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Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportun
by elAhmo 11mo ago
Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free.
A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.
If they had 0 improvements over these 15 years the situation wouldn't be much different than today.
- sethops1 11mo agoI'd throw in the failure to do anything meaningful with home automation, which I guess could fall under the Siri umbrella of failure. Maybe I'm still peeved big tech bought up the industry just to kill any innovation.
- kridsdale1 11mo agoHey, my 10 HomePods are able to turn off 80% of my lights at night, 80% of the time!
- pornel 11mo agoI've switched to Home Assistant, and it's sooo much better. Home Assistant can even share devices with Home app, so you can still use "Siri, turn off the lamp" to have it answer "you don't have any alarms set".
- npunt 11mo agoI'm amazed 'set a reminder for x when I leave this location' still doesn't get the 'when I leave this location'. It's clear user expectation created internally (by siri marketing) and externally (by ai tools) has far outpaced capability.
- smelendez 11mo agoApple seems weird about that and I'm not sure why, maybe accuracy or creepiness factor? A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.
- jagged-chisel 11mo agoI can set location-based alerts manually. For me, or for those who voluntarily already share their location with me. No reason Siri can’t drive those same notifications. Edit: to be clear, Siri doesn’t. Still no reason it shouldn’t be able to.
- npunt 11mo agoApple Reminders has a feature to remind you when you are leaving or arriving at a location. It's super useful! But it's not super low friction to add to a Reminder via UI (it's buried at the bottom of the edit screen), so it's a feature ideally suited for a voice-based reminder. Nevertheless, nobody implemented it.
- kridsdale1 11mo agoHey, I made that!
- npunt 11mo agoIt's a great feature! I was demoing it to my parents over Thanksgiving and forgot about the lack of Siri support, and of course it failed. Parents were excited when I mentioned it but now won't be using it. Ah well.
- nunez 11mo agoSuper useful feature; thanks. I used it to help me remember the names of people I saw often at places I ate at or worked out of.
- calvinmorrison 11mo agohey, the most reliable way to send something to yourself is still via email. if it works it works.
- drob518 11mo agoYep. It was theirs to lose… and they lost it.
- ecshafer 11mo agoSiri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst driving and half the features are turned off then.
- scrollaway 11mo agoAsking “what’s the weather” in the morning gets Siri to yell at you about the phone being locked, or even “I don’t know where you are”. It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage. Timers and alarm clocks it is.
- singularity2001 11mo ago"What's the weather in Berlin." "you need to unlock your phone to activate location service services"
- astrange 11mo agoWorks for me. Turn on "allow Siri when locked"? If it doesn't know where you are then you might live in a Faraday cage.
- swores 11mo agoTheir point is that Siri is not consistent with these things. If you've never had these issues yourself then good for you, not everyone is as lucky. I have had the same issues myself. The "allow Siri when locked" toggle for my phone is set to on, yet it still often refuses to do stuff like turning my home lights on/off, giving the reason that I need to unlock my phone. And I've also had the location issue they gave an example of, where asking "what is the weather in Berlin" does not need it to know where you are because you've told it the location you're asking about, so the answer is the same regardless of whether you're asking while in Berlin or Tokyo, yet it still sometimes gets stuck believing it needs location access. Edit: oops the issue of having said a location in the request wasn't in the comment you replied to, but another reply to it. But the overall point of Siri being annoyingly inconsistent still stands.
- epistasis 11mo agoSiri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going to work at all. Every few years I would try to use it for a few days, then quit in frustration at how useless it was. Accidentally activating Siri is a major frustration point of using Apple products for me.
- npunt 11mo agoYeah, it's a classic CLI v GUI blunder. If you don't know exactly what the commands are, the interface is not going to be particularly usable. I've found I appreciate having Siri for a few things, but it's not good enough to make it something I reach for frequently. Once burned, twice shy.
- highwaylights 11mo agoI get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating. I’m looking at you, Photos sync. EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right (https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losing-confidence/ https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losi...)
- FireBeyond 11mo agoPhotos is horrific for this. No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality. Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.
- nunez 11mo ago
- fidotron 11mo agoGoogle Now. It's even completely gone and forgotten.
- thevillagechief 11mo agoOh the things they could have done with Google Now. I want to know the story behind it's death if any insiders are lurking around.
