6 ms·

It's ridiculous how Siri is still this shitty. I have an 11 Pro and even on such an expensive phone I can't really trust it to do anything more advanced than se

It's ridiculous how Siri is still this shitty. I have an 11 Pro and even on such an expensive phone I can't really trust it to do anything more advanced than set timers. Every few months I try to do something else and just get annoyed at how bad it is. Before lockdown I even had it disabled entirely because it would get activated randomly from time to time, even if nobody in the vicinity said anything remotely close to "Hey Siri".

bnt 6y ago
I’ve had Siri disabled for years. Even the basic “call home” works every 3rd time. I try it for a few minutes with every new iOS update only to see it’s still the same dumbster fire.
- mxcrossb 6y ago
  When I lived in the United States I frequently used Siri while driving to setup the gps or change what music I was listening to. But indeed, ever since moving to a country with a nice public transportation system, I’ve had it disabled. There just isn’t a compelling use case. Meanwhile, my iPhone has gotten much smarter about adding meetings to my calendar, or guessing the person who is calling me. These seem like the real use cases for AI going forward.
michaelbrooks 6y ago
I mostly use Siri to play Spotify, but most of the time she won't listen to me through my car's microphone. If she isn't working then I need to pull my phone out of my pocket and place it somewhere the phone can clearly hear me. Every once in a while she will decide to listen through my car, but it's very rare. I don't have Apple Car Play so not sure if that's a factor. Google has been far better and more consistent listening through my car even if it didn't get my query correct all the time, at least I could correct it without pulling my phone out.
chappar 6y ago
I had never used an Apple product before the company which I joined recently gave me a MacBook Pro. I am really surprised how bad the product quality is. The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over. Similarly the keyboard shortcut is random. Sometimes it opens the app, sometimes it does not. The laptop also gets very hot if you are not sitting in A/C. Not sure if it is this specific laptop or it is a general issue
- roland35 6y ago
  I had this problem too. Maybe try charging it on the other side. It sounds crazy but it's true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22957573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22957573
- leonroy 6y ago
  > The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over. I see something similar and assumed this happens because Mail / Calendar are relying on ics attachments (not sure what the behaviour is with the Gmail integration). I believe this means that if Mail is closed you don’t get Calendar updates until you open both and refresh. Either way I find I have to refresh Mail and Calendar a lot to keep them in sync.
- eknkc 6y ago
  Yeah it is the norm these days. I’ve been using macs for 15 years and they bave been fantastic until the very last iteration (after 2016, 17). My latest MacBook (16") is so unstable that it is actually funny at this point.
  - osrec 6y ago
    So do people just buy these to look cool? I tried using a Macbook many times, but often got frustrated and went back to my good old Linux laptop for development. Doesn't look quite as slick, but certainly gets the job done.
toyg 6y ago
TBH, Google Assistant is not that much better. In the last few months it has become absurdly racist against my Italian accent, replying to me in Italian after I ask stuff in English - and getting the question wrong anyway. But yes, Siri is the worst.
- ewindal 6y ago
  There’s nothing worse than being forced to use a language you didn’t explicitly request. Well, maybe some things are worse.
  - swebs 6y ago
    Probably at least number 3 behind the Holocaust and Internet Explorer.
- swebs 6y ago
  Are you sure it's due to your accent? That seems like a difficult feature to even implement. I know Google loves to play language shenanigans based on your current IP address.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    Mine will sometimes parse English, sometimes German. Sometimes it will understand English, and answer in German. It's a total crapshoot.
  - toyg 6y ago
    I live in England.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  You consider that racist?
- r1ch 6y ago
  Google Assistant failed on me recently trying to set a timer. It correctly understood my "set timer for three-and-a-half minutes" request, says it's setting a timer for 3am instead and proceeds to actually set a timer for 30 seconds. How is there that much disconnect between the stages of the query?! Screenshot: https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1252232170237640706/photo/1 https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1252232170237640706/photo...
jotm 6y ago
