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by rollcat 446 days ago
Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter failure that even Gruber has been calling it out.

It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless.

TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
3 comments
p_ing 446 days ago
A few months ago, for quite a few years, Siri (in the car) would respond correctly to "Play playlist <playlist name>". Now it interprets that as of about two months ago that it should play some songs of the genre (I have a playlist named "modern").

No idea what changed, but it sucks.

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ben_w 446 days ago
> I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.

I have almost the opposite problem this year. I tell the HomePod to turn the office lights on, it sometimes interprets this as a request to play music even though my library is actually empty, and the response is therefore to tell me that rather than turn on the lights.

Back in the pandemic, same problem with Alexa. Except it was in the kichen, so it said (the German equivalent of) "I can't find 'Kitchen' in your Spotify playlist" even though we didn't even have Spotify.

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ethbr1 446 days ago
The decreasing effectiveness of machine-local search is just developers fucking up integrations and indexing.

This is a solved problem since ~1970 -- they're just not spending enough time on it.

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