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Is it time to complain about Siri again? Sure is! I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old. I still appreciate

Is it time to complain about Siri again? Sure is! I am an old-school Apple fanboy. I learned HyperCard on a Macintosh SE/30—I am that old. I still appreciate the Apple ecosystem, and I do like certain aspects of my HomePod mini…but Siri. C’mon. Get it together. It just fails at the absolute basics. https://imgur.com/q0H788Y https://imgur.com/q0H788Y The basics being: please add stuff to my shopping list when I yell it into the aether while in the kitchen. It either completely mangles the speech-to-text (starches, Siri, not starships), or just…fails. It times out, or sits there, blankly pulsing a light at me. I would really appreciate a higher-quality speaker with easy integration with my iOS/Mac devices. But $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri? Nah.

kybernetyk 4y ago
Siri complain time? Well, my newest problem with Siri is: Let's say I want to play some classic song (like Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd). So I say "hey siri, play sweet home alabama" - and what I get is not the original one but some newish remake/remix/reinterpretation. Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original? Oh also ... what's the "next song pls" command in German? With Alexa I can say "Alexa, weiter" and the next track plays. With Siri? "Weiter" won't do anything. I have to say "Hey Siri, nächstes Lied" ... or I can just switch to English and say "Hey Siri, next" which then works. Oh another one: The German Siri pronouncing English song titles with the German voice-set makes my ears hurt. Like you would read an English word but pronounce it like you would a German word. But then again some Band/Song Titles she gets perfectly right. Cannibal Corpse sounds like perfect English. Those AI assistants are a hot mess and get worse with time. Seems like feeding more and more data into your model won't make it better.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  I've also been baffled by this. Some syntax helps (".. by $band"), especially when an album and a track have the same name (which is a related issue for me).
- marbletiles 4y ago
  It's somehow managing to get worse in this area. You were once able to say "not this version" and it would try a different version of the same song. Now it just replies "I found some results on the web, but I can't show them here". (This is especially infuriating when it does it on CarPlay)
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original? I heard the original implementation of Alexa had a banned list of words that shouldn’t appear in the song title unless there are no alternatives, including “remix”, “live”, and “explicit” (among others). Seems such an obvious and easy solution.
- garblegarble 4y ago
  Does "Hey Siri überspringen" work? Voice assistants really need to get away from their pretense that they're magical at understanding languages and just provide a long documentation page showing what you can say... and also take feedback on that page so people can provide more idiomatic ways to express that same command. Apple do actually have such documentation[1 English][2 German] but it's far from comprehensive, and the examples are tediously long ("Hey Siri skip this song", when I know "Hey Siri skip" works) 1: English: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/siri https://support.apple.com/en-gb/siri / https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208279 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208279 2: German: https://support.apple.com/de-de/siri https://support.apple.com/de-de/siri / https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208279 https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208279
  - kybernetyk 4y ago
    >überspringen Even if it works - it's still way too long. "weiter" is a very short word. "überspringen" is like having a deep conversation with my mp3 player :)
    - garblegarble 4y ago
