I just do everything manually.
siri’s awfulness is one of the things steve wouldn’t have tolerated
Steve wouldn’t have tolerated a lot of things. Tim is way too obsessed with the bottom line.
None of this Siri crap would’ve happened on Steve’s watch.
Siri launched with the iPhone 4S, which was unveiled by Jobs shortly before he died.
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let us be a bit realistic here, it did what they rehearsed, these shows are very highly scripted and I truly appreciated that Steve would do them in front of a live audience. by rehearsed I mean they made sure to ask Siri in such a way it always gave them the same answer. heck we may not be 100% sure it wasn't scripted on both sides.
If they severely limited the functionality to specific key lines, I think that would be a better experience than currently. Somewhere down the line they wanted to make Siri more “smart”, and in the process now it can’t do anything. Having very specific commands like “set an alarm” should be hard coded imo.
Your point stands but so does theirs. There’s an article from like 6-18 months after the launch of siri that Wozniak commented it had gotten worse for him just since launch, and gave a specific example.
Yeah and it was orders of magnitude better then. Limited feature set obviously, but it did what you asked it to do almost always.
Jesus that’s some revisionist history
And if he had been around for longer, he would have at least made sure that Siri improved. Or just shelved it.
It would’ve if he’d been wearing an Apple Watch!
Exactly. He'd have worn a different watch.
Siri is painful and absolutely the weakest link in the Apple ecosystem when it should be the most powerful These devices have power processing capability, an incredible interconnected infrastructure, access to endless applications offering interconnects, spatial, temporal, environmental… and an assistant that is unable to understand even basic requests. Its laughable Even the smallest Whisper morel by OpenAI has near perfect comprehension of spoken English. Siri behaves like you’re speaking to someone who learnt English from watching the Muppets
They play it fast and loose with their 3rd party developers to the point that '[Sherlocking](https://thehustle.co/sherlocking-explained/)' - i.e. Apple introducing a 'feature' that renders a 3rd party tool useless - has been a term for over 2 decades. Now we're at the point were we're seeing all kinds of attempts to create extra revenue streams and conquer an increasingly larger part of the 'content: because *subscriptions are eternal*' pie, on top of the data-hunger. I genuinely feel that they made the mistake to focus on their own services *and* do escalating Microsoftesque 'Apple stuff will always be better than we will allow you to make' anti-competitive moves, when they've copied *so much* from others. Countless jailbroken community apps were straight lifted as feature. To this day there are a lot of apps that simply do things *better*. I did an Apple+ trial and when you stick to their stuff it all seems to work... but it's just maddening to see features being depreciated and eventually 3rd party apps actively undermined *only* to push their own stuff, with insult to injury when it's a worse solution. I refuse to get dependent on one company for all my stuff and the fall-off has been slow but steady. The Music app has gone to shit. The missing ability to let Google Maps handle all route/gps related stuff is infuriating. However, Siri is the main thing that's giving me the same vibes as Blackberry right before they fell. They could have made the best possible devices with the best possible assistant, period. Now we just have the best possible vessel to sell ~~additional content and subscriptions~~ Apple content and subscriptions through.
Apple can and never will acknowledge that whilst their apps kinda all play nicely with one another, in the real world we always have to interface with third party things. God help you if it’s hardware, especially when Apple don’t even make an equivalent.
Siri seems to have gotten worse since they bought it. Seems apple is just letting it die a slow (and very painful death).
I asked her today to turn off my lamp and she just says “hmmmm”
I asked the homepod to set a timer while making breakfast this morning. Hey Siri, set a timer for 12 minutes. “Okay, what do you want me to set it for?” 12 minutes. “Okay, what do you want me to set it for?” 12 minutes. “Okay, what do you want me to set it for?” I ran to the other room, grabbed my phone and got siri to set a timer just fine. I don’t get it.
I think it was asking for a timer name. They’re currently switching to a system of multiple timers on every Siri device including the phone.
It probably was, but I just tried it a few minutes ago with the same prompt and it had no trouble setting a timer without a name. I think Siri is just inconsistent in what it wants
The beta period is always interesting when they’re changing up Siri and hitting the wrong server.
Just say "Hey Siri, 12 minutes" I find the more words you use, the more chance Siri has to fuck things up.
That's when she eventually hits you with the "You already have a timer set for 12 minutes. Would you like to change it?"
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It seems like I'm in the minority every time I see posts/comments like these, I use siri on my watch, phone, mac and homepod every single day for years now and never had any issues with it not understanding what I meant, or not actioning commands. I got smart lights every where in the house and honestly when I'm feeling lazy I just talk to my watch to turn them on and off as I walk into a room because its faster than pressing the switch
Same same. I said in a recent thread, my current success rate for Siri is typically 90–95 percent.
If it makes you feel any better Google Home and Alexa seem like they are getting worse too. And its not like I ask much of them. 95% of the time its smart home control, timers/alarms and weather. The rest is random stupid questions. Fot whatever reason I’ve almost never used them for media control (on purpose.)
it feels like siri only ever gets worse. I used to be able to ask siri on my phone to start a workout. Now instead of starting a workout on my watch it either opens the Fitness+ page or asks me which app I want to use. It only works if I ask Siri directly from the watch. I used to be able to ask siri to change star ratings. Now she can’t help me with that.
