[ianferrel]

Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement.

Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:

1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.

2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.

[dawnerd]

I back this, it used to work very well for me. Timers, music, etc. Now it's like I'm trying to ask a toddler.

[VogonPoetry]

I have experienced some similar issues. I think some of it related to the "locked" state of the device. Siri needs context data to answer, particularly the mom or some destination questions. Specifically for contacts or recent places data. This context isn't remotely stored, but provided by the device to Siri each time. I think when the phone is locked it doesn't have access to the data (reading or writing). When I mean "Siri", I mean both the on device and remote parts of it.

I think this also interacts with countries and states that have (possibly misguided) strict laws forbidding the "touching" of phones "while driving". My experiences suggest that using Siri when driving and the device is locked, it just gives up - I sort of see the start of it working then, bam, it stops. If I retry, I suspect that I've somehow "looked" at the phone in frustration, it saw my attention and unlocked. I now wonder if where I have placed the device is making a difference.

It does seem to work much better (when driving) if the device is already unlocked.

I also see odd things when using Shortcuts for navigation. If I've previously asked for walking directions and then speak the shortcut while driving it won't give directions until I switch to the "car" icon in maps. I think it might be trying to calculate the 15Km walking directions, but it doesn't complete before I tell it, frustrated, to stop.

When Siri doesn't work it is usually the times when I need it to. This is definitely a multiplier in disastisfaction.

[VogonPoetry]

After writing this I decided to look at my shortcut. The action seems to have been a simple "get directions to <place>" and sent verbatim to Siri.

I was not able to edit / update it! However, there was now a new "maps" option for `Open <type> directions from <Start> to <Destination>`

Where type can now be {driving,walking,biking,transit} and <start> is Current Location by default.

After updating, this now seems to correctly set actual driving directions, even if I'd previously set up a walking route!

[ianferrel]

I remembered a third one:

3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play <song/artists>", it asks me for access to Pandora (which I do have on my phone). I don't want to play it on Pandora. I have the song! I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to change this, and neither the youtube video I found searching nor this reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/y18ioq/changing_the_de...) seems to work.

Amusingly (?) the reddit people have the opposite problem. They want to use a 3rd party music app but can't get their phones to stop preferring Apple-provided apps.

I can sometimes get this to work by saying "Play <song/artist> on Apple Music", but even that is not reliable.

[jkestner]

I would love to know why Siri has clearly deteriorated. I assume it’s opaquely failing due to server infrastructure not keeping up. Thought device-side was supposed to help with that. That’s another thing I’d like to understand — what are the moving parts to Siri?

[mort96]

Hey I tried to use Siri to call my mom ~half a week ago and it said it didn't know who my mother was. I did find it weird since although I don't use Siri much, I was almost certain I've had success with that exact same request before, and haven't changed my contacts recently.

Interesting that you've also had that problem.

[esafak]

The competition has suffered too. The companies seem to have collectively written the category off.

[stephen_g]

Yeah I've been having this with directions for a while too. It generally takes on the second try but a good 30% of the time I'm getting the same acknowledgement it's getting directions and then just silently failing.