11 ms·

Siri, don't make me even start. I like much of what Apple does, but Siri is just hilariously bad. The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up o

by lynx23 4y ago

Siri, don't make me even start. I like much of what Apple does, but Siri is just hilariously bad. The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Keywords are randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have to use a different phrase to get what you want. They even broke "Where am I" at least in German. "Wo bin ich" is sometimes replied to with "Sein oder nicht sein" (to be or not to be) which indicates Siri is trying to be smart and fails totally. I am blind and use this feature when I have a feeling I might have been lost. Very funny if you ask a simply question like "Where am I" and your voice-assistant is fucking with you about pseudophilosophically. "Was läuft gerade" did also just fail a few hours ago. Siri just started to play something from my library, which is not what I wanted. All in all, its a embarrasing failure all around. Oh, and before I forget, when Siri fails to understand the name of the person I want to call, it says "OK, I am calling <your name>" and actually tries to dial my own number. This is so dumb, it feels like a joke put in there by an intern.

prawn 4y ago
I get the impression that Apple makes an effort with accessibility and would be horrified about this blind/“where am I” example. Hopefully there’s an employee here who sees it and can get it in front of the right person.
- sitkack 4y ago
  Your chat bots shouldn't need a safe word to stop messing around.
prmoustache 4y ago
> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Has it really or have your expectation increased instead? Or is it because they initially only worked well with business us english and have been trained over the years to support many more languages, dialects and even variations of said dialets/language + slang and profanity? Also at the beginning people where talking to these slowly, articulating every word. Now everybody take it for granted they should be understood and talk in their lazier and more natural way. I've never activated speech recognition on any device I own. But last week I was in a videocall with my partner's mexican family and early in the call they were trying to make my mother in law's Amazon Echo to stop the music and it only really stopped when my sister in law started using profanity words, something like "no mames! chinga to pinche madre Alexa cayate!" Apparently this stuff became so used/trained by people not using them in a polite way that they eventually only react when you talk badly to them using slang and profanity.
- mplanchard 4y ago
  In my experience using Siri for only a handful of defined tasks over the years “set a timer,” “remind me to X at Y,” and so son, it has objectively gotten worse.
- tarboreus 4y ago
  Yeah, it's worse.
BlandDuck 4y ago
It's unbelievable that Apple hasn't been able to do better. My 'favorite' Siri 'feature' is when I ask for directions to 'home' it gives me directions to the local Home Depot.... really??? EDIT: After thinking about this for a while, the reason this irks me is that 'directions to home' is one of the most basic asks. I am not asking Siri to play some obscure unreleased track from an underground British punk band. I am asking for directions to my home, and it fails.
- flybrand 4y ago
  Brought to you for your convenience!
- hashtag-til 4y ago
  Or when it unexpectedly decides to "call" someone when I asked it to play some song while I'm driving. I'm mindful my English pronunciation is not 100% accurate, but Alexa gives me no problem at all.
  - wincy 4y ago
    I speak midwestern American English and it’s been constantly trying to text the wrong person, which is weird because a year ago ON THE SAME PHONE this never ever happened. If it’s not working for me it’s definitely a degradation. Siri had worked reliably for me for literally a decade! I’ve also noticed my autocorrect has gone bonkers. It’s constantly trying to change the case of the word “guess” into “Guess”, the brand I guess? Despite me never ever having shopped or mentioned this. The autocorrect has gotten very aggressive and I type so fast that it’ll take me three or four tries to get it to revert to lower case. It also has some weird context sensitivity to proper nouns they added so if I say “I guess James can come over” it’ll change that to “Guess James” like it’s a name (in iMessage only I suppose) and I have to delete that entire “name” and carefully retype!
