I wonder if this has anything to do with their acquisition of DarwinAI. After a decade of mediocrity, I'd love to see Siri get smarter. Any improvement would be welcome at this point.
Honest question: what do you (in the general sense, not specifically asking the parent) use Siri for? I think my main (only?) use case is setting a timer.
Maybe I find conversational UIs awkward, or maybe I just got jaded REALLY quickly from Siri’s lacking capabilities early on, but I have hardly used it in the decade or whatever that it’s been around.
I use it almost daily for something that is simple but under appreciated I don’t know why it’s not in every marketing video: “Siri, remind me tomorrow at 10am to do X”
I outsource so much of my memory to the phone via Siri ALL THE TIME. It’s so useful. Even for things in 20m. I’ll easily forget if I don’t do this, and it’s reliable so it gives me confidence. It also keeps the notification present until I actually do the thing, so I have a kind of string around my finger until the task is accomplished. I can also snooze that notification as needed to rebring it up at the right time.
Every time I do this around non-tech people they go “wow I didn’t know you could do that.” I swear it’s literally life changing, particularly for anyone over 30.
Especially with Shortcuts, Siri can have some pretty useful functionality. My personal big improvement I'd like to see is being able to better able to tap into those actions without having to set things up in advance.
A year or so ago I remember someone pointing out in a podcast how LLMs are great at taking something like general language and turning it into a series of predefined commands (the stuff available to shortcuts). It would instantly make Siri much more useful.
I think Federico Viticci rigged up something similar or at least a powerful demo using Siri + Shortcuts + ChatGPT to be able to answer all sort of questions better than native Siri.
Yep. Reminders is #1 by far, followed by sending texts, turning lights on/off with HomeKit and timers which are similar.
I can’t imagine reminders w/o Siri because that’s how I add 90%+ of them. Grocery items, things to do at time X, or when I get to (or leave) work/home are the big ones.
Raising blinds, turning on/off lights, and unlocking the front door. It is convenient since I can do all those things with one command (raise all the blinds and turn off all the lights, or raise all the north blinds and lower the south ones), it would be a hard problem to create physical buttons to do what we needed without running around the room to hit various switches.
Google can also do this. Alexa has lots of problems, but it can raise a blind in a pinch. We also spent a ton on Lutron shades because we discovered that we were just managing them too much manually (Siri then is great for controlling that).
You can also ask Siri the weather in the morning, useful in figuring out how to dress the kid.
For me it really is extremely close to 100% for timers, I barely remember it being wrong and I use it several times per day. Finding my phone via the HomePod also works pretty much every time, may be 90% for me but it doesn’t recognize my wife so for her it basically never works. The others I don’t use enough. But timers and reminders work really well for me and it’s also what I need to most from an assistant.
I’ve seen similar. They really don’t have two person houses down pat - timers work great for me (as long as I never have to ask how much remaining; I’d die for a “count down from 30 seconds”) - but for the wife; nothing.
Since they removed “hey” and I got the latest phone, I’ve noticed many little situations where it’s faster to speak to the device than tap your way around. E.G. when it’s locked you can say, “Siri, open Spotify” and look at it for face unlock, boom. Random stuff. Also Alexa has surprised me lately, like a rational response to, “how many sandwiches is too many?”
Personally, I don't want Siri to be 'smarter', if smarter means it becomes an open-ended and unpredictable way to have an LLM guess what I meant. I'd like Siri to be more powerful, yes.
I like that I can model Siri as a decision tree with voice-activated input. Being able to configure it to do more things (for example, to put reminders in Things rather than Reminders), that would be useful. More discoverability would also be great (but this is Apple we're talking about, so good luck there). But for me personally, the most important feature is that Siri is predictable: once I figure out how to do something with it, asking again in mostly the same way will get the same result. If I want to talk to an LLM, I have ChatGPT on my phone.
I agree. The whole push to have Siri work on device was a noble one, but I’d rather have the option for a dumber on device Siri or a smarter in the cloud Siri.
I hear that a lot, and I have no desire to tell you your opinion’s wrong, but it doesn’t match my experience. Siri’s… fine, I guess, for what I ask of it like setting timers and reminders and such.
It’s not perfect, for sure:
Me: Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights.
Siri: I can’t process multiple requests.
Me: Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights.
Siri: OK.
But it works reliably enough that I use it all the time for the reminder and timer actions. Is it vastly worse for other people, and in what ways?
The characterization of "mediocre" is fair, but we're transiting a household to Siri from Alexa (because Alexa doesn't work locally, and because of Amazon's track record on privacy), and it's not noticeably worse.
The feeling I’ve heard from people is Alexa was way better than Siri at first.
Over time Siri got better. Not great but better. Alexa had mostly stayed the same or perhaps gotten a touch worse except for adding ads and other annoyances.
I’ve never used anything but Siri. It works decently, definitely has its moods/dumb-as-a-post moments. But I’ve learn what works well and for that it’s proven very useful.
Maybe I find conversational UIs awkward, or maybe I just got jaded REALLY quickly from Siri’s lacking capabilities early on, but I have hardly used it in the decade or whatever that it’s been around.