It's ridiculous how poor in functionality all of them are... The best they can do is, what? Creating schedule entries, for me. All I ask Google is the weather, time, some search when I'm lazy and translate (the voice translate app itself is great btw). Feeling like a total corporate bitch saying "Hey Google" every time, too :D This is supposed to be a personal assistant. And I have a whole list of what it could do for me, personally. But it doesn't. I've been trying to figure out how to hook Google's speech recognition and voice into other apps, since they're great and it's 99% of what I need, hands-free control and feedback. Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  I agree, some things are just astonishingly bad given the immense effort and resources that are being put into machine learning. Microsoft OneDrive tags my photos. It's mostly useless. For instance, I have some pictures of squirrels on the tree outside my window. Squirrels can really do the most amazing things on trees, but they are small compared to the tree. Microsoft with all its AI muscle will invariably tag those images as something like #Outdoor #Grass #Plant #Tree. It's the same problem with all of those benchmark beating AIs. They have no clue what's special about the picture and what just happens to be in them as well.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something. Like they would ever do that. Then you would no longer be their "corporate bitch". Seriously, the one thing that stands between home assistants and being useful is opening the software up and letting it be used by regular OSS devs. Alas, every one of the four big providers (Apple, Google, MS and Amazon) treat them as their moat; they want control over the ecosystem. It's the same in many other places in the industry - we're technologically way behind where we could be, because everyone wants to be the platform and commoditize everyone else, which necessitates having total control.
  - jotm 6y ago
empath75 6y ago
It even sucks at setting timers. I asked to set a timer for 50 minutes and it clearly said 50 minutes on the screen and then “corrected” it to 15 minutes. For a while, it randomly decided that “call my wife” meant to “call my mom.” It clearly said call my wife on the screen and then switched to “mom”.
- huffmsa 6y ago
  Ask it to set a timer for 5/6ths of an hour.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  You have to know the Siri hacks. Set a timer for fifty-one minutes or fourty-nine minutes. Even siri can hear that
pjc50 6y ago
The problem is not just that it is wrong, nor that it doesn't have enough personal information, but that it lacks proper personalisation and the ability to learn. You can't reply with "no Siri, not that London" and have it remember. It doesn't learn your voice among the people who normally use your Siri in your household. "Artificial intelligence" is always going to make mistakes, as do real humans. Humans can perform unsupervised learning - in fact it's one of the key skills that employers like to select on! Until AI can learn in context it's going to be very limited.
- neor 6y ago
  Siri indeed never learns. I've had to disable "Hey Siri" because my daughters name is pronounced vaguely similar to Siri. Worst thing is, Siri transcribes what it hears, and it transcribes my daughters name. So it doesn't hear wrong; it just activates on a different name than Siri. I've tried telling Siri to shut up; but it never learns not to activate when I call out my daughters name.
  - mdemare 6y ago
    It activated when I greeted my cat. My cat is called "Timmie"
  - aasasd 6y ago
    That might be because the activation words are recognized by a separate chip (so it's low-power and works offline). Whereas the rest of the conversation is with the software service. At least that's what I heard about how iirc Alexa works.
  - hrktb 6y ago
    Activation words are fuzzy by design. Siri is easy enough so we never looked much into it, but “OK Google” for instance looked like a real PITA, so we did some research before buying an assistant. It appears a ton of people just intentionally say “Ok GooGoo”, “Ok Boogle” etc., whatever is easier for them to pronounce and it works perfectly fine.
    - 6y ago
pndy 6y ago
I think that up until the real AI appears that can mimic human personality and expand it, understand variety of languages, virtual assistants will remain what they are: virtual assistants capable of executing basic commands provided by a human (preferably in English). This technology isn't bad per se - in particular cases is helpful (blind people) but it's still far for what we dream about. My Nokia 1320 with Windows Phone 8.1 come with a very basic VA that was capable of understand Polish but only if I drop all grammar and talk like a robot. The "call mum" is "zadzwoń do mamy" in its proper form, but I had to do "zadzwoń do mama" which sounds unnatural; not mention that stuff is also being read without proper Polish grammar; "calling mum" is synthesized as "dzwonię do mama", not "dzwonię do mamy". The grammar complexity is a problem for VA technology and probably that's why neither Siri nor Cortana supports Polish or other Slavic languages, not mention dozen of other languages.
csomar 6y ago
Yesterday I was washing the car while listening to Music with the air pods. I mistakenly clicked them and it launched Siri which for some reason it called a number on my phone through Facetime.
- fiblye 6y ago
  I always immediately disable siri because something similar happened the very first week I got my first iPhone. It seems to want to call the one person you haven't talked to in years.