      If you do insist on speaking German, is it any wonder you need to use long words? :-) /s I think I have worked out a way to do this with a custom Shortcut (using an If condition on Device Name to use the Music Skip Forwards action on the device executing the Shortcut), but I'm pretty sure it would end up as a longer interaction. Edit: Drat, Shortcut approach doesn't work, looks like the Shortcut runs on your iPhone, so the device name is always the iPhone's
- nytesky 4y ago
  Are you using Spotify or Apple Music as your streaming service. We had endless problems with cover bands and tribute songs rather than the mainstream song when we used Alexa with Spotify (which baffled us as I expect that would be the most common configuration). We currently use Apple Music and Google Nest devices since our mesh network has them built in. Music works fine. Podcasts are a curse on humanity — if you say “play podcast”, it always defaults to the last episode you played, even if it was months ago. You have to specify the latest episode of so and so podcast EVERY TIME, and even then it’s flaky. It’s like it forgot that podcasts are a derivative of “broadcast” where timeliness is relevant.
  - kybernetyk 4y ago
    Apple Music. Don't know if you can use Spotify with the Homepod's Siri
ubermonkey 4y ago
We have an original large-size HomePod in the kitchen. Its MAIN job is music-in-the-kitchen, and it excels at that. It's secondary job is "Siri portal" for random information or timers or whatever (btw, did you know you can set multiple timers and give then names, like "set a pasta timer for 10 minutes" and then also "set a simmer timer for 30 minutes" and ask it for status on those by name?). I have an ongoing sort-of faux-competition with my wife about how to ask Siri for things. She asks questions and gets frustrating replies, but when I ask them slightly differently I get good data. I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...". I SUSPECT it's mostly specificity, or asking for simple facts ("when was King Charles born?") and not derived facts ("how old is King Charles?"), but it comes up a LOT. That same history of software means that I don't even ATTEMPT some of the stuff Siri is notionally capable of, like maintaining a shopping list. (Though I routinely use Siri on my watch or phone to add appointments or reminders.)
- perardi 4y ago
  Aye, I have some history in software development as a UI designer. Including for something with natural language processing. So I have some heuristics for what and how to ask. But I feel like “add [x] to my Shopping list” where [x] is a fairly common would should be doable. But also I didn’t know about named timers. So I appreciate that, that’s actually really useful. Huh, something I didn’t know about a voice assistant, it’s almost like there are issues with discoverability, who would have thought…
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    Yeah, I never really articulated it before, but Apple is a company with a history of emphasizing discoverability in interfaces. That maybe doesn't work quite as well for a voice interface. OTOH, thinking of something to try and then being delighted it works (which is how I found the named timers) was a pretty cool experience.
- adamparsons 4y ago
  > I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...". Hah, very much the same. My partner will always end up asking me to ask siri to ask something because my slightly differently worded requests tend to succeed more often
jsjohnst 4y ago
> Buy $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri? Well, in fairness, it’s designed first as a music device, the Siri seems like almost an afterthought. That said, Spend $299 on a wireless speaker where the stereo pairing often fails, has random Wi-Fi connection issues (that no other Apple device has), and is otherwise hindered by issues? Nah, fooled me on the first gen, fooled me again on the HomePod minis, think I’ll pass this time.
- perardi 4y ago
  That what confuses me about the market fit here. It’s not an amazing voice assistant. It’s OK as a wireless speaker, but Sonos is almost assuredly better, and similar aesthetics and ease of use. So this is targeting…uh?
  - IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
    It is targeting Apple customers, who use the ecosystem.
  - astrange 4y ago