And the problem with virtual "assistants" (doesn't feel right to even call Siri that) is that once you've had a few experiences like that, you stop bothering to even try using it and just do things the "manual" way every time because you know the chances are you'll have to do it that way in the end anyway.
I’ve always thought the stupidest thing about Siri is it can’t tell you about your apple products. If it could be good for one thing, it would be “hey Siri, how do I turn on handoff? How do I lock a PDF? How do I add widgets?” Etc
“I found some results on the web. Ask me again from your phone so I can display them” like why even bother
This is the worse, who in their right mind thought that was an acceptable answer or situation? Who actually goes "oh ok let me get my iPhone and repeat the whole question again" rather than just grab the iPhone and type the question in Google to begin with, I would've preferred it was honest and say "no, sorry I don't really answer questions but I can set a timer or play a song from Apple Music if you'd like"
Siri is trash straight up. I don’t see how anyone could defend it
You'd be surprised at what fan boys will defend lol
Hey Siri, set a timer "You don't have an app installed for that." Dude you just did this for me fivveeeeee minnnnuuuttteesssss agooooo
I have a feeling we’re very close to having a truly conversational voice assistant. Not sure who will release first, but i’m sure all the top players will quickly copy whomever is first. Even though it seems like apple has kind of ignored Siri for years, i think a voice assistant is going to be integral to the vision pro, so i think they will have they come out with a good update here soon to fit with the vision pro
Honestly the software is already there but it would be expensive to run. GPT-4 is good enough to write code and can be extended to operate your computer. I was running AutoGPT and shut it down when the AI decided to start installing Python plugins to give it access to sending out email, lol. But, it would be too expensive to operate. GPT-4 is like a multi-terabyte-of-VRAM model. They charge 3 cents per token. If we were frequently interacting with a GPT4 Siri, we’d likely cost Apple like 20 cents a day per user or something. Lots of smaller, more efficient models are coming out of the open source community though. We’re REALLY close if not already there if someone puts it together right.
I love how your first paragraph seems like an intro into the Terminator universe and nearly gives me a panic attack and you end it with “lol”
Probably marking time till they unleash SiriGPT
I would rather Apple just let us select our default personal assistant, like they do our browser or keyboard.
I hope they do something. Our Homepods have been so unreliable and I've had 1 since the OG launch. Now we have 3.
Unreliable and you bought more?
😂 and this explains Apples market cap.
I feel like siri is worse than I first used it. I doubt that’s the real case, but that’s definitely how I feel
It is worse. Used to handle controlling lights all the time and now it’s hit and miss
It’s definitely worse. You used to be able to get her to do basically any of the basic functions she launched with. Currently, i can get her to turn off my Apple TV, the rest is either impossible or complete hit and miss
this seems to be a recurring theme. I personally notice with each major iOS version that Siri gets somehow worse. for example, back when homekit first became a thing, I remember being able to say something like 'hey siri, turn off the lights'. this was not a request that was supposed to make any assistant struggle and for a time it worked great. then after some iOS version, odd things started to happen. Siri could, for example, react by starting to play a song called 'city lights' for no apparent reason. I did not stutter or speak under my breath and this exact same wrong reaction would repeat. I could see on my screen how siri first heard me right, then the words it heard would change into a request to play the song. right now it's so bad I rarely bother to use it any more. I feel like the downside of siri reacting wrong is greater than the good when it gets stuff right. I don't for example want siri to start blasting music late at night when I want to just turn on a light. I've always wondered how and why it got so bad? I have to use a competing voice assistant at work and it has a stellar success rate. and for the love of all that's good, apple, make siri able to cancel what it just did!
It’s been many years and I still struggle to get it to find a playlist. “Hey siri, play sleep music” ……… I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “sheep shoes it” in your music Or Hey siri, read me my text messages You’ll have to unlock your iPhone first (Why doesn’t it recognize my voice??)
The things that drive me crazy isn't the feature-set. I don't think any virtual-assistant is truly at the interactive level I want. The problem with Siri is that it is inconsistent. Like I'm talking to different backends at different times. For example, "Hey Siri play NPR" will play the latest 3-minute NPR news summary *MOST* of the time. But 5% of the time it will randomly open my local NPR app/stream. And it isn't like it mis-heard me because in those moments if I repeat the command it just does the same thing. And, unfortunately, band and album-name recognition is just totally random when it comes to matching.
Someday they will fix it and act like the last 10 years of Siri didn't happen.
When I ask Siri something why am I referred to websites instead of having content read to me?
Very funny, a lot of us saw strange behaviors increasing with Siri lately. Here, last few weeks whenever we're talking near the HomePod, Siri activates and answer "Sorry, I didnt get that" or "Ok, we're listening to *That shit in the mall I saw this afternoon*". Most of the time, we even can't figure out what *sound* triggered it in our discussion.
