[adoxyz]

Basic things that I feel like should be trivial for Siri to handle. The biggest issue by far is how bad the voice dictation is for sending messages. It almost never gets it right.

I'm not opposed to an Apple search engine if it works. Would happily use it. But the way Siri has stagnated doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence for me.

[core-questions]

> But the way Siri has stagnated

Well, maybe most people just don't find it that useful, as an idea, rather than as an implementation? I don't personally find myself wanting to talk to my phone, and I certainly don't want smart speakers listening to everything I say and giving it to intelligence agencies or whatever.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Personally I agree. But other people are happy with that interface, so IMO Siri could have been a game changer. It had the potential to eat a big part of the web and give Apple dominance over it.

Failing to take advantage of that early lead has been one of the biggest failures of the Cook era.

[spike021]

That's odd. I use Siri with CarPlay in my car and a very low-quality mic from an aftermarket headunit, and it's able to capture probably 80%, if not more, of my voice-to-texts when I'm trying to text people hands-free.

The only real issue Siri has there more often is when I ask it a more complicated query for playing music a certain non-trivial way, like "Play music by X from their latest album" or similar.

[shakna]

A lot of it comes down to your accent. It seems like Siri is trained well for a very particular voice, and if you fall in that range it works great.

If you fall outside that range... It might get one in three words correct.

[rodgerd]

For example, the memorable time I was letting my boss know I was running late because of what Siri chose to transcribe as "sick cunts".

(It was my children who were unwell.)

[simonh]

I suspect the search engine effort is actually part of making Siri better. To do that they need the data to analyse, which means scraping and indexing, which is search. Might as well wraps that in a UI and nail two birds with one stone.