    HomePods sound better than Sonos One. (But also cost more.) https://www.rtings.com/speaker/tools/compare/apple-homepod-vs-sonos-one-gen-2/1719/7232 https://www.rtings.com/speaker/tools/compare/apple-homepod-v...
    - secabeen 4y ago
      Yeah, the equivalent Sonos product was the 3, but it's EOL and there is currently a hole in the Sonos line there. Not sure if they'll bring something back, maybe now that Apple has Homepod 2 they will, or the medium-sized bi-directional speaker we saw go through the FCC last month.
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  I used to have Wi-Fi connection issues that magically went away when I swapped my Linksys Velop network for an eero Pro system. HomeKit works every time now, there are never any unresponsive devices, and all my HomePods work great. I'm not sure this is a HomePod issue based on how immediately the router switch helped.
lancesells 4y ago
"Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes." "I'm sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Please try again later."
- mdemare 4y ago
  "Isn't the pasta done by now? Hey Siri, what's the timer?" "There are no timers set." "$@*%#$&"
tiffanyh 4y ago
Speak recognition on Siri is horribly bad. They need to license/acquire Nuance Dragon, or do something to improve it. https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html
- yborg 4y ago
  I'm often surprised at how far away I can be from the device and have it hear the trigger, but I also notice that it has a habit of trying to guess what you are saying when the input is weak instead of telling you that it didn't hear it well. I.e. if I move a few feet closer and repeat the same input string it will execute correctly. It feels like they should be less shy about having Siri just tell you that that the signal to noise ratio was too low for it to be sure of what you said.
vineyardmike 4y ago
So Siri is mediocre at best, we also probably agree. Lots of things to complain about… how Siri works inconsistently across devices, punts most queries to a web search, etc. I appreciate that they aren’t overbuilding Siri though. Alexa (which recent experienced an unfortunate gutting vis layoffs) was amazons attempt to build a consumer ecosystem, which meant a lot of crappy features no one uses (notifications?). Siri feels like it definitively lives on that device and is just a fancy hands-free control. No extraneous feature creep in an attempt to build out a platform. Apple resisted a lot of opportunities to grow Siri while Alexa et al dramatically increased headcount and features, and it seems that voice assistants never really caught on as a general purpose tool. I imagine smarthome/weather/music still dominates all queries by a huge margin. I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. This one looks like it has less speakers in it, but I assume it sounds comparably good. If you want good sound I assume you’d be buying a Sonos or something more versatile, but this is an equal but apple-loving choice. The real pro is that it sounds like it has a removable cable. I still want a screen-based apple smart speaker. Smart speaker+clock is a sweet spot in terms of usability, and the Google home I’ve been loving. It gets you some richer visual for that 1% of queries that benefit, and a glanceable clock for the rest of the time. I can’t imagine apple making a UI that is one-off though. Hopefully the iPad goes the way of the pixel tablet
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  > I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. Why did you get yours?
  - ezconnect 4y ago
    Maybe because he thought it would be good and useful. Now he knows better after experiencing it.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    I bought one when it was the only Siri speaker. My partner did the same, we now share a household. We have since bought Alexa devices, then after the release of the HomePods Mini, prompted threw away Alexa. One too many “by the way” interjections for us. Oh and now I bought a Google home hub v2. Great device, but we’re an apple household.
benhurmarcel 4y ago
It would also be pretty nice to have Siri works in several languages on a shared device like the Homepod. Not everyone has the same native language in my house.