- sethops1 11mo agoUgh Google Now on my Pixel 3 was the last time I felt a genuine "wow" factor with tech. Everything since then has been between eye-rolling, uninteresting, or just worse.
- ianferrel 11mo agoHonestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement. Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not: 1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on. 2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.
- dawnerd 11mo agoI back this, it used to work very well for me. Timers, music, etc. Now it's like I'm trying to ask a toddler.
- mort96 11mo agoHey I tried to use Siri to call my mom ~half a week ago and it said it didn't know who my mother was. I did find it weird since although I don't use Siri much, I was almost certain I've had success with that exact same request before, and haven't changed my contacts recently. Interesting that you've also had that problem.
- stephen_g 11mo agoYeah I've been having this with directions for a while too. It generally takes on the second try but a good 30% of the time I'm getting the same acknowledgement it's getting directions and then just silently failing.
- jkestner 11mo agoI would love to know why Siri has clearly deteriorated. I assume it’s opaquely failing due to server infrastructure not keeping up. Thought device-side was supposed to help with that. That’s another thing I’d like to understand — what are the moving parts to Siri?
- VogonPoetry 11mo ago
- 98codes 11mo agoUses for Siri: 1. Checking the current temp or weather 2. Setting an alarm, timer, or reminder 3. Skipping a music track or stopping the music altogether roughly 3 seconds after hearing the command, or 1 second after you assume it didn't work <end of list>
- dyauspitr 11mo agoTelling it to find directions in CarPlay but you have to say “using Google Maps” at the end. It’s pretty good for finding directions with voice only. It is ridiculously useless for most things though. Like I’ll ask it a question on my Apple Watch and it will do a web search and give me a bunch of useless links.
- dhussoe 11mo agothe thing I find most frustrating about the music use-case is that if you ask it to play an album, then close out Siri after the confirmation bing noise, but before it finishes reading back to you the artist and album name it's about to play, then it will treat that as a cancellation and it won't play the album. for example I say: "play comically long album title by artist on Spotify", it thinks about that for five seconds, does the bing noise, then says "playing comically long album title [special remastered edition] by artist on Spotify", and then a few seconds later starts playing the album, and if you don't wait through that whole thing it will just decide that actually you didn't want to hear the album
- mosselman 11mo agoFor some reason this confirmation is always much louder than the music you are listening to. If you tell Siri to play some obscure artist or title of which there seem to be about 10 possible hits, then sure, we need confirmation. If I tell you to play Riders on the Storm by the The Doors, just play it damn it.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoDirections when I’m in the car. Tell me my next event when I’m driving.
- kulahan 11mo agoIt's actually crazy how they've seemingly managed to do absolutely nothing with Siri in a decade and a half. I legitimately have no idea what features it has had added, but I still try basic things and am shocked at how useless it is. I was excited when I recently got an iPhone 16 Pro - it comes with Apple Intelligence! Surely this is how Siri leaps into the future and starts doing things like translating for me, or responding with a photo and some basic facts when I ask who Ariana Greenblatt is, or letting me convert from Krore to USD (it gives results for rupees every time it seems?) or... Anyways, I asked it something basic, and Siri said it would have to use Apple Intelligence. Not like, prompting me if I want to use it, just saying it's needed, then turning off. I'm pretty confused as to what Apple Intelligence is at this point, since I assumed it would be Siri. "Hey Apple Intelligence" doesn't do anything, so I ask ChatGPT. It informs me that AI is, in fact, part of Siri. I... do not know why it gave me that response. Back to timers and alarms. Edit - this is your daily reminder that you can NO LONGER SHUT OFF IPHONES BY HOLDING DOWN THE POWER BUTTON.
- bombcar 11mo agoSiri has changed once it its (her?) lifetime. When they introduced "machine learning" it started working much worse - things that used to work 99% of the time (if you knew the incantation) now randomly fail in inexplicable ways. And now it never gets my kids' names right. If I'm doing voice-to-text I will actually see it flash the correct spelling, and then replace it with some random phrase.
- baggy_trough 11mo agoThe one God-damn thing I really liked using it for, "skip to next chapter" in CarPlay podcasts, they REMOVED.
