4 ms·

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

• LZ_Khan 11mo ago
  No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet
  • torlok 11mo ago
    Exactly. Looks like everybody's complaining that Siri isn't a better Ask Jeeves, when that's not the design goal. What people expect is an LLM that has full access to the phone. Nobody's even remotely close to shipping that.
    • bombcar 11mo ago
      I just want "set timer for 5 minutes" and "what time is it" to work reliably, 100% of the time.
      • antipaul 11mo ago
        Works on Siri! You can even set – get this – multiple timers ;)
        • bombcar 11mo ago
          I seem to get about 90%; wife gets closer to 80%. I just want it to be better.
          • NaOH 11mo ago
            Activate Siri and then say the amount of time you'd like on the timer. For me, that's holding the side button then only saying, "20 minutes." The one caveat is that once the timer you want is two and a half hours or longer, then Siri replies by asking what you would like to convert to.
            • bombcar 11mo ago
              That may be it - we’re always asking a HomePod to do it - “hey siri set timer for five minutes”
              • NaOH 11mo ago
                My Siri-initiated timers are always done with my phone, probably 50 or more each week (work stuff). The only time I get a failure is when I release the side button too quickly. I've made certain the spoken feedback is enabled to reduce the risk of me making that mistake. (Settings > Siri > Siri Responses > Prefer Spoken Responses) As for, "What time is it?"... Try activating Siri and only saying, "Time."
                • bombcar 11mo ago
                  I suspect that's the main difference; if you're trying to use hands-free voice activation via "hey Siri" you get a much different experience than if you can touch the watch/phone to trigger Siri first. And thinking back over it, more than half the failures are complete - e.g., it likely never activated at all. Very few are "it set a timer, but for the wrong time".
                  • NaOH 10mo ago
                    Good chance that's what captures our different Siri experiences. The few times I've done it spoken was always with AirPods and I always waited for the Siri reply (been a while; is it, "Uh-huh"?) after I said, "Hey, Siri." But my experience activating Siri with speech is so minimal as to be untrustworthy of anything broader.
  • rightbyte 11mo ago
    How is that even possible with modern transcribing and natural language capabilities?
  • hu3 11mo ago
    I guess it depends on what you mean by voice assistant. But Android has been 100% accurate for simple commands for over a decade for me. Things like: - "weather." tells me forecast of where I am. - "alarm at 8am" and "alarm in 30 minutes" works as expected. - calendar commands also work My favourite is "go home" which opens Google map with a route to home. These things just work. I don't recall last time I had to repeat myself.
    • arthens 11mo ago
      I wonder if we are getting different versions based on geolocation (I'm in Europe) because my experience is the absolute opposite of this. I actually had the thought "maybe I should switch to apple to stop having to deal with this" just this week (although reading this thread siri is as bad). My experience is only through android auto and it honestly makes me furious how bad it is. There is absolutely no other tech product in my life that gets even close to how bad voice commands are handled in Android. In my experience, literally everything sucks: - single language voice recognition (me speaking in English with an accent) - multi language voice recognition (english commands that include localised names from the country I'm in) - action in context (understand what I'm actually asking it to do) - supported actions (what it can actually do) Some practical examples from just this week: - I had to repeat 3 times that "no I don't want to reply" because I made the mistake of getting google to read a whatsapp message while driving, and it got stuck into the "would you like to reply" (it almost always gets stuck - it's my goto example to show people how bad it is) - I asked it to queue a very specific playlist on Spotify, and it just couldn't get it right (no matter how specific my command was, I couldn't get it to play a playlist from MY. account instead of playing an unrelated public playlist) - I asked to add a song to a playlist, and it said it couldn't do that (at least it understood what I was asking? maybe) And in general I gave up trying to use google maps through voice commands, because it's just not capable of understanding an English command if it contains a street/location name pronounced in the local language/accent.
• navane 11mo ago
  I use it almost daily, to set timers and alarms
  • TranquilMarmot 11mo ago
    Same thing I used it for 10 years ago hahaha
  • recursive 11mo ago
    I used to use it for that. A few months ago I got an Android system update and it no longer works for that. It just does web searches if I try. Now it's trying to push me into this thing where it takes a screenshot and tells me what's on the screen. I've never once cared about that. Failing to find any way to get the alarm thing back, I turned off the entire assistant thing.