kybernetyk 4y ago

Siri complain time? Well, my newest problem with Siri is: Let's say I want to play some classic song (like Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd). So I say "hey siri, play sweet home alabama" - and what I get is not the original one but some newish remake/remix/reinterpretation. Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original? Oh also ... what's the "next song pls" command in German? With Alexa I can say "Alexa, weiter" and the next track plays. With Siri? "Weiter" won't do anything. I have to say "Hey Siri, nächstes Lied" ... or I can just switch to English and say "Hey Siri, next" which then works. Oh another one: The German Siri pronouncing English song titles with the German voice-set makes my ears hurt. Like you would read an English word but pronounce it like you would a German word. But then again some Band/Song Titles she gets perfectly right. Cannibal Corpse sounds like perfect English. Those AI assistants are a hot mess and get worse with time. Seems like feeding more and more data into your model won't make it better.

ubermonkey 4y ago
I've also been baffled by this. Some syntax helps (".. by $band"), especially when an album and a track have the same name (which is a related issue for me).
marbletiles 4y ago
It's somehow managing to get worse in this area. You were once able to say "not this version" and it would try a different version of the same song. Now it just replies "I found some results on the web, but I can't show them here". (This is especially infuriating when it does it on CarPlay)
vineyardmike 4y ago
> Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original? I heard the original implementation of Alexa had a banned list of words that shouldn’t appear in the song title unless there are no alternatives, including “remix”, “live”, and “explicit” (among others). Seems such an obvious and easy solution.
garblegarble 4y ago
Does "Hey Siri überspringen" work? Voice assistants really need to get away from their pretense that they're magical at understanding languages and just provide a long documentation page showing what you can say... and also take feedback on that page so people can provide more idiomatic ways to express that same command. Apple do actually have such documentation[1 English][2 German] but it's far from comprehensive, and the examples are tediously long ("Hey Siri skip this song", when I know "Hey Siri skip" works) 1: English: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/siri https://support.apple.com/en-gb/siri / https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208279 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208279 2: German: https://support.apple.com/de-de/siri https://support.apple.com/de-de/siri / https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208279 https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208279
- kybernetyk 4y ago
  >überspringen Even if it works - it's still way too long. "weiter" is a very short word. "überspringen" is like having a deep conversation with my mp3 player :)
  - garblegarble 4y ago
    If you do insist on speaking German, is it any wonder you need to use long words? :-) /s I think I have worked out a way to do this with a custom Shortcut (using an If condition on Device Name to use the Music Skip Forwards action on the device executing the Shortcut), but I'm pretty sure it would end up as a longer interaction. Edit: Drat, Shortcut approach doesn't work, looks like the Shortcut runs on your iPhone, so the device name is always the iPhone's
nytesky 4y ago
Are you using Spotify or Apple Music as your streaming service. We had endless problems with cover bands and tribute songs rather than the mainstream song when we used Alexa with Spotify (which baffled us as I expect that would be the most common configuration). We currently use Apple Music and Google Nest devices since our mesh network has them built in. Music works fine. Podcasts are a curse on humanity — if you say “play podcast”, it always defaults to the last episode you played, even if it was months ago. You have to specify the latest episode of so and so podcast EVERY TIME, and even then it’s flaky. It’s like it forgot that podcasts are a derivative of “broadcast” where timeliness is relevant.
- kybernetyk 4y ago
  Apple Music. Don't know if you can use Spotify with the Homepod's Siri

ubermonkey 4y ago

We have an original large-size HomePod in the kitchen. Its MAIN job is music-in-the-kitchen, and it excels at that. It's secondary job is "Siri portal" for random information or timers or whatever (btw, did you know you can set multiple timers and give then names, like "set a pasta timer for 10 minutes" and then also "set a simmer timer for 30 minutes" and ask it for status on those by name?). I have an ongoing sort-of faux-competition with my wife about how to ask Siri for things. She asks questions and gets frustrating replies, but when I ask them slightly differently I get good data. I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...". I SUSPECT it's mostly specificity, or asking for simple facts ("when was King Charles born?") and not derived facts ("how old is King Charles?"), but it comes up a LOT. That same history of software means that I don't even ATTEMPT some of the stuff Siri is notionally capable of, like maintaining a shopping list. (Though I routinely use Siri on my watch or phone to add appointments or reminders.)

perardi 4y ago
Aye, I have some history in software development as a UI designer. Including for something with natural language processing. So I have some heuristics for what and how to ask. But I feel like “add [x] to my Shopping list” where [x] is a fairly common would should be doable. But also I didn’t know about named timers. So I appreciate that, that’s actually really useful. Huh, something I didn’t know about a voice assistant, it’s almost like there are issues with discoverability, who would have thought…
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  Yeah, I never really articulated it before, but Apple is a company with a history of emphasizing discoverability in interfaces. That maybe doesn't work quite as well for a voice interface. OTOH, thinking of something to try and then being delighted it works (which is how I found the named timers) was a pretty cool experience.
adamparsons 4y ago
> I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...". Hah, very much the same. My partner will always end up asking me to ask siri to ask something because my slightly differently worded requests tend to succeed more often

jsjohnst 4y ago

> Buy $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri? Well, in fairness, it’s designed first as a music device, the Siri seems like almost an afterthought. That said, Spend $299 on a wireless speaker where the stereo pairing often fails, has random Wi-Fi connection issues (that no other Apple device has), and is otherwise hindered by issues? Nah, fooled me on the first gen, fooled me again on the HomePod minis, think I’ll pass this time.