    - Izkata 4y ago
      SwiftKey on Android does the same thing to me to random words, I think it's learning some words should always be capitalized because I once used them at the beginning of a sentence.
dspillett 4y ago
> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years This isn't unique to Apple: my Amazon devices have definitely become slower to respond, and less accurate when they do, than they were a while ago. I think part of the issue is that the companies have not found a way to “properly” monetise the services (my echo thingies where dirt cheap and I've never done anything with them remotely like making a purchase) so they are essentially throwing money at the infrastructure to keep them running due to the fear of the backlash if they just let the services die.
rst4455 4y ago
> Siri fails to understand the name of the person I want to call After too many frustrated attempts, I found a crude fix for people I call frequently - use the shortcuts app to set a single word to trigger that specific call. Use words that are hard to misunderstand, like "newspaper" or "fantastic". Silly hack but so far it's been working flawlessly.
tarboreus 4y ago
I'm also blind. I use airpods, and sometimes I'd like to know where the phone is. I ask Siri, where is the phone? Or "make a sound." Siri just says some stupid joke, or "I'm right here." So not useful, just make a chime or something. Even basic stuff like changing the lock rotation can't be done with Siri. I just don't understand how it could be that bad. I feel like I could sit and code a better parser that would be more useful. And Siri was the first really big voice assistant, they've had 13 years to get it working.
leokennis 4y ago
Oof that sucks for you. Siri is an absolute joke. My two major gripes: - After four years it still doesn’t understand my youngest son’s name. I added a phonetic spelling to his Contacts card. I told Siri 200 times: “my son’s name is pronounced XYZ”’ I religiously corrected his name a 1000 times when text to speech misunderstood it. Nothing. Joke. - Siri is triggered by anything that even vaguely resembles “hey Siri”: “…they seriously…”, “…ok see here…”, “easier”. And once that dumb piece of %$£~ is triggered she HAS to finish her cutesy “listen to me being a helpful and funny assistant” sentence. Again: sad joke.
Avamander 4y ago
The worst part about Siri in my opinion is how it can do bulk actions when it mishears you. You want the ceiling light off? Okay, turning off all the lights. Or the opposite, it turns *everything* on, which can be even more annoying.
- pram 4y ago
  They're all complete crap. I use Google Home to ONLY turn my lights on or off and it gets it like 60% of the time. Sometimes it accepts the command and it just doesn't even work and says something went wrong. Pressing the light button in the app is 100% consistent. Incredible.
  - NathanOsullivan 4y ago
    It's not a good reason but I believe this happens because voice command has to go to Google server, Google talk to light vendor API, light vendor communicates with your device, and lights go off only if all of this succeeds. Meanwhile, button in vendor app will not use internet so lot less can go wrong.
  - scottyah 4y ago
    I've been superstitiously switching between "turn the lights off" and "turn off the lights" (also with music). It seems like every few weeks or days it prefers one over the other.
    - nicky0 4y ago
      I say to Siri “close the blinds” eyes and it replied “I don’t see anything like that in your home”. I say again five seconds later “close the blinds” and it closes the blinds.
      - ductionist 4y ago
        I have the same problem with my “blinds” - I started calling them “shades” instead (not the usual term, in my vernacular at least) and have had much better luck. YMMV!
mostlysimilar 4y ago
It's infuriating when I ask Siri to play a song and it decides to pick an obscure remix of the song one day, the actual song another day, then another remix another day. Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a more complex/verbose option from the results list?
- ryanjshaw 4y ago
  You get the same issues on Android. There is zero intelligence, it's embarrassing. You can have a song in your library that you've listened to every day of your life, but it'll still decide you actually want to listen to some weird track you've never heard of just because the names are similar.