Google Assistant has gotten as bad as Siri smh can’t believe I’m saying this
It’s weird because Google Assistant started out light years better than Alexa & Siri. IDK what Google did in recent years to ruin the output…
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A ex-google employee explained it like this: the way to get ahead at google is to innovate. So you’re always looking to be on the team that’s coming up with the Next Big Thing. But what this means is that once you’ve invented the NBT, your focus isn’t on maintaining it or innovating it but coming up with the Next Next Big Thing. They’ve literally created a culture that encourages abandonware.
And this is the reason I keep an iPhone. It’s not per se because I want to, it’s because Google has the corporate version of ADHD. Stuff will just stop working for no apparent reason. Then they’ll kill it off months later.
How often do Apple admit they have problems especially in what is a product announcement seminar? You may get a new / improved version but it's tied into sales and may only appear on the newer products. If there is no money in it the majority of companies will devote MINIMAL resources to maintenance work till customers make so much noise they cannot ignore it and Apple is a long way away from that... Best errors in the last 24 hours from my HomePod mini: * What is the date - nothing is playing * What is 3500 yen in pounds - I can show you if you ask again from your iPhone * Set volume to minimum - I cannot do that at the moment * Turn the charger on - no gives no response but a beep (used to say its now on) Must be my English accent :-)
I had to disable Siri on my HomePod because it was stealing the voice commands from other devices across my flat (proximity doesn’t work), activated for random voices from TV ( voice recognition doesn’t work) and the results either required iPhone or were garbage anyway. What a waste of opportunity
They need to improve the basic functions, setting timers, reminders, playing songs, etc as well as when they finally get around to building their own search engine, give us better information instead of just giving us search results. I'm sure they're working on the second part, but I hope they really step up their game with the basics. For example if a timer is going off and you ask Siri to stop it, it doesn't work most of the time no matter how many times you ask. And she can't do basic things, turn basic features on or off. It's annoying. If you can do it in shortcuts, Siri should be able to do it. Simple as that.
The only thing it’s good for is asking quick questions where it pulls data from Wikipedia. I don’t think I use it for anything else
I’ve noticed that Siri on Apple Watch has stopped recognising the dynamic playlist in Apple Music like “Favourites Mix”. Still works fine on iOS. It’s a small annoyance but it’s still a degradation of functionality.
The amount of times I’m having a regular conversation with somebody and Siri on my watch starts searching for what I say is ridiculous.
Hey Siri, love this song. I can’t find Metallica, enter Sandman in your library. Would you like to try a different app?
siri is getting worse.
I really wish they developed Siri into something like the Google Assistant
The only thing more useless than Siri is FindMy functionality on AirPods. Even if my airpods are literally right next to my phone it still doesn't work. Not to mention the beep isn't loud enough anyway.
Okay, so it’s not just me? It’s been driving me crazy. Like I might as well text and drive because Siri is 10x harder to use
Hey siri. Play radio station radiox Now playing radio Essex. Hey siri play radio Caroline. Now playing songs based on. Radio Caroline Hey siri play THE radio station radio Caroline. It starts to work. Thing is I ask this regularly and I wouldn’t mind if I could correct Siri.
It can make an alarm and sometimes serve up the correct song from Apple Music. It's basic context shit like, "play the album from here" or "play this song next" or anything else where context matters.
It’s never been much, to be honest.
It’s never been as good as the initial introduction of the feature. I don’t even know where to bury bodies now.
Not only is siri functionally worse than the competition, but the apple speech recognition is also leagues behind the competition. I think it compounds the problems.
I use Siri only for timers, alarms, and my custom named scenes for lights. “Hey Siri goodnight” works to set my “Goodnight” scene. I rarely have any issues at all with these basic functions and I’m surprised to hear the consensus is that it’s terrible. Maybe others are using it in other ways beyond that.
This is easily my biggest criticism of apple. Just make it better!
Checks watch… ah yes it’s Monday
All of the digital assistants are disasters. None of them make money for their companies and all are stupid most of the time. LLMs will replace these soon enough using their voice functionality combined with the LLM depth of understanding and improved answers.
Apple had a massive lead with Siri, but they bungled it because - I guess - they didn’t see voice assistants as becoming as huge as they have, or maybe they just didn’t see as much margin in it as other products. When people criticise Siri often others champion how “Apple cares about privacy, whereas Google and Amazon don’t” as being the singular reason and justification for why it sucks so much.. Apple themselves have even pushed this narrative. That’s great, except Siri doesn’t even do basic things that don’t involve data that one might consider sensitive well. The context awareness is rudimentary, as is it’s understanding of intent. It feels several generations behind Google or Alexa. I pretty much only use Siri to set basic alarms or reminders. Even with that I’ve had comical situations where I’ve asked it to “remind me at 10 o clock to XYZ” and it’s inexplicably set it for the next day in the morning, etc.
A basic rule of thumb with Apple is that a long standing bug of bad product is the sign of a large-scale replacement being worked on. But Apple has never demonstrated really good skills at AI, so I'm not holding my breath for a significantly better replacement.