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Comment by blazespin | Hacker News Reader

For me, Siri is horribly behind. I've gone to the point of installing Google on my iPhone and using it even though it's a struggle to activate it compared to Siri.

My big problem with Siri is that I have to time when I start talking. Also, her voice recognition is awful in noisy settings.

I have an iPhone 7

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> My big problem with Siri is that I have to time when I start talking.

What do you mean? You can just say "Hey Siri, blah blah blah" and Siri will pick up the "blah blah blah" just fine.

If you're adding an artificial delay after "Hey Siri", waiting for her to respond before continuing, then you're just making it harder. Just speak conversationally.

>If you're adding an artificial delay after "Hey Siri", waiting for her to respond before continuing, then you're just making it harder. Just speak conversationally.

I actually find this frustrating and I'm surprised Apple went this way given their usual commitment to humanistic interaction design. When I'm addressing someone in real life, I call out their names and wait for acknowledgement that they're listening before rattling off questions at them.

The fact that Siri doesn't acknowledge it's listening or even give you a visual indicator that it's attention has been caught (like a person does by making eye contact) makes interaction with it feel strange and unnatural.

It's especially weird when you're in a room with multiple "Hey Siri" capable devices. If I call out "Hey Siri" I'd like to know whether I should be speaking at my iPhone, my iPad, my girlfriends iPhone, or a hypothetical HomePod. Which ones should I direct my voice at and expect a response from? All? None? Some? Can I tell my girlfriend's iPhone to go away because I'm talking to my phone right now? I'd like to. . .

> The fact that Siri doesn't acknowledge it's listening or even give you a visual indicator that it's attention has been caught

Yes it does. It makes a very distinct sound when it starts listening, and the screen itself transitions to the Siri screen and shows the animating waveform.

It's weird. It takes several seconds after saying "Hey Siri" before it starts doing that. It works fine if you say "Hey Siri blah blah blah." But if you wait for the indication, then it actually messes up. It's listening before it's brought up, but it doesn't seem to listen to what you say immediately after it's brought up, it takes a second. It's very strange.

And it doesn't start listening until about a second later.

Which is a big problem.

Tangent: wouldn't it be nice if you could say "Siri, ask Google to..."

I wonder if implementing the feature of calling 3rd party assistants from the flagship assistant would pay off strategically.

On one hand, you appeal to people who like other assistants better, or like different assistants for different things. On the other hand, you give up on forcing people to get used to your assistant.

Also, could an isolationist provider stop other assistants from calling their one? Technically? Legally?

Lol, you can't even ask Siri to play a song on Spotify so you can forget about that. Anyway at that point why do you want to play telephone with chatbots? Just get an android phone.

>I wonder if implementing the feature of calling 3rd party assistants from the flagship assistant would pay off strategically.

It'll never happen, but I can definitely see some utility in building this in. For example: "Hey Siri, have Alexa order some paper towels from Amazon." I can see Amazon allowing this since they're going for a more generic approach. But I don't think Google, Apple, MS, or Samsung will.

>Also, her voice recognition is awful in noisy settings.

I figured that was more of a hardware problem?

Talk to the top of the phone. There is a separate mic up there for Siri. Took me a while to work this out.

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