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I don’t think Apple has “simply failed to invest resources into making Siri useful”, but rather, voice assistants pose major UX problems that nobody knows how t

I don’t think Apple has “simply failed to invest resources into making Siri useful”, but rather, voice assistants pose major UX problems that nobody knows how to solve at scale. We have tons of patterns for CLI and GUI usability. But in both cases, we have a easy enough way for users to discover what is possible—in the CLI, you can present a list of commands or categories for commands. In the GUI, we have menus, dialogs, and windows that let you explore. Voice is a much more difficult problem in the first place. Voice commands are often modeless, discovery is difficult, and commands are given with troublesome natural language patterns which must somehow be adapted to multiple languages. Take a look at all the different voice assistants—Siri, Alexa, and Google. They all kinda suck, despite enormous amounts of money being poured in. From recent news, we know that Alexa managed a loss close to $10 billion in a single year. By all signs, it contains some brilliant engineering, but brilliant engineering doesn’t matter if it doesn’t solve the underlying (difficult) problems well enough. (I don’t think tools like ChatGPT are going to push the needle much here, at least for a couple years, because integration with all the different software systems takes such a massive amount of coordinated work.)

ghaff 4y ago
In my experience, voice assistants go through a cycle something like: 1. The novelty of the thing! 2. Start using for some simple stuff like weather, timer, alarm, etc. 3. Try more complicated things like skills, really managing controls/media in the car, reliably playing some album.. and largely give up because it's frustrating. 4. Mostly go back to 2.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
>voice assistants pose major UX problems that nobody knows how to solve at scale. My example of a Siri fail is not at all indicative of a "major UX problem. The fact that Siri doesn't understand iOS nomenclature and that iOS doesn't have the proper hooks to do something that a user would obviously want to do, is indicative of a total failure to invest resources in making Siri useful.

ghaff 4y ago

In my experience, voice assistants go through a cycle something like: 1. The novelty of the thing! 2. Start using for some simple stuff like weather, timer, alarm, etc. 3. Try more complicated things like skills, really managing controls/media in the car, reliably playing some album.. and largely give up because it's frustrating. 4. Mostly go back to 2.

wintermutestwin 4y ago

>voice assistants pose major UX problems that nobody knows how to solve at scale. My example of a Siri fail is not at all indicative of a "major UX problem. The fact that Siri doesn't understand iOS nomenclature and that iOS doesn't have the proper hooks to do something that a user would obviously want to do, is indicative of a total failure to invest resources in making Siri useful.