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Meanwhile I am still waiting for Siri to reach the capability of an average voice assistant from ~2014.
by paxys 3y ago
Meanwhile I am still waiting for Siri to reach the capability of an average voice assistant from ~2014.
- unstatusthequo 3y agoSiri excels at setting a hot dog done timer with my voice. That’s good, right?
- resource0x 3y agoAnd you want it to do what? Fill out your taxes? This is a one-trick pony by design. :-)
- bombcar 3y agoTell me your secrets. I’ll practice it in your voice, your language, whatever. I get a time about half the time, and then if I immediately ask how much left on the timer, Siri informs me there are no timers. Which then promptly goes off.
- camjohnson26 3y agoI set timers for 49 minutes frequently because Siri will hear 15 instead of 50
- bombcar 3y agoReminds me of hitting 99 seconds on the microwave because it’s easier to enter than 1 minute 30.
- euroderf 3y agoOne of the more obnoxious "features " of English.
- blitzar 3y agoIronically when I want a 15 minute timer, I get given 50 a lot of the time... 14 and 40 are also problematic. I figure I am just holding it wrong.
- Tiktaalik 3y agoYou can get around this by asking Siri for a timer for "one five" minutes and "five zero" minutes. (Folks irl do this too... damn you english language...)
- bombcar 3y agoReminds me that emergency services are adamant about not calling it (as in the song): So they called nine-eleven, like any piggy would The sent out Rambo, just as fast, as they could Because in a stressful situation, people would literally get hung up looking for the "11" key on the phone.
- barkingcat 3y agohow long do you set your hot dog done timer for? do you cook it until plump? usually my dogs split, probably with too high temperature?
- mortenjorck 3y agoApple's famously-squandered first-mover advantage with Siri is so entrenched at this point, it feels (at least to an outside observer) like it must simply be culturally and organizationally impossible for Apple to innovate in that space. I’d love to be surprised at WWDC this year, but it intuitively seems exceedingly unlikely.
- jiggawatts 3y agoThe original Siri was more capable than it is now, which blows my mind. Apparently there's a senior exec in Apple that is even more of a puritan than the "AI safety" nuts and forced Siri to be dumbed down to prevent even the slightest risk of any impropriety. With people like that in charge, innovation can't occur.
- refulgentis 3y agoNo I hate when I make these posts when I know something, and have to eat down votes for it. Believe what you will, but it's not true, not even close to true, or in the same ballpark as truth, and it's not some contentious half truth. It's a bizarre wholly new rumor that should strike everyone reasonably acquainted with AI as trivially wrong, given timelines. 14 years here, I at least had come to expect common courtesy on what is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
- jiggawatts 3y agoEvidence: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/siri-getting-dumber-wolfram-alpha-integration-removed-in-ios-7.1597610/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/siri-getting-dumber-wol... Siri could answer questions it no longer can. When I ask it to play a specific song in the car, it plays a song at random. This has been a known issue for 3+ years: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253216090?sortBy=best https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253216090?sortBy=best Literally the only two things I can successfully use it for is setting timers and reminders. Nothing else works robustly. You say you've worked in the Siri team for 14 years? Print this out, roll it up, and bop your managers on the nose with it: YOU'RE MISSING THE BOAT. You haven't bought a ticket, and you're not even at the pier! While you guys are still "thinking" about generative AI integration, millions of your users like me have switched to using the Open AI app because it actually understands what I'm saying and can answer usefully. Just the voice recognition part of Siri alone is being absolutely blown out of the water by demos thrown together by individuals, not entire teams of people working at what is soon to be the former biggest company in the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfvLIEHwiyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfvLIEHwiyo If I get a message from my Mum that's not in English, Siri used to say some hilarious verbatim English pronunciation of the words. Total gibberish. The big improvement now is that she'll just say: "A message in a foreign language" or something to that effect. Simply refusing to do anything useful. The Open AI app can read the same text out loud to me, no problems. How is that "improving over time"!? What are you guys doing over there? All I see is regressions. PS: It seems that there aren't even that many people in the Siri team: https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/03/apple-siri-amazon-alexa-hiring-data/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/03/apple-siri-amazon-alexa-hirin... PPS: Zuckerberg bought 350,000 NVIDIA H100 accelerators. https://www.pcmag.com/news/zuckerbergs-meta-is-spending-billions-to-buy-350000-nvidia-h100-gpus https://www.pcmag.com/news/zuckerbergs-meta-is-spending-bill... Does the Siri team even have access to a single H100 card? A few dozen maybe? I haven't heard a peep about Apple buying anything from NVIDIA in the last year...
- crossroadsguy 3y agoIt says uh-huh and um-hmm. That should compensate for everything else I suppose.
- chongli 3y agoWhat do you use your voice assistant for? I use Siri to set timers, set alarms, create reminders, identify songs (which uses Shazam), and turn on/off various smart devices around the house.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoI use Siri a lot when driving. It's completely hit or miss if it will provide me with an answer or tell me to open my phone to view web results. Some of it's rather baffling. Like being able to convert certain common units but not others.
- simondotau 3y agoThe problem I have is that the quality of dictation seems to drop precipitously when using something other than the microphone built into an iPhone. In my car, Siri and dictation feel like a bad tech demo; as soon as I disable Bluetooth, accuracy shoots back up again. (And I know for a fact that the hands-free in my car makes super clear phone calls.)
- hellotomyrars 3y agoI use it mostly while driving to request specific songs. It is insane that in multiple cases, it has shown the song I asked for on the lock screen, changing from the previous track so I know it understood what I asked it for, and then plays something entirely random that I have never heard before and is not in my library. I don't know how that even happens, but it has happened multiple times. Siri is truly awful and they certainly don't need an LLM to make Siri functional but anything that drives it forward is welcome relief. Specific example of Siri seemingly recognizing exactly what I said, but playing something totally different. (In this case it is another song from my library, but I'm not usually in a position to take a screenshot or record the screen when I'm driving.) https://i.imgur.com/t9dnoTx.png https://i.imgur.com/t9dnoTx.png
- astrange 3y agoAre you connected to the car radio? I wonder if it's fighting the phone when it tries to change tracks.
- walteweiss 3y agoYeah, back in 2011, I bought iPhone 4S, not 4, for exactly that, because of Siri. Expecting it to work as I imagined back then. Siri is still not there, 13 years / generations of iPhones later.
- _tom_ 3y agoor 2000 https://www.fastcompany.com/90209550/general-magics-forgotten-second-act-was-the-siri-of-its-era https://www.fastcompany.com/90209550/general-magics-forgotte...