  - csomar 6y ago
    Ha. Same thing for me. Made me rush to the phone as I heard the number it wanted to call.
Gatsky 6y ago
It isn’t really ridiculous. The number of people that buy an iphone because of Siri could share a pizza.
- DangerousPie 6y ago
  It may not be the main selling point but it's certainly a factor for many people. And the fact that Siri is so bad makes the whole phone feel less high-quality. And maybe I'm the exception here, but I have refrained from buying an Apple Homepod specifically because of how bad Siri is. If it was on the same level as Google Assistant I would have bought one by now.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Back when Siri was new and I was much younger this was something I really wanted…
wazoox 6y ago
I almost never use the "google assistant". However it has an habit of firing up while I'm driving listening to podcasts : "I didn't understand your command" (generally, at a annoyingly loud level, with that). I didn't ask you anything, you stupid. You've just misunderstood a sound coming out of the phone itself, where nobody said anything remotely related to "hey google" or "OK google". Puhlease.
- viewer5 6y ago
  I turn off as many settings for Assistant as I can, and disallow the Microphone permission to the "Google" app. That should help you out.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
I'm convinced it's actually gotten worse with the 11, I recently went from an iPhone 7 where Siri only really activated randomly a handful of times a year and could set timers (Only thing I ever use it for) with a shout across a room over the sound of an oven and fan. Now it randomly activates multiple times a week and really struggles to even pick up me talking to it right next to it. Convinced they've switched to a less capable microphone system because assistants were all the rage in the 7 era but now I think people have realized it's not really that important.
jonplackett 6y ago
Like others have said - it's Apple's privacy policy, they don't know enough about you and can't use the recordings to train. I think Apple should have been more honest about it in their privacy messaging - "Hey guys, pretty please can we listen to your Siri recordings? We know it's not the privacy style you're used to from Apple, but if you want Siri to ever not be a piece of crap, this is really the only way."
- michelb 6y ago
  I don't buy that anymore. There's a multitude of ways to improve Siri while respecting privacy. Apple doesn't have to go the Google way to improve. Apple knows a ton about me, they have realtime access to my email, calendar, contacts etc. If they have guarded access, then I would accept a toggle. A lot of Siri processing happens locally on the device nowadays, which could be why the Watch, Mac, iPhone and Homepod all can give wildly different results. Also, Apple could train it themselves, they possibly do, except we haven't gotten an update yet. A large portion of my personal training data could be stored in iCloud, I mean my passwords, mail, documents and my photos are there, right? The analysis of my voice data is sent to Apple anyway.
rhinoceraptor 6y ago
I get the accidental invocations about once a day, because my dog is named Maisie and apparently that's just close enough to "Hey Siri".
racl101 6y ago
Siri is utterly useless. Like, I just don't. The only capacity in which I use it is to tell it to open an app on the phone, or set the timer. Siri is like that nice employe who was hired by way of nepotism, and she's attractive, but she sucks at most things, but the organization won't fire her because of aforementioned nepotism in the organization and the only reason you put up with her is cause she's attractive and she, at the very least, makes coffee and makes photocopies just good enough, but you can't trust her with more advanced tasks. What's worse is that the organization also won't hire her more talented and equally attractive contemporary Google Assistant because of aforementioned nepotism. The boss thinks there's only room for one assistant. lol.
dunham 6y ago
Still? Siri has actually gotten worse. In the last year or so it's gone from correctly handling "add red salsa to the shopping list" to consistently adding two items "red" and "salsa". (It also fails on "buttermilk" and others.) And around the time this started happening, Siri went from acting after a short pause to saying "just a sec" after a short pause. Perhaps it's time to file a feature request to Apple to allow us to plug in alternative digital assistants in place of Siri.
justinph 6y ago
"Timers"? You mean: the timer. You can still only set one timer. Yet another deficiency. Its like the people who work on iOS don't ever cook multiple things at once.
parliament32 6y ago
Same deal for me but with Google. I had to turn it off because it kept activating itself, despite voice training it to apparently just my voice. I'd be driving in the car by myself, playing music (via BT, from Google Play, on the same phone!) and it would randomly pause my music and give me an assistant prompt (after, I assume, hearing something in the song that it was playing itself that sounded like OK Google). It was absolutely infuriating and would come up a few times a week.

