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Is anyone else an avid iPhone user, yet also someone who never uses Siri? I've used an iPhone exclusively for the past 8 years, and I can count on one hand the
by hazyc 4y ago
Is anyone else an avid iPhone user, yet also someone who never uses Siri? I've used an iPhone exclusively for the past 8 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've used Siri. Interestingly, the one person I know who loves using Siri is my 70yr old dad.
- BudaDude 4y agoI use Siri for setting timers and reminders. It's pretty good at parsing numbers. Other than that, It hasn't been very reliable for me. Apple really needs to overhaul Siri's intelligence.
- zippergz 4y agoYes, I have had iPhones from the beginning and I never use Siri.
- trap_goes_hot 4y agoI use it for things like 'will it rain today' or sending quick texts when I am driving.
- dfee 4y agoI use Siri all the time and am half your dads age. “Get directions to the nearest gas station.”, “What’s the score of the Giant’s game?”, “Play Master of Puppets”, “What is 4’3” in centimeters?” And many, many more.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoMan, I used to love using Siri, until I had a daughter and named her "Sarah" big mistake. Turns out I say "Hey Sarah" a hundred times a day, and all my iDevices pipe up and simultaneously say "Yeah?" "WHAT'S UP" "HEY OVER HERE" "Hi it's me Siri what do you need?"
- keepquestioning 4y agoWhy did you pick 'Sarah'
- bigiain 4y ago“You’re naming your children wrong.” — Jeve Stobs.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoLate every night I cry and scream while asking myself this same question, surrounded by my iPhone, Apple Watch, 3 iPads, MacBook Pro, and Mac Studio How could I have been such a fool!???
- MichaelCollins 4y agoKeeping true to your username? In case you are earnestly somehow unaware, Sarah is among the most popular feminine given names of all time, with Hebrew origin but also popular with Christians, Muslims, nonreligious people in areas influenced by those religions, and in just about every country and culture influenced by any of those. It's hard to even think of a culture which doesn't use the name Sarah in some form; I'm drawing a complete blank; where are you from? Alpha Centauri?
- parker_mountain 4y agoI use it pretty frequently, mostly to set timers, alarms, or send quick texts without getting up.
- SigmundA 4y agoI was that way for a long time, but the Apple TV remote got me using it and I now occasionally do use it on my iPhone, mainly while driving to play music on reply to texts. Definitely has come a long way and is useful, one of my friends never types texts anymore and just dictates through Siri.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoMy personal use as someone his 30s is mostly as a kitchen timer with a HomePod mini (not my phone), to turn on/off lights, and to occasionally toss things onto a to-do list. My dad on the other hand loves his full size HomePod stereo pair and uses them frequently, almost entirely for playing music with voice commands. I think there are other things he might find it useful for but I haven't shown him those yet.
- dilap 4y agoOccasionally I ask her (it?) to set a timer or add a reminder, but mostly I don't. Siri is quite slow and frustratingly limited. The other day in a hurry and driving somewhere, I ended up w/ both Apple Maps and Google Maps open, simultaneously giving me directions. "Hey Siri, close Google Maps" "To close an application, swipe up from the bottom of the phone..." To paraphrase a quote from Steve Jobs, if your voice assistant asks you to touch the screen, you blew it.
- pftburger 4y agoSeconded. I get way too many "Im sorry Dave, I just can't do that" moments
- josephg 4y agoI've given up asking her arbitrary questions - the other day I asked what the weather was like in Sydney. (I live in Australia, so the context is really obvious). She told me what the weather was like at "Sidney's tool shed" - wherever that is. But I use siri daily for things like: - Setting and stopping alarms and timers: ("Hey siri - set alarm for tomorrow morning at 9:25" / when the alarm goes off: "Hey siri stop") - Turning on and off my lights. Its a delight every time to say "hey siri goodnight" when I go to bed and see all the lights in the house turn off.
- Kye 4y agoSiri handles this fine on my new phone from the opposite end of the globe. This seems to support my suspicion that they ship increasingly less sophisticated Siris to increasingly older phones. Siri on my 6S Plus before this became almost useless once they switched to on-device processing. It's also much better at identifying objects in photos for searches.