- Izikiel43 11mo ago> A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. When it works! I’ve spend days where it goes wonky and says something went wrong for anything I ask. How is it that with modern phones the voice recognition and whatnot isn’t running locally?
- the_snooze 11mo agoAlexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze. I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfaces gave up after realizing tired arms make for annoyed users.
- kshacker 11mo ago> voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while. If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single function in a driving car should be controllable by voice, and so could a lot of phone and computer functions.
- scoot 11mo agoWhy on earth would you want to accelerate, brake, and steer by voice?
- neural_thing 11mo agoI'm assuming they meant things like "change temperature" or "seat massage" or "play Despacito" - things you might need to look for in a rental car
- maccard 11mo agoOr more helpfully “find me a fuel station near my destination”
- dboreham 11mo agoStep on it Jeeves, and go through the park.
- rifty 11mo agoI know, it's lame. Over that amount of time Apple with the help of third party developers could have walked much of useful distance we now are trying to run to with LLMs for controlling devices. Unfortunately Apple neither wanted to give up the interaction point to developers nor develop it themselves, and only gave users some control super late with Shortcuts.
- thatjoeoverthr 11mo agoI used it exactly so (timers and alarm clocks) until after some updates it wouldn’t react to my voice even half the time. I haven’t tried it since in 10 years.
- zeristor 11mo agoIt’s got worse in the past few years, I think thought they might have impeded it so that the waited for improvements were that much more apparent.
- quenix 11mo agoDoes anyone have an actual technical theory of how it’s possible for commands that used to work , say a month ago, to just stop working? What is it about Siri’s architecture that causes “Set bedroom light to 30%”, a command that worked for years, to randomly stops working on a random Tuesday with no OS update or home change? I mean, what on earth are they doing on the back end…?
- crooked-v 11mo agoFor me, the standout was a period of 6 months or so when Siri stopped understanding the world "half" (as in "lights to half"), and thne it abruptly started working again.
- spicymaki 10mo agoMy hypothesis is that when Siri does processing on the phone its abilities are severely diminished. Perhaps there is some heuristic it uses to pick if it processes voice to text on the phone vs on the server (e.g. possibly based on server load). That might be why you see inconsistencies day to day.
- bsimpson 11mo agoThe tension is that there's a big chasm of utility from those things until you're compete-with-Google-Search levels of good. I feel like I heard there was an Amazon UX study that said weather, music, and alarms/timers are all people use Alexa for. And even with the best LLM, that's probably all you want out of a smart speaker. A whole bunch of assistants have gotten way worse in the last decade by chasing features at the expense of utility. I don't care about whatever new feature my speaker has, but if it fails to play a song or check the weather, I'm PISSED.
- mietek 11mo agoMy original HomePod has recently regressed in its ability to play songs. It can no longer play one song after another without glitching and repeating a little bit of the previous song. It boggles my mind.
- bradly 11mo agoSteve Jobs passed away the day after Siri’s release, and I don’t think anyone else had the confidence and internal credibility to push the hard organizational changes Siri needed, similar to when he moved Apple to a single P&L when he returned.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoUntil LLMs came along, there wasn’t much you could do to improve Siri’s underlying technology. You could throw a thousand monkeys at to add more phrases it could match on and improve the interface to let you know what you could do. But that’s about it.
- bradly 11mo agoLLMs would help a lot, but there was a lot of low hanging fruit. During my time at Apple I worked on some of the evaluation of Siri's quality and saw first hand how the org issues affected Siri's path forward.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoNow I’m curious. What could have been improved about Siri other than “bringing in 1000 monkeys” to add more phrases for intent matching before LLMs?
- bradly 11mo agoGood question. While I had a fairly narrow view of a very large system, I'll give my personal perspective. I worked on systems for evaluating the quality of models over time and for evaluating the quality of new models before release to understand how the new models would perform compared to current models once in the wild. It was difficult to get Siri to use these tools that were outside of their org. While this wouldn't solve the breadth of Siri's functionality issues, it would have helped improve the overall user experience with the existing Siri features to avoid the seemingly reduction of quality over time. Secondly, and admittedly farther from where I was... Apple could have started the move from ML models to LLMs much sooner. The underlying technology for LLMs started gaining popularity in papers and research quite a few years ago, and there was a real problem of each team developing their own ML models for search, similarity, recommendations, etc that were quite large and that became a problem for mobile device delivery and storage. If leadership had a way to bring the orgs together they may have landed on LLMs much sooner.