  - naravara 4y ago
    It gets real bad if you listen to music in a language other than the language you have Siri set to. It's attempts at deciphering Japanese punk or Bollywood song titles are terrible. It also has a habit of invoking whenever I say "Hi sweetie" to my neighbor's dog.
- ciroduran 4y ago
  I stopped using Siri because it does recognise the artist/song I want, and then it plays a completely different thing, not even a related genre.
- wincy 4y ago
  I understand this isn’t necessarily Apple’s fault, but I bought a HomePod (which are very expensive smart speakers!) because I assumed it’d be the most convenient “smart” speaker with good audio quality. It does deliver on audio quality, but despite supporting literally every other smart speaker under the sun Spotify has no support for HomePod and instead you have to AirPlay from your phone. So my kid can’t listen to Spotify, and the HomePod is useless to anyone but me or my wife.
  - mostlysimilar 4y ago
garbagecoder 4y ago
Apple does lay some turds. MobileMe. Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called. Maps until recently. Usually they fix them, but Siri never seems to get better. For what it's worth, I think Alexa has gotten worse, but for different reasons.
- segasaturn 4y ago
  >Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called. It was called Ping for anybody wondering.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called. "iTunes Ping" or "Apple Music Connect". Yes, they tried it twice.
- zer0zzz 4y ago
  iCloud Drive still sucks and it terrifies me I have so much stuff on it when it doesn’t even do snapshots (the way Dropbox does).
- savoytruffle 4y ago
  Alexa has always worked better from across the room, but nowadays an Echo device will do very little aside from weather and timers without trying to sell you a subscription.
  - ultrarunner 4y ago
    By the way—- Alexa’s inability to just answer a question and go away is why my son didn’t get in trouble for knocking it off its table (and breaking the top), and why we didn’t replace it.
throwaway894345 4y ago
If you think Siri is bad, give Apple autocorrect a spin!
- ultrarunner 4y ago
  My phone has somehow decided that ‘20’ should be changed to ‘2.0’. This is the only combination of numbers to do this (so far).
- deepspace 4y ago
  Oh dear $deity. Why does it insist on capitalizing "and" in the middle of a sentence?
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    On my phone, I've somehow gotten into a situation where I can't type "butt" without it autocorrecting it to "Butt".
    - hombre_fatal 4y ago
      There needs to be a way to reset this kind of learned behavior. I must have accidentally corrected "and" into "abs" once because now my iPhone always corrects "and" into "abs" when I use swipe gestures. "Bob abs Katie are here". Since I never notice it until I send the message, it's becoming so cocksure about the correction that there's no going back.
      - m463 4y ago
        There is someone else I know that always texts me with "abs" instead of "and" I think there was a dictionary you can reset. EDIT: "Settings > General > Reset; Tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary"
        hombre_fatal 4y ago
        Thanks!
dmd 4y ago
I found this on the web for "make me even start".
notvplez 4y ago
I finally caved in and switched the Siri language to English on all my devices, after trying and failing to keep it in my native language on my iThings while simultaneously keeping my new MacBook in English (because I prefer it on computers, and I wanted the read time out loud at the hour-function turned on - it kept reading it out in a mixture of both languages, wtf?). Turns out it is much better in US English, but still completely useless . I just set timers using the crown on my watch now, combined with custom google assistant commands to control what I need (lights, tv) through my Nest. Playing and controlling music is too much of an extreme sport for my taste on either assistant, and I've stopped using it for calls too as there's always a 5% chance it will call up some random person I knew decades ago but haven't removed from my contact list because reasons. The name is of course totally different from the few persons I do call on a regular basis. It's great for joking around with my kid though, laughing at the misinterpretations and stuff like that. And that's about it.
PicassoCTs 4y ago
