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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

This is strictly anecdotal but a friend of mine is an exec at Facebook and we were recently discussing phones. He had an iPhone for a few years and has now had an Android for a couple years. He said that by far the most drastic difference between the two platforms is Siri vs. Assistant (or whatever Google's assistant is called in the phone). He said it is no contest how much more useful and functional Assistant is, compared to Siri. We did not dwell on this discussion and I otherwise find him an objective, un-biased user of the two platforms, so there you have it.

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Obligatory question is why? What usefullness or functionality made that much of a difference to him?

I want to like Siri but I spend so much time correcting what it has misunderstood, it's nearly not worth using it.

The Google alternative is, from what I understand, something that just works.

But it's not personified to the degree Siri is. I noted this elsewhere in the thread.

Doing that bit of theatre, with some humor, pop culture relevant things, even just good responses, appears to matter more to people than "it can do it", and "it actually did it" hit rates.

OK Google needs a name.

Google is this big, smart thing. People get that.

But, "Ask Siri" has less friction and appears easier to identify with than giving an order to a corporation is, "OK Google."

Maybe just, "Hey Google" would make a subtle difference.

And, in typical Apple fashion, "Ask Siri" is all you need to know to attempt it.

Further, discovery has error. If that can be best guess, combined with some fun, people will play.

"OK Google" lacks these human friendly connotations.

A name would be a follow, hard for Google, but... If it were me, I would flat out own that, get the name, and run ADS. "We hear you... meet [name not common, familiar sounding, friendly, easy to say.]"

There has to be either an old world name with good connotations, or a variant that is catchy, fun, gender fluid.

Lol, use goog. Mostly kidding, but a tiny bit serious.

Better, much better is out there.

Or, let the user name it. Why not?

"OK Google, can I call you inigo?"

"Sure, I will answer to inigo. And OK Google when I'm not properly introduced, OK?"

I'm not a huge fan of Siri's 'jokey' personality, but I could live with it if it actually worked. As it is, it just feels extra frustrating to have a 'personal assistant' that is extremely dumb and cracks jokes.

Oh, I agree. Don't use it myself.

Got downvotes, but it seems to me Google has the superior product. True for me and how I use it anyway.

Add in a little personification, and it's nothing but win, IMHO.

So far, I've seen people like the bit of theatre related to Siri. Whether we do or not isn't necessarily the point.

Or, let the user name it. Why not?

Supposedly these devices have low-power chips that can only recognize certain pre-configured names (like "OK, Google"), and then wake up the main CPU to do the rest.

Ahh, didn't know that. Makes a ton of sense.

Personification is an antifeature to me. I find the named Siri and Alexa to be juvenile and mildly embarrassing.

"hey Google" does work

I always found the phrase ok Google simply awkward to pronounce

Cant speak for the other person, but as someone who's used iPhones exclusively since the original, Siri makes mistakes with sufficient frequency that it's subjectively just bad. I can't quantify what percentage of requests fail to be understood correctly, but it's sufficiently high that the frequency is annoying. It's even worse when using the Apple Watch (Series 3).

Unexpectedly, this can sometimes be a positive too. "Hey siri, turn my lights <pink/orange/purple/blue/red/white>" has on multiple occasions been interpreted as "Hey siri, turn my lights", which then results in the lights being turned off. This is hugely entertaining when you're demonstrating your new Philips Hue bulbs over FaceTime, and the person on the other end now just sees your camera go black instead.

I often want to set a timer for exactly 50 minutes so I know when my laundry is done.

But siri always interprets "Fifty" as "Fifteen". Pretty much every single time, it always makes the same mistake, no matter how clearly or slowly I try to pronounce it. I have to say "Hey Siri, set a timer for five zero minutes" to get it to pick it up accurately.

Maybe saying 49 or 51 would work...

It certainly does work, and I did that until I discovered the "Five zero" trick. It's just "Fifty" that it has a problem with!

I also have that problem, but I say 51 minutes instead.

Do you have any accent? By that I mean are you a second language English speaker? I just presumed that it couldn’t understand my accent heavy speeech.

Americans think I sound British. British think I sound American. Siri fails less often when set to British instead of American for me, but still fails too often regardless.

I'm a native English speaker, though whether I have an accent depends on your perspective! I can do either American or British somewhat convincingly, and I usually don't have any trouble being understood by Siri.

I suspect the problem with "50" is that whatever ML underpins it is heavily tuned/biased towards "15" because a lot of people probably set 15 minute timers all the time. 50 minute timers are much less common, I suspect?

Walt Mossberg has a funny "series" on his Twitter where he screencaps all the blatent failures he has with Siri. Many times, he or a follower will attach a screenshot of Assistant completing the action. It's not scientific by any means, but it's fun to go through and provides some concrete examples. His biggest issue seems to be that Siri is unreliable - there are queries that work, but only sometimes, and that makes the experience of using the product terrible.

If Apple engineers who work on Siri were required to do all of their corporate communication with Siri exclusively, Siri would rule inside a year.

That is assuming they were trusted to work on it instead of report to status meetings, or meetings to their dotted line manager, etc. Apple was built around Steve. It’s going to take a while.

That remark is relevant for so many products!!! That's why Toyota invented the Toyota way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way

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