[daxuak]

A neat writup. I am sincerly curious about the speech interface: does it worth having the speech interface, if you have to mind not saying specific expressions at your own home because Siri might get confused? I thought people were more longing for the interface on phones (vs. walk up to a physical switch) and do not really want Siri or alikes.

[sgt]

As much as I love Apple products, Siri is my least favorite.

I just can't fathom why they can't get Siri right after all these years. She will just respond to something completely irrelevant once in a while, presumably because it sounded like a command issued to her.

The toddler comparison is spot on. Occasionally it's like she's busy doing something else (clearly MUCH more important,.. maybe she's mining bitcoin in the cloud?), instead of listening to my requests.

That being said, I still use Siri for things when I have my hands full. She can be a lifesaver.

[aemreunal]

Same here. I'm really looking forward to the tell-all book in a decade or two about what really went on with Siri and why it's still so so bad.

Not asking for miracles or "general-purpose AI" here, just decent speed, dependable consistency and general reliability. For example, Siri will correctly set a timer 90-95% of the time when you say a duration to it, like "5 minutes", but just sometimes, it doesn't understand what I'm talking about and gives an error speech.

[sgt]

I literally just asked Siri: "set a timer for 5 minutes". She responded with: "I set your alarm for 5AM".

So .. frustrating.

Surely there are Apple employees reading HN? This is an embarrassment.

[aemreunal]

They don't even need to read HN, I'm wondering if they even use the thing at all! Same goes for pretty much all of their software...

[sgt]

I am a pretty big Apple user and I am mostly satisfied with the quality of e.g macOS, iOS etc. Been a "power user" on OS X / macOS for almost two decades.