- squidsoup 11mo ago> A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. Also quite good for making shopping lists, with some bonus amusement when you get a weird transcription and have to try to work out that "cats and soup" is "tonkatsu sauce" several days after you added it to the list.
- raspasov 11mo agoBecause almost no one (outside of accessibility needs) truly needs or wants to use voice to control their device. It’s one of the few UX fetishes that refuses to die.
- wnevets 11mo agoPeople really thought Siri was what LLM chat bots are today.
- nixpulvis 11mo agoVoice Assistance was a thing long before Siri, and was arguably more useful because it was less smart, the keywords worked more predictably.
- browningstreet 11mo agoSiri isn’t the only one.. Amazon has the same story with Alexa, but they did get to Alexa+ before Siri’s successor bowed.
- bane 11mo agoIt also pioneered billions of other users with "hey google" and "siri" uselessness which also copied and then completely flatlined with things to do beyond calling the wrong person in your call list, setting timers, and playing the wrong song.
- venturecruelty 11mo agoSo now can we all agree that voice interfaces are mostly useless? Other than "Siri, set a timer for ten minutes" while your hands are full in the kitchen. Siri could never work because voice interfaces are not good.
- notatoad 11mo agoif anything, siri has gotten worse over the years, which is wild. it used to be able to set a timer or alarm 100% of the time, now sometimes it decides it needs to ask chatGPT for help.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoThe problem was that Siri didn’t need new technology to be at least as good as Alexa, just more monkeys at the keyboard. Classic Alexa, Gemini and Siri are all just intent based pattern matching systems where you brute force all of the phrases you want to match on (utterances), map those to intents and have “slots” for the variable parts. Like where you are coming from and where you are going. Then you trigger an API. I’ve worked with the underlying technology behind Alexa for years on AWS - Amazon Lex - with call centers (Amazon Connect). On the other hand, the capabilities and reliability of both Alexa and Google’s voice assistant have regressed once they moved to an LLM based system. It seems to be a hard problem and I don’t understand why. I’ve find plenty of free text input -> LLM -> standard JSON output -> call API implementations. It seems like it would just be another LLM + brute force issue.
- occamsrazorwit 11mo ago"15 years ago" is funny, because Siri couldn't even do either of those functions on desktop 7 years ago [1]. It's crazy how they've managed to do nothing with a winning hand. [1] https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9q7ugf/it_is_truly_absurd_that_siri_on_macos_still_cant/ https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9q7ugf/it_is_truly_absur...
- nunez 11mo agoIt's actually worse than that because Siri was MORE functional back when it had static NLP rules. Many people have used it to book movie tickets, restaurant reservations, etc. it also told pretty funny jokes. I definitely remember people having a great time with that feature.
- jasonkester 11mo agoIt was never a good idea for a product. I'm not ever going to talk to my phone. Certainly not for the slim list of things that doing so would make more efficient than just looking at it and poking the button I need. And there's no way I'm going to enable a battery draining 24/7 surveillance microphone on my phone on the off chance I ever do come up with a reason to give it a voice command. But Apple really wants me using it. So much that my wife's car won't enable CarPlay unless turn Siri on. Like, there's no way to get it to put a Google map on the car's screen unless I turn this unrelated other thing on. They're happy to burn all our goodwill and convince us to buy Android phones next time (which work fine in a car without their surveillance microphone turned on). Until then, I bought a $5 phone stand for the dashboard.
- hbs18 11mo ago> I'm not ever going to talk to my phone Maybe you won't, but there's still value in being able to use it hands free. "Hey Siri, call (name) on speaker" is something I regularly ask it to do while I'm driving.
- __patchbit__ 11mo agoApple never wargamed the Siri dialogue tree for iPhone `lost and found' recovery safely return to owner the one time first time I tried to use it seriously.
- seec 10mo agoYes that's because Apple marketing is always wildly overhyping the capacities of what they are selling. In this case the lie was that Siri could understand you just like a real human but it really can't. AI chat bots have some similar problems (figuring out what it can actually do) but at least they are much better at communicating like a human.