- josephg 4y agoI'm querying siri on a homepod, not a phone. And I just checked - she still answers with a weather report near "Sidney Tools". (Its currently raining and 17 degrees C, if you're wondering.) I have a running theory that you can tell how long any FAANG bug will stick around by just imagining a 25 year old tech dude in the bay area. If Dave the bay area tech dude will never encounter the bug, you're in for a bad time. For example, google maps used to give terrible directions at roundabouts (traffic circles). That makes sense because there's no traffic circles in the bay area. All the people who could fix the problem weren't aware there was a problem at all. Dave is terrified of roundabouts, so of course it took about a decade for directions at roundabouts to improve. A corollary of this is that modern software works well proportionally to how closely your setup matches that of the average bay area tech dude. Everything works best if you have a new phone (preferably an iPhone), fast computer and you speak english. Woe be to you if your computer is old and slow, or you use a right-to-left language, if you're blind or you have a bad internet connection. Macos feels laggy and slow on a slow internet connection because of course it does. Bay area tech bros are never in that situation! What would Dave know about slow internet?
- dcdc123 4y agoThe only reason I even have it enabled is because it is required for voicemail transcription.
- madrox 4y agoIn my experiences working on voice OS, it's boom or bust depending on the user. Some people use it rarely if ever and some people live by it, and there's little in between. I think it makes sense in most cases to view voice commands as an accessibility feature.
- nanidin 4y agoSiri killer apps for me are asking for factoids via my watch, and opening my garage door as I approach while driving (my building uses an app that requires multiple taps + swipes to open the garage door, using Siri makes it palatable.)
- gleenn 4y agoAre you using proprietary garage door software? Would live to have any better kind of integration there so any setup details that aren't crazy specific to some manufacturer would be interesting
- pcardoso 4y agoNot the parent, but I use Shelly devices flashed with the shelly-homekit firmware and I can control them with the HomeKit app or Siri. I haven't bothered yet to add a open/close sensor so the current open state is lost if I use the remote. I have to invert the actions when this happens. Annoying but I only need to use it this way occasionally.
- nanidin 4y agoMy apartment building recently switched to an access control system called Brivo. It replaced a keyfob + garage door opener system with an app. Overall not the greatest as it's now difficult to get into the building if you leave your phone at home. My "integration" with Siri is to set up an iOS shortcut and use Siri to trigger it.
- TheFreim 4y ago> I know who loves using Siri is my 70yr old dad. My mother loves using Siri, she always uses it when she wants to look things up. It seems quite useful for people who aren't proficient at typing quickly, easier to ask Siri.
- Ntrails 4y agoI disabled it all the day it came out. I briefly enabled so I could text mum to say when I was nearly home. Avoids sneaking a traffic light text. Turns out it was waaaaaaaay more distracting and time consuming to get siri to text a single word, so back into the box it went
- aparks517 4y agoFor sure. I stood in line for the original iPhone, owned every model (except the 5C) up through the 6, then an SE, X, and now an 11 Pro since it came out. I played around with Siri when it debuted, but didn't use it much. I turned it off at some point (I think it was when Apple was catching grief for keeping recordings or something like that) and haven't missed it. I'm not against it especially -- it just never really became part of my life.
- z9znz 4y agoMy colleagues and I had a moment of fun somewhere in remote Iceland, offroading on the way to a glacier. On an iPhone 3G, we were able to ask trivia questions and get pretty useful responses. Aside from setting a timer, I've not seen Siri do anything more useful in 9 years. You haven't missed anything.
- lagrange77 4y agoThe first day i asked her for the weather, songs and alarms. The second day i turing tested her, asked it philosophical questions and insulted it the worst way. Yes, that was pretty much it.
- z9znz 4y agoIronically, she will complain if you cuss at her and call her names, but she won't turn herself off. And when she pops up without my request, and I want her to go off, it seems there's no verbal way to make her go away... even verbally abusing her.
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- tristor 4y agoYou are not alone. I've been using an iPhone for over a decade now. I've had Siri turned off the entire time. I have never turned it on. I do not now, or ever, want a "voice assistant" or any technology that listens to me and tries to understand what I want by listening to me. I want technology that does exactly what I tell it to do and nothing more. Siri is a better option than the alternative "voice assistants" on the market, but they're all bad in my book, and I don't want any of them.
- joshstrange 4y agoMy trust of what Siri is capable of is laughably low but I do use it for reminders ("Remind me on X day...", "Remind me in X hours...", "Remind me when I get home...") and for timers. Occasionally I'll use it for unit conversions but I usually use Alexa for that since I'm in my kitchen often when I use that and it's just right there. Other than that I don't use it.
- asadlionpk 4y agoI just use it in text-mode ie. Double tap siri button, type the thing I want (wake me 7am). Done.
