I am really annoyed by Siri these days. I was so excited when they introduced it in 2011 (?). But I feel like there was almost no progress since then. It’s so painful to use Siri even for the simplest of tasks
See comparison Siri Alexa google and Cortana: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/20/siri-on-homepod-vs-alex...
I fear the challenge will be one of perception. Speech is really a make-or-break first impression kind of technology, since speech is so personal. I'm afraid that Siri will need to become twice as better as the competition to regain the trust of users that it won't completely fail them, or even to just get them to retry it.
I wonder if, in the future, there will be some sort of marketing push called "Siri 2.0" or maybe even regular "releases" (even though I'm sure it's not updated on that kind of cadence). Since the technology is all invisible, there's no way to tell that something has changed, unlike a traditional OS, which changes its appearance even slightly.
Oddly, even speech to text with GBoard on the iPhone is noticeably worse than on Android as well.
It took me all of 3 minutes to create a Shortcut that lets me message my wife with my ETA at my house when I say "hey siri coming home" (or use the Siri activation in my car) and then "yes" when she asks for confirmation to send it. Takes my current location, finds the route to my house, grabs the time, and plops it into a custom message that I typed up that's sent to my wife's iPhone.
Also for a bit of fun, ask Siri for the population of Buffalo NY. I noticed because Siri also tells you that Buffalo is big, and then goes on to say...
For the longest time Chrome on iOS was just using WebKit/safari’s UIWebView then later WKWebView for rendering webpages, much like many other iOS apps that display web content. For various reasons the App Store rules have always banned third party browser rendering engines, I haven’t heard any change in this policy recently?
The only real advantage of Chrome on iOS was ancillary features like Google account bookmark/history sync etc if you are all in on Chrome elsewhere, which isn’t all that useful in the context of a link provided by Siri, for me at any rate. The feature that lets apps using WKWebView access your password/auto fill data only works with Safari on iOS as well, which is all the reason I need not to bother with the WebKit-wrapper rivals anyway.
The maps issue is significantly more annoying to me.
As far as the second question - yeah that one was weird. It said that the population was 69 but the text summary that it displayed was 269,000. It’s the only city that displayed that bug.
In my case, there were 9 McDonalds within a 10 mile radius.
In cases where there was only one location nearby, it took me right to it.
It's very hard for us to discuss Siri's internal state; by contrast it's easier to discuss Google's observable performance, which is to semantically differentiate between these two requests.
You can just ask Google, "Nearby McDonalds" and you'll get a list. "Go to the nearest McDonalds" and you get navigation.
“McDonalds” - gives me a list.
“