The project has been on the department trading bazaar, selling itself out to survive. "So we in the MacOs trading station, will push siri enable notifications on powerbutton wakeup, if you push the following answers on keywords up the likelihood. Deal? Deal! Thus she existed on, living long and prosperous.. through diplomatic victorys, that destroyed the qualities that could not keep her alive on her own..
pjmlp 4y ago
I never bought one of these devices, because I refuse to speak in foreign languages to them. When I am on the confort of my house, I want to use my native languages as much as I can.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
> Very funny if you ask a simply question like "Where am I" and your voice-assistant is fucking with you about pseudophilosophically. well sure, not funny for the person actually going through it, but as the premise of a skit seems to hold some promise.
- vrc 4y ago
  I believe GP stating s/he’s blind in the previous sentence means s/he’s grabbed the short end of the stick on this one
crooked-v 4y ago
> Keywords are randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have to use a different phrase to get what you want. The most striking example for me is that the word "half" - as in, "Hey Siri, set the lights to half" - stopped working for six months, then started working again.
nindalf 4y ago
When it fails you in German, do you switch to English? I don’t even attempt to talk to assistants in my native language because I know they’ll fuck it up. I just go straight to English.
- baggsie 4y ago
  I'm English and my wife and kids are french so naturally all our devices are set to french - our Google speakers do not understand my terrible french accent but bizarrely work perfectly when I speak English but only if I do a completely over-the-top french accent.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    Same with Hindi. Needs a ridiculous English accent to understand Hindi. I call it the British Colonial Administrator accent. Like this guy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6_896OhnaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6_896OhnaQ
voytec 4y ago
> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Input recognition quality falling all over the place - it's very much noticeable with their onscreen keyboards as well. Some "intelligent" mechanisms know better which button I tried to tap and I'm getting gibberish even with auto-correct off. It's the same on iPhone and Watch. Apple has already forced me to re-learn keyboards once - with the MacBook Pro 2017 fiasco when I had to start carrying external keyboard with my "mobile" laptop. Haven't bought a MacBook since.
- el_benhameen 4y ago
  Their swype-style keyboard is an absolute joke—perhaps the most infuriating part of my iphone. I know that it’s easier to criticize than it is to implement, but my god, just a basic markov chain would yield more intelligible results than the shit it comes up with.
  - c0m 4y ago
    Totally agree so I installed SwiftKey. It worked great for years and I’ve been super happy! Then in the last year, SwiftKey has been randomly crashing so while I type I swap between the SwiftKey and normal keyboard unwillingly several times per message. The built-in keyboard seems absolutely determined to believe that the word 'fuck' does not exist.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Polyphonie 4y ago
      You can easily add fuck into your dictionary: Settings>General>Keyboard >Text Replacement.
      - blululu 4y ago
        This is useful advice but, the frustration is warranted if a user needs to modify a sub-sub-sub menu to undo a default that is not even grammatically correct.
WalterBright 4y ago
> They even broke "Where am I" at least in German. Probably should be careful with "I am sinking!"
- madmoose 4y ago
  > "I am sinking!" Wat are you sinking about?
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    Reference: https://youtu.be/yR0lWICH3rY https://youtu.be/yR0lWICH3rY (partially German, but I believe works without understanding German)
_the_inflator 4y ago
What totally strikes me as odd is, that Siri on iPad even reacts to the Audible player in the background. Most false positive triggers stem from Audible books as well as audio play from the Apple Audio. Sometimes I feel Siri is desperate to be triggered, because if hardly ever, I use it in the car when I have to change direction and need to set a new course on a Map app.
avereveard 4y ago
just wait a few month "as an ai language model, I don't know your location"