- z9znz 4y agoI use Siri to set a timer. That's it. And I do it by holding my power button to activate her. My only other use of Siri usually involved phrases like "stop", "go away", "close", "fucking close!", "you stupid fcking * ** close the **** thing" when Siri would pop up out of nowhere and interrupt whatever I was actually doing. I had it turned off, but occasionally somehow it's back on, listening. Other actual attempts at using it have been no better than 50% effective, so it wasn't worth the trouble. And I was speaking very clearly and articulately. I've observed a friend (a Googler who had Google-fied his house) have frequent useless conversations with the Google assistant, so maybe 50% is the best you can hope for. No experience with Alexa, but I'd be too scared to even turn it on; I might end up with three refrigerators delivered the next day.
- jdwithit 4y agoSame here. Even that simple task (setting a timer) only has about a 75% success rate for me. The other 25% it spins for 30 seconds then says "hmm something went wrong". Trying for anything more complex, even playing a song or album, is just asking for trouble. I honestly can't believe how bad Siri is despite years of development. I do have an older iPhone 10 and maybe it's just not up to the task of running Siri? But if so they should disable it rather than put on this extremely amateur feeling show. For what it's worth we have an Echo Dot in the house and I find it to be both orders of magnitude more responsive and more likely to actually do what I asked for. No unwanted refrigerators have arrived as of yet.
- concinds 4y agoI use Type to Siri on my Mac; all I ever use it for is "Play [song]". 70-80% of the time it goes: "something went wrong..." When I try typing "Play [song] on repeat", it never understands that; it plays it, but not on repeat. There's zero excuse due to mishearing me, since I'm typing everything. Siri is just defective, and I think it's a great measure of how dysfunctional Apple and poorly-run is. Why are all of Apple's AI and online-service efforts amateur hour?
- ASalazarMX 4y agoMy only usage of it is as a push-button dictionary/translator, "define x", "how do you say x in Spanish". For every other use I've found it extremely limited, you have to ask the right questions, otherwise it defaults to a web search on my wife's phone, even if she's not in the room. How, after all these years, is it still so stunted? There are Telegram bots with better interaction.
- dylan604 4y agoI have never enabled Siri on any device. Precisely for fear of this kind of shit, or the ones where humans are listening to the recordings that are obviously being made, and all of the other logical conclusions one can reach on how this can be abused. Just like HDD failures, it is not a question of if but when.
- Aaronstotle 4y agoI only enabled Siri because it was necessary for CarPlay, it's about a 50% success rate on getting anything right on the first try.
- bdougherty 4y agoI only ever use it in the car with CarPlay.
- knodi123 4y agoI switched from Android a few years ago because my company gives out iphones as a perk. I used "ok google" extensively, and loved it. It was incredibly good at answering obscure questions and doing things like navigating or playing a song. It would do what I wanted almost every time, even if I was trying a new command for the first time. I try to use Siri for the same things, but she suuuuuuucks. If I ask her to play a song, 9 out of 10 times it will do something idiotic- like I say "hey siri play tears in heaven on spotify", she might reply "now playing tears in heaven by a shitty kazoo cover band". If I say "navigate to the closest olive garden", it would say "navigating to olive garden corporate headquarters, estimated travel time 43 hours 12 minutes." But never mind, I can see the olive garden I was looking for, it's at the end of the street I'm on. These are artificial examples because I can't remember specifics right now, but trust me - the real examples were just as dumb. She's great at setting timers or alarms though! And I can reliably use her to pause, skip, or adjust volume when I'm showering or something.
- sbf501 4y agoiPhone user since 2009. I used Siri for about a month when it first came out because I really liked hearing a British man's voice said "SSSSHedule" to me instead of "skedule", but then I learned it was sending all audio to the cloud and noped out.
- crazygringo 4y agoWhen exercising and listening to a Spotify radio station, I use it to ask who the artist/song is. That's literally the only thing.
- dvzk 4y agoI have never even setup Siri. Sometimes I've been tempted to enable it so I can say, "Siri, call 911!" if I'm assaulted or injured on the trail. I doubt it would help, but it's occasionally disconcerting when my phone isn't quickly accessible.
- az_reth 4y agoI use Siri exclusively to call my SO, because the way the British accent pronounces their contact name is just too funny.
- corobo 4y agoI only use it to set timers and it sucks at that half the time, not even going to bother with the faff of doing anything more complex. It's quicker to just do it myself as I'll probably have to unlock the screen anyway. "Siri, timer, one hour thirty" "Timers can't be set for a time of day, so I set your Timer alarm for 1:30" Every damn time. Siri hates Brits.