perardi 4y ago
That what confuses me about the market fit here. It’s not an amazing voice assistant. It’s OK as a wireless speaker, but Sonos is almost assuredly better, and similar aesthetics and ease of use. So this is targeting…uh?
- IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
  It is targeting Apple customers, who use the ecosystem.
- astrange 4y ago
  HomePods sound better than Sonos One. (But also cost more.) https://www.rtings.com/speaker/tools/compare/apple-homepod-vs-sonos-one-gen-2/1719/7232 https://www.rtings.com/speaker/tools/compare/apple-homepod-v...
  - secabeen 4y ago
    Yeah, the equivalent Sonos product was the 3, but it's EOL and there is currently a hole in the Sonos line there. Not sure if they'll bring something back, maybe now that Apple has Homepod 2 they will, or the medium-sized bi-directional speaker we saw go through the FCC last month.
dkonofalski 4y ago
I used to have Wi-Fi connection issues that magically went away when I swapped my Linksys Velop network for an eero Pro system. HomeKit works every time now, there are never any unresponsive devices, and all my HomePods work great. I'm not sure this is a HomePod issue based on how immediately the router switch helped.

lancesells 4y ago

"Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes." "I'm sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Please try again later."

mdemare 4y ago
"Isn't the pasta done by now? Hey Siri, what's the timer?" "There are no timers set." "$@*%#$&"

tiffanyh 4y ago

Speak recognition on Siri is horribly bad. They need to license/acquire Nuance Dragon, or do something to improve it. https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html

yborg 4y ago
I'm often surprised at how far away I can be from the device and have it hear the trigger, but I also notice that it has a habit of trying to guess what you are saying when the input is weak instead of telling you that it didn't hear it well. I.e. if I move a few feet closer and repeat the same input string it will execute correctly. It feels like they should be less shy about having Siri just tell you that that the signal to noise ratio was too low for it to be sure of what you said.

vineyardmike 4y ago

So Siri is mediocre at best, we also probably agree. Lots of things to complain about… how Siri works inconsistently across devices, punts most queries to a web search, etc. I appreciate that they aren’t overbuilding Siri though. Alexa (which recent experienced an unfortunate gutting vis layoffs) was amazons attempt to build a consumer ecosystem, which meant a lot of crappy features no one uses (notifications?). Siri feels like it definitively lives on that device and is just a fancy hands-free control. No extraneous feature creep in an attempt to build out a platform. Apple resisted a lot of opportunities to grow Siri while Alexa et al dramatically increased headcount and features, and it seems that voice assistants never really caught on as a general purpose tool. I imagine smarthome/weather/music still dominates all queries by a huge margin. I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. This one looks like it has less speakers in it, but I assume it sounds comparably good. If you want good sound I assume you’d be buying a Sonos or something more versatile, but this is an equal but apple-loving choice. The real pro is that it sounds like it has a removable cable. I still want a screen-based apple smart speaker. Smart speaker+clock is a sweet spot in terms of usability, and the Google home I’ve been loving. It gets you some richer visual for that 1% of queries that benefit, and a glanceable clock for the rest of the time. I can’t imagine apple making a UI that is one-off though. Hopefully the iPad goes the way of the pixel tablet

wodenokoto 4y ago
> I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. Why did you get yours?
- ezconnect 4y ago
  Maybe because he thought it would be good and useful. Now he knows better after experiencing it.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  I bought one when it was the only Siri speaker. My partner did the same, we now share a household. We have since bought Alexa devices, then after the release of the HomePods Mini, prompted threw away Alexa. One too many “by the way” interjections for us. Oh and now I bought a Google home hub v2. Great device, but we’re an apple household.

benhurmarcel 4y ago

It would also be pretty nice to have Siri works in several languages on a shared device like the Homepod. Not everyone has the same native language in my house.