by lynx23 4y ago

prawn 4y ago

I get the impression that Apple makes an effort with accessibility and would be horrified about this blind/“where am I” example. Hopefully there’s an employee here who sees it and can get it in front of the right person.

sitkack 4y ago
Your chat bots shouldn't need a safe word to stop messing around.

prmoustache 4y ago

> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Has it really or have your expectation increased instead? Or is it because they initially only worked well with business us english and have been trained over the years to support many more languages, dialects and even variations of said dialets/language + slang and profanity? Also at the beginning people where talking to these slowly, articulating every word. Now everybody take it for granted they should be understood and talk in their lazier and more natural way. I've never activated speech recognition on any device I own. But last week I was in a videocall with my partner's mexican family and early in the call they were trying to make my mother in law's Amazon Echo to stop the music and it only really stopped when my sister in law started using profanity words, something like "no mames! chinga to pinche madre Alexa cayate!" Apparently this stuff became so used/trained by people not using them in a polite way that they eventually only react when you talk badly to them using slang and profanity.

mplanchard 4y ago
In my experience using Siri for only a handful of defined tasks over the years “set a timer,” “remind me to X at Y,” and so son, it has objectively gotten worse.
tarboreus 4y ago
Yeah, it's worse.

BlandDuck 4y ago

It's unbelievable that Apple hasn't been able to do better. My 'favorite' Siri 'feature' is when I ask for directions to 'home' it gives me directions to the local Home Depot.... really??? EDIT: After thinking about this for a while, the reason this irks me is that 'directions to home' is one of the most basic asks. I am not asking Siri to play some obscure unreleased track from an underground British punk band. I am asking for directions to my home, and it fails.

flybrand 4y ago
Brought to you for your convenience!
hashtag-til 4y ago
Or when it unexpectedly decides to "call" someone when I asked it to play some song while I'm driving. I'm mindful my English pronunciation is not 100% accurate, but Alexa gives me no problem at all.
- wincy 4y ago
  I speak midwestern American English and it’s been constantly trying to text the wrong person, which is weird because a year ago ON THE SAME PHONE this never ever happened. If it’s not working for me it’s definitely a degradation. Siri had worked reliably for me for literally a decade! I’ve also noticed my autocorrect has gone bonkers. It’s constantly trying to change the case of the word “guess” into “Guess”, the brand I guess? Despite me never ever having shopped or mentioned this. The autocorrect has gotten very aggressive and I type so fast that it’ll take me three or four tries to get it to revert to lower case. It also has some weird context sensitivity to proper nouns they added so if I say “I guess James can come over” it’ll change that to “Guess James” like it’s a name (in iMessage only I suppose) and I have to delete that entire “name” and carefully retype!
  - Izkata 4y ago
    SwiftKey on Android does the same thing to me to random words, I think it's learning some words should always be capitalized because I once used them at the beginning of a sentence.

dspillett 4y ago

> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years This isn't unique to Apple: my Amazon devices have definitely become slower to respond, and less accurate when they do, than they were a while ago. I think part of the issue is that the companies have not found a way to “properly” monetise the services (my echo thingies where dirt cheap and I've never done anything with them remotely like making a purchase) so they are essentially throwing money at the infrastructure to keep them running due to the fear of the backlash if they just let the services die.

rst4455 4y ago

> Siri fails to understand the name of the person I want to call After too many frustrated attempts, I found a crude fix for people I call frequently - use the shortcuts app to set a single word to trigger that specific call. Use words that are hard to misunderstand, like "newspaper" or "fantastic". Silly hack but so far it's been working flawlessly.

tarboreus 4y ago

I'm also blind. I use airpods, and sometimes I'd like to know where the phone is. I ask Siri, where is the phone? Or "make a sound." Siri just says some stupid joke, or "I'm right here." So not useful, just make a chime or something. Even basic stuff like changing the lock rotation can't be done with Siri. I just don't understand how it could be that bad. I feel like I could sit and code a better parser that would be more useful. And Siri was the first really big voice assistant, they've had 13 years to get it working.

leokennis 4y ago

Oof that sucks for you. Siri is an absolute joke. My two major gripes: - After four years it still doesn’t understand my youngest son’s name. I added a phonetic spelling to his Contacts card. I told Siri 200 times: “my son’s name is pronounced XYZ”’ I religiously corrected his name a 1000 times when text to speech misunderstood it. Nothing. Joke. - Siri is triggered by anything that even vaguely resembles “hey Siri”: “…they seriously…”, “…ok see here…”, “easier”. And once that dumb piece of %$£~ is triggered she HAS to finish her cutesy “listen to me being a helpful and funny assistant” sentence. Again: sad joke.

Avamander 4y ago

The worst part about Siri in my opinion is how it can do bulk actions when it mishears you. You want the ceiling light off? Okay, turning off all the lights. Or the opposite, it turns *everything* on, which can be even more annoying.

pram 4y ago
They're all complete crap. I use Google Home to ONLY turn my lights on or off and it gets it like 60% of the time. Sometimes it accepts the command and it just doesn't even work and says something went wrong. Pressing the light button in the app is 100% consistent. Incredible.
- NathanOsullivan 4y ago
  It's not a good reason but I believe this happens because voice command has to go to Google server, Google talk to light vendor API, light vendor communicates with your device, and lights go off only if all of this succeeds. Meanwhile, button in vendor app will not use internet so lot less can go wrong.
- scottyah 4y ago
  I've been superstitiously switching between "turn the lights off" and "turn off the lights" (also with music). It seems like every few weeks or days it prefers one over the other.
  - nicky0 4y ago
    I say to Siri “close the blinds” eyes and it replied “I don’t see anything like that in your home”. I say again five seconds later “close the blinds” and it closes the blinds.
    - ductionist 4y ago
      I have the same problem with my “blinds” - I started calling them “shades” instead (not the usual term, in my vernacular at least) and have had much better luck. YMMV!