bnt 6y ago

I’ve had Siri disabled for years. Even the basic “call home” works every 3rd time. I try it for a few minutes with every new iOS update only to see it’s still the same dumbster fire.

mxcrossb 6y ago
When I lived in the United States I frequently used Siri while driving to setup the gps or change what music I was listening to. But indeed, ever since moving to a country with a nice public transportation system, I’ve had it disabled. There just isn’t a compelling use case. Meanwhile, my iPhone has gotten much smarter about adding meetings to my calendar, or guessing the person who is calling me. These seem like the real use cases for AI going forward.

michaelbrooks 6y ago

I mostly use Siri to play Spotify, but most of the time she won't listen to me through my car's microphone. If she isn't working then I need to pull my phone out of my pocket and place it somewhere the phone can clearly hear me. Every once in a while she will decide to listen through my car, but it's very rare. I don't have Apple Car Play so not sure if that's a factor. Google has been far better and more consistent listening through my car even if it didn't get my query correct all the time, at least I could correct it without pulling my phone out.

chappar 6y ago

I had never used an Apple product before the company which I joined recently gave me a MacBook Pro. I am really surprised how bad the product quality is. The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over. Similarly the keyboard shortcut is random. Sometimes it opens the app, sometimes it does not. The laptop also gets very hot if you are not sitting in A/C. Not sure if it is this specific laptop or it is a general issue

roland35 6y ago
I had this problem too. Maybe try charging it on the other side. It sounds crazy but it's true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22957573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22957573
leonroy 6y ago
> The calendar notification is very random. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it does not. I have missed couple of meetings because notification popped after the meeting was over. I see something similar and assumed this happens because Mail / Calendar are relying on ics attachments (not sure what the behaviour is with the Gmail integration). I believe this means that if Mail is closed you don’t get Calendar updates until you open both and refresh. Either way I find I have to refresh Mail and Calendar a lot to keep them in sync.
eknkc 6y ago
Yeah it is the norm these days. I’ve been using macs for 15 years and they bave been fantastic until the very last iteration (after 2016, 17). My latest MacBook (16") is so unstable that it is actually funny at this point.
- osrec 6y ago
  So do people just buy these to look cool? I tried using a Macbook many times, but often got frustrated and went back to my good old Linux laptop for development. Doesn't look quite as slick, but certainly gets the job done.

toyg 6y ago

TBH, Google Assistant is not that much better. In the last few months it has become absurdly racist against my Italian accent, replying to me in Italian after I ask stuff in English - and getting the question wrong anyway. But yes, Siri is the worst.

ewindal 6y ago
There’s nothing worse than being forced to use a language you didn’t explicitly request. Well, maybe some things are worse.
- swebs 6y ago
  Probably at least number 3 behind the Holocaust and Internet Explorer.
swebs 6y ago
Are you sure it's due to your accent? That seems like a difficult feature to even implement. I know Google loves to play language shenanigans based on your current IP address.
- nicbou 6y ago
  Mine will sometimes parse English, sometimes German. Sometimes it will understand English, and answer in German. It's a total crapshoot.
- toyg 6y ago
  I live in England.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
You consider that racist?
r1ch 6y ago
Google Assistant failed on me recently trying to set a timer. It correctly understood my "set timer for three-and-a-half minutes" request, says it's setting a timer for 3am instead and proceeds to actually set a timer for 30 seconds. How is there that much disconnect between the stages of the query?! Screenshot: https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1252232170237640706/photo/1 https://twitter.com/R1CH_TL/status/1252232170237640706/photo...

