[dilap]

Occasionally I ask her (it?) to set a timer or add a reminder, but mostly I don't. Siri is quite slow and frustratingly limited.

The other day in a hurry and driving somewhere, I ended up w/ both Apple Maps and Google Maps open, simultaneously giving me directions.

"Hey Siri, close Google Maps"

"To close an application, swipe up from the bottom of the phone..."

To paraphrase a quote from Steve Jobs, if your voice assistant asks you to touch the screen, you blew it.

[pftburger]

Seconded. I get way too many "Im sorry Dave, I just can't do that" moments

[josephg]

I've given up asking her arbitrary questions - the other day I asked what the weather was like in Sydney. (I live in Australia, so the context is really obvious). She told me what the weather was like at "Sidney's tool shed" - wherever that is.

But I use siri daily for things like:

- Setting and stopping alarms and timers: ("Hey siri - set alarm for tomorrow morning at 9:25" / when the alarm goes off: "Hey siri stop")

- Turning on and off my lights. Its a delight every time to say "hey siri goodnight" when I go to bed and see all the lights in the house turn off.

[Kye]

Siri handles this fine on my new phone from the opposite end of the globe. This seems to support my suspicion that they ship increasingly less sophisticated Siris to increasingly older phones. Siri on my 6S Plus before this became almost useless once they switched to on-device processing. It's also much better at identifying objects in photos for searches.

[josephg]

I'm querying siri on a homepod, not a phone. And I just checked - she still answers with a weather report near "Sidney Tools". (Its currently raining and 17 degrees C, if you're wondering.)

I have a running theory that you can tell how long any FAANG bug will stick around by just imagining a 25 year old tech dude in the bay area. If Dave the bay area tech dude will never encounter the bug, you're in for a bad time.

For example, google maps used to give terrible directions at roundabouts (traffic circles). That makes sense because there's no traffic circles in the bay area. All the people who could fix the problem weren't aware there was a problem at all. Dave is terrified of roundabouts, so of course it took about a decade for directions at roundabouts to improve.

A corollary of this is that modern software works well proportionally to how closely your setup matches that of the average bay area tech dude. Everything works best if you have a new phone (preferably an iPhone), fast computer and you speak english. Woe be to you if your computer is old and slow, or you use a right-to-left language, if you're blind or you have a bad internet connection.

Macos feels laggy and slow on a slow internet connection because of course it does. Bay area tech bros are never in that situation! What would Dave know about slow internet?

[Kye]

I run into some things like this in Georgia. I wanted to know when the humidity and temperature were low enough to be safe. It's always nice in that part of California, so Siri has no concept of humidity and temperature. It just throws out a general weather report. The weather app at least has graphs for UV index, humidity, and temperature now. I think it must have come by way of Dark Sky.

This isn't just a SV thing, though. I downloaded a well-regarded weather app from a country in Europe that has pretty consistent humidity. The app didn't even show humidity. People have trouble seeing outside their bubble. SV just happens to have outsized influence, for now.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

> To paraphrase a quote from Steve Jobs, if your voice assistant asks you to touch the screen, you blew it.

Gold.

[BudaDude]

It makes no sense that Siri is so stunted in what she can do.

[z9znz]

No kidding! She obviously knew what was wanted, but instead of doing her fing job, she tells you how to do it yourself. She doesn't like when I tell her to F herself. I hope some of those recordings end up with Apple training.

[throwaway290]

May they be hedging against a vulnerability where a malicious person with similar enough voice closes some crucial app in a sticky situation. It's not as harmless than setting reminders/alarms which I use Siri for.

[genewitch]

yeah like in that movie when the Bomb Squad is using Pocket Bomb Defuser Pro 2023 and the bomber shouts over the loudspeakers "Siri, Turn off Bomb Defuser Pro" and then everyone was sad.

A moody teenager rips a poster of Jobs off their bedroom wall.

[Kye]

Siri's performance and quality seems to depend a lot on the on-board ML cores since it switched to on-device. It was basically unusable on my 6S Plus with its early ML cores, and now it's great on the 14 Pro Max I replaced it with. It seems like they ship a Siri to match the device capability.

[ASalazarMX]

I had the idea that Siri could only recognize "Hey Siri", and after that it would offload the task to Apple's cloud. If it's offline now, it would be great, but I don't see how the ML cores would help. Speech-To-Text is practically solved for most devices, after that you're interacting with a regular chat bot.

[Kye]

They made the change last year.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522993/apple-siri-on-dev...

All I know is what I experienced: it got less reliable with the switch and stopped handling stuff it handled perfectly before, then got better with a newer phone.