mostlysimilar 4y ago

It's infuriating when I ask Siri to play a song and it decides to pick an obscure remix of the song one day, the actual song another day, then another remix another day. Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a more complex/verbose option from the results list?

ryanjshaw 4y ago
You get the same issues on Android. There is zero intelligence, it's embarrassing. You can have a song in your library that you've listened to every day of your life, but it'll still decide you actually want to listen to some weird track you've never heard of just because the names are similar.
- naravara 4y ago
  It gets real bad if you listen to music in a language other than the language you have Siri set to. It's attempts at deciphering Japanese punk or Bollywood song titles are terrible. It also has a habit of invoking whenever I say "Hi sweetie" to my neighbor's dog.
ciroduran 4y ago
I stopped using Siri because it does recognise the artist/song I want, and then it plays a completely different thing, not even a related genre.
wincy 4y ago
I understand this isn’t necessarily Apple’s fault, but I bought a HomePod (which are very expensive smart speakers!) because I assumed it’d be the most convenient “smart” speaker with good audio quality. It does deliver on audio quality, but despite supporting literally every other smart speaker under the sun Spotify has no support for HomePod and instead you have to AirPlay from your phone. So my kid can’t listen to Spotify, and the HomePod is useless to anyone but me or my wife.
- mostlysimilar 4y ago

garbagecoder 4y ago

Apple does lay some turds. MobileMe. Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called. Maps until recently. Usually they fix them, but Siri never seems to get better. For what it's worth, I think Alexa has gotten worse, but for different reasons.

segasaturn 4y ago
>Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called. It was called Ping for anybody wondering.
Hamuko 4y ago
>Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called. "iTunes Ping" or "Apple Music Connect". Yes, they tried it twice.
zer0zzz 4y ago
iCloud Drive still sucks and it terrifies me I have so much stuff on it when it doesn’t even do snapshots (the way Dropbox does).
savoytruffle 4y ago
Alexa has always worked better from across the room, but nowadays an Echo device will do very little aside from weather and timers without trying to sell you a subscription.
- ultrarunner 4y ago
  By the way—- Alexa’s inability to just answer a question and go away is why my son didn’t get in trouble for knocking it off its table (and breaking the top), and why we didn’t replace it.

throwaway894345 4y ago

If you think Siri is bad, give Apple autocorrect a spin!

ultrarunner 4y ago
My phone has somehow decided that ‘20’ should be changed to ‘2.0’. This is the only combination of numbers to do this (so far).
deepspace 4y ago
Oh dear $deity. Why does it insist on capitalizing "and" in the middle of a sentence?
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  On my phone, I've somehow gotten into a situation where I can't type "butt" without it autocorrecting it to "Butt".
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    There needs to be a way to reset this kind of learned behavior. I must have accidentally corrected "and" into "abs" once because now my iPhone always corrects "and" into "abs" when I use swipe gestures. "Bob abs Katie are here". Since I never notice it until I send the message, it's becoming so cocksure about the correction that there's no going back.
    - m463 4y ago
      There is someone else I know that always texts me with "abs" instead of "and" I think there was a dictionary you can reset. EDIT: "Settings > General > Reset; Tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary"
      - hombre_fatal 4y ago
        Thanks!

dmd 4y ago

I found this on the web for "make me even start".

notvplez 4y ago

I finally caved in and switched the Siri language to English on all my devices, after trying and failing to keep it in my native language on my iThings while simultaneously keeping my new MacBook in English (because I prefer it on computers, and I wanted the read time out loud at the hour-function turned on - it kept reading it out in a mixture of both languages, wtf?). Turns out it is much better in US English, but still completely useless . I just set timers using the crown on my watch now, combined with custom google assistant commands to control what I need (lights, tv) through my Nest. Playing and controlling music is too much of an extreme sport for my taste on either assistant, and I've stopped using it for calls too as there's always a 5% chance it will call up some random person I knew decades ago but haven't removed from my contact list because reasons. The name is of course totally different from the few persons I do call on a regular basis. It's great for joking around with my kid though, laughing at the misinterpretations and stuff like that. And that's about it.