• DrewADesign 11mo ago
  Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods name are people downvoting me for politely asking about someone’s differing experience?
  • ASalazarMX 11mo ago
    "Siri, play The Dragonborn comes at 25% volume" "Here is what I found about "The Dragonborn comes at 25" on the Internet" opens Safari
    • DrewADesign 11mo ago
      Ah I never felt inspired to use it on a computer and always use physical volume controls in the car and through headphones, so I wouldn’t have run into that. It does seem like something that should be a day-one sort of feature.
    • fragmede 11mo ago
      "First you have to unlock your iphone" (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
      • bombcar 11mo ago
        I swear I've gotten that response, from a nearby HomePod, while holding my unlocked iPhone in my hands. I don't know what it is doing sometimes.
  • addaon 11mo ago
    The very first thing I tried when Siri was released -- "set an alarm for ten minutes before sunset" -- still doesn't work. "What time is sunset?" and "Set an alarm for 5:03 PM" both worked on day one, and still work. Zero progress.
• cheeze 11mo ago
  It works pretty well for me, but doesn't do nearly what I'd expect. EG I can talk to it like I would chatgpt and it works well. But I can't be like "hey I want to get dinner with my wife on our anniversary, please book the best available option in my city for fine dining" It's still way better than Siri, which feels like a voice CLI to me (same as Alexa, which is very low quality IME)
  • DrewADesign 11mo ago
    I don’t think I’d want to talk to a voice assistant like that. Maybe it’s a generational thing? Things like that are ambiguous enough discussing them with human beings and a big part of things like voice assistants is understanding how it’s going to interpret and execute a response based on what I say to it.
• parliament32 11mo ago
  It works okay. I like that it's universal (the same assistant on my phone, on my home devices, in my car, in my earbuds). I like that it does tasks right, but you have to know how to phrase them (my most common is probably "remind me to X tomorrow at X time"). Setting alarms and timers, creating calendar events, asking about the weather on a specific day or in a specific place, asking how long it'll take to walk/drive somewhere -- all good. But anything more complicated than that and you get erratic behaviour. From what I've seen with my friends interacting with Siri, I'd say they're about equal in capability.
• avereveard 11mo ago
  Its gemini so at least its smartish and has some integration with the rest of the ecosystem so it can do some assistant work as long as its read mostly, but integration with the rest of the phone is almost non existent. It also struggle in noisy environments and in mixed language situations
• indymike 11mo ago
  If they didn’t have so many limitations imposed for safety or by permissioning. Hey Google call my wife. 30 seconds later “something has gone wrong”. Or hey Google play _______ on YouTube music. “Playing something else on you tube music”. Its stupid.
• PopePompus 11mo ago
  The current situation on Google's Android Pixel phones is odd. The old non-LLM Google Assistant works well in a limited domain: Things like setting alarms, phoning by name, etc. It's similar in scope to Siri, but with better voice recognition, and better context awareness. However, Google is desperate to kill Google Assistant and force all Pixel users to use Gemini instead. Gemini 3 is a very good LLM, and far, far, far more versatile than Google Assistant. But Gemini won't do the simple things as reliably as the old Assistant. Setting an alarm works maybe 90% of the time with Gemini. If you asked the old Assistant "What time is it?" it would respond "It's 4:40 PM". If you ask Gemini "What time is it?" it will sometimes respond "It's 4:40 PM CDT in {your city}", but sometimes it will say "It's four four zero Pee Em in {your city}" and sometimes it will do a web search. Results are spotty in other areas like voice dialing. I've retained the old Assistant, because I want to do the basic things far more often than I want to verbally vibe code. But rumor has it Google is going to disable the old Assistant in March, forcing all users onto Gemini for voice commands. Unless Gemini gets much better at handling simple tasks by then, Pixel users will end up with a voice assistant much more frustrating than Siri.
  • 1d22a 11mo ago
    Not to mention all the useless LLM fluff Gemini has. I turned off Gemini because simple questions like "What's 1 USD in AUD" would be met with 30 seconds of "As a large language model, I can't provide investment advice, so it's always important to check information yourself [...], but one Australian dollar is approximately $0.65" (note the conversion in the wrong direction). By comparison, Google Assistant just gives you a number straight away.
  • dyauspitr 11mo ago
    They should have deterministic actions for certain non fungibles and let the LLM do the rest.
• insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  Pretty much the same as Siri. Alexa isn't any better either.