jotm 6y ago

It's ridiculous how poor in functionality all of them are... The best they can do is, what? Creating schedule entries, for me. All I ask Google is the weather, time, some search when I'm lazy and translate (the voice translate app itself is great btw). Feeling like a total corporate bitch saying "Hey Google" every time, too :D This is supposed to be a personal assistant. And I have a whole list of what it could do for me, personally. But it doesn't. I've been trying to figure out how to hook Google's speech recognition and voice into other apps, since they're great and it's 99% of what I need, hands-free control and feedback. Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago
I agree, some things are just astonishingly bad given the immense effort and resources that are being put into machine learning. Microsoft OneDrive tags my photos. It's mostly useless. For instance, I have some pictures of squirrels on the tree outside my window. Squirrels can really do the most amazing things on trees, but they are small compared to the tree. Microsoft with all its AI muscle will invariably tag those images as something like #Outdoor #Grass #Plant #Tree. It's the same problem with all of those benchmark beating AIs. They have no clue what's special about the picture and what just happens to be in them as well.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Maybe they should make that easy, preferably offline and let other people create their own personal assistant modules or something. Like they would ever do that. Then you would no longer be their "corporate bitch". Seriously, the one thing that stands between home assistants and being useful is opening the software up and letting it be used by regular OSS devs. Alas, every one of the four big providers (Apple, Google, MS and Amazon) treat them as their moat; they want control over the ecosystem. It's the same in many other places in the industry - we're technologically way behind where we could be, because everyone wants to be the platform and commoditize everyone else, which necessitates having total control.
- jotm 6y ago

empath75 6y ago

It even sucks at setting timers. I asked to set a timer for 50 minutes and it clearly said 50 minutes on the screen and then “corrected” it to 15 minutes. For a while, it randomly decided that “call my wife” meant to “call my mom.” It clearly said call my wife on the screen and then switched to “mom”.

huffmsa 6y ago
Ask it to set a timer for 5/6ths of an hour.
jonplackett 6y ago
You have to know the Siri hacks. Set a timer for fifty-one minutes or fourty-nine minutes. Even siri can hear that

pjc50 6y ago

The problem is not just that it is wrong, nor that it doesn't have enough personal information, but that it lacks proper personalisation and the ability to learn. You can't reply with "no Siri, not that London" and have it remember. It doesn't learn your voice among the people who normally use your Siri in your household. "Artificial intelligence" is always going to make mistakes, as do real humans. Humans can perform unsupervised learning - in fact it's one of the key skills that employers like to select on! Until AI can learn in context it's going to be very limited.

neor 6y ago
Siri indeed never learns. I've had to disable "Hey Siri" because my daughters name is pronounced vaguely similar to Siri. Worst thing is, Siri transcribes what it hears, and it transcribes my daughters name. So it doesn't hear wrong; it just activates on a different name than Siri. I've tried telling Siri to shut up; but it never learns not to activate when I call out my daughters name.
- mdemare 6y ago
  It activated when I greeted my cat. My cat is called "Timmie"
- aasasd 6y ago
  That might be because the activation words are recognized by a separate chip (so it's low-power and works offline). Whereas the rest of the conversation is with the software service. At least that's what I heard about how iirc Alexa works.
- hrktb 6y ago
  Activation words are fuzzy by design. Siri is easy enough so we never looked much into it, but “OK Google” for instance looked like a real PITA, so we did some research before buying an assistant. It appears a ton of people just intentionally say “Ok GooGoo”, “Ok Boogle” etc., whatever is easier for them to pronounce and it works perfectly fine.
  - 6y ago

pndy 6y ago

I think that up until the real AI appears that can mimic human personality and expand it, understand variety of languages, virtual assistants will remain what they are: virtual assistants capable of executing basic commands provided by a human (preferably in English). This technology isn't bad per se - in particular cases is helpful (blind people) but it's still far for what we dream about. My Nokia 1320 with Windows Phone 8.1 come with a very basic VA that was capable of understand Polish but only if I drop all grammar and talk like a robot. The "call mum" is "zadzwoń do mamy" in its proper form, but I had to do "zadzwoń do mama" which sounds unnatural; not mention that stuff is also being read without proper Polish grammar; "calling mum" is synthesized as "dzwonię do mama", not "dzwonię do mamy". The grammar complexity is a problem for VA technology and probably that's why neither Siri nor Cortana supports Polish or other Slavic languages, not mention dozen of other languages.

csomar 6y ago

Yesterday I was washing the car while listening to Music with the air pods. I mistakenly clicked them and it launched Siri which for some reason it called a number on my phone through Facetime.

fiblye 6y ago
I always immediately disable siri because something similar happened the very first week I got my first iPhone. It seems to want to call the one person you haven't talked to in years.
- csomar 6y ago
  Ha. Same thing for me. Made me rush to the phone as I heard the number it wanted to call.