PicassoCTs 4y ago

The project has been on the department trading bazaar, selling itself out to survive. "So we in the MacOs trading station, will push siri enable notifications on powerbutton wakeup, if you push the following answers on keywords up the likelihood. Deal? Deal! Thus she existed on, living long and prosperous.. through diplomatic victorys, that destroyed the qualities that could not keep her alive on her own..

pjmlp 4y ago

I never bought one of these devices, because I refuse to speak in foreign languages to them. When I am on the confort of my house, I want to use my native languages as much as I can.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

> Very funny if you ask a simply question like "Where am I" and your voice-assistant is fucking with you about pseudophilosophically. well sure, not funny for the person actually going through it, but as the premise of a skit seems to hold some promise.

vrc 4y ago
I believe GP stating s/he’s blind in the previous sentence means s/he’s grabbed the short end of the stick on this one

crooked-v 4y ago

> Keywords are randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have to use a different phrase to get what you want. The most striking example for me is that the word "half" - as in, "Hey Siri, set the lights to half" - stopped working for six months, then started working again.

nindalf 4y ago

When it fails you in German, do you switch to English? I don’t even attempt to talk to assistants in my native language because I know they’ll fuck it up. I just go straight to English.

baggsie 4y ago
I'm English and my wife and kids are french so naturally all our devices are set to french - our Google speakers do not understand my terrible french accent but bizarrely work perfectly when I speak English but only if I do a completely over-the-top french accent.
- nindalf 4y ago
  Same with Hindi. Needs a ridiculous English accent to understand Hindi. I call it the British Colonial Administrator accent. Like this guy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6_896OhnaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6_896OhnaQ

voytec 4y ago

> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Input recognition quality falling all over the place - it's very much noticeable with their onscreen keyboards as well. Some "intelligent" mechanisms know better which button I tried to tap and I'm getting gibberish even with auto-correct off. It's the same on iPhone and Watch. Apple has already forced me to re-learn keyboards once - with the MacBook Pro 2017 fiasco when I had to start carrying external keyboard with my "mobile" laptop. Haven't bought a MacBook since.

el_benhameen 4y ago
Their swype-style keyboard is an absolute joke—perhaps the most infuriating part of my iphone. I know that it’s easier to criticize than it is to implement, but my god, just a basic markov chain would yield more intelligible results than the shit it comes up with.
- c0m 4y ago
  Totally agree so I installed SwiftKey. It worked great for years and I’ve been super happy! Then in the last year, SwiftKey has been randomly crashing so while I type I swap between the SwiftKey and normal keyboard unwillingly several times per message. The built-in keyboard seems absolutely determined to believe that the word 'fuck' does not exist.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Polyphonie 4y ago
    You can easily add fuck into your dictionary: Settings>General>Keyboard >Text Replacement.
    - blululu 4y ago
      This is useful advice but, the frustration is warranted if a user needs to modify a sub-sub-sub menu to undo a default that is not even grammatically correct.

WalterBright 4y ago

> They even broke "Where am I" at least in German. Probably should be careful with "I am sinking!"

madmoose 4y ago
> "I am sinking!" Wat are you sinking about?
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Reference: https://youtu.be/yR0lWICH3rY https://youtu.be/yR0lWICH3rY (partially German, but I believe works without understanding German)

_the_inflator 4y ago

What totally strikes me as odd is, that Siri on iPad even reacts to the Audible player in the background. Most false positive triggers stem from Audible books as well as audio play from the Apple Audio. Sometimes I feel Siri is desperate to be triggered, because if hardly ever, I use it in the car when I have to change direction and need to set a new course on a Map app.

avereveard 4y ago

just wait a few month "as an ai language model, I don't know your location"