Gatsky 6y ago

It isn’t really ridiculous. The number of people that buy an iphone because of Siri could share a pizza.

DangerousPie 6y ago
It may not be the main selling point but it's certainly a factor for many people. And the fact that Siri is so bad makes the whole phone feel less high-quality. And maybe I'm the exception here, but I have refrained from buying an Apple Homepod specifically because of how bad Siri is. If it was on the same level as Google Assistant I would have bought one by now.
saagarjha 6y ago
Back when Siri was new and I was much younger this was something I really wanted…

wazoox 6y ago

I almost never use the "google assistant". However it has an habit of firing up while I'm driving listening to podcasts : "I didn't understand your command" (generally, at a annoyingly loud level, with that). I didn't ask you anything, you stupid. You've just misunderstood a sound coming out of the phone itself, where nobody said anything remotely related to "hey google" or "OK google". Puhlease.

viewer5 6y ago
I turn off as many settings for Assistant as I can, and disallow the Microphone permission to the "Google" app. That should help you out.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

I'm convinced it's actually gotten worse with the 11, I recently went from an iPhone 7 where Siri only really activated randomly a handful of times a year and could set timers (Only thing I ever use it for) with a shout across a room over the sound of an oven and fan. Now it randomly activates multiple times a week and really struggles to even pick up me talking to it right next to it. Convinced they've switched to a less capable microphone system because assistants were all the rage in the 7 era but now I think people have realized it's not really that important.

jonplackett 6y ago

Like others have said - it's Apple's privacy policy, they don't know enough about you and can't use the recordings to train. I think Apple should have been more honest about it in their privacy messaging - "Hey guys, pretty please can we listen to your Siri recordings? We know it's not the privacy style you're used to from Apple, but if you want Siri to ever not be a piece of crap, this is really the only way."

michelb 6y ago
I don't buy that anymore. There's a multitude of ways to improve Siri while respecting privacy. Apple doesn't have to go the Google way to improve. Apple knows a ton about me, they have realtime access to my email, calendar, contacts etc. If they have guarded access, then I would accept a toggle. A lot of Siri processing happens locally on the device nowadays, which could be why the Watch, Mac, iPhone and Homepod all can give wildly different results. Also, Apple could train it themselves, they possibly do, except we haven't gotten an update yet. A large portion of my personal training data could be stored in iCloud, I mean my passwords, mail, documents and my photos are there, right? The analysis of my voice data is sent to Apple anyway.

rhinoceraptor 6y ago

I get the accidental invocations about once a day, because my dog is named Maisie and apparently that's just close enough to "Hey Siri".

racl101 6y ago

Siri is utterly useless. Like, I just don't. The only capacity in which I use it is to tell it to open an app on the phone, or set the timer. Siri is like that nice employe who was hired by way of nepotism, and she's attractive, but she sucks at most things, but the organization won't fire her because of aforementioned nepotism in the organization and the only reason you put up with her is cause she's attractive and she, at the very least, makes coffee and makes photocopies just good enough, but you can't trust her with more advanced tasks. What's worse is that the organization also won't hire her more talented and equally attractive contemporary Google Assistant because of aforementioned nepotism. The boss thinks there's only room for one assistant. lol.

dunham 6y ago

Still? Siri has actually gotten worse. In the last year or so it's gone from correctly handling "add red salsa to the shopping list" to consistently adding two items "red" and "salsa". (It also fails on "buttermilk" and others.) And around the time this started happening, Siri went from acting after a short pause to saying "just a sec" after a short pause. Perhaps it's time to file a feature request to Apple to allow us to plug in alternative digital assistants in place of Siri.

justinph 6y ago

"Timers"? You mean: the timer. You can still only set one timer. Yet another deficiency. Its like the people who work on iOS don't ever cook multiple things at once.

parliament32 6y ago

Same deal for me but with Google. I had to turn it off because it kept activating itself, despite voice training it to apparently just my voice. I'd be driving in the car by myself, playing music (via BT, from Google Play, on the same phone!) and it would randomly pause my music and give me an assistant prompt (after, I assume, hearing something in the song that it was playing itself that sounded like OK Google). It was absolutely infuriating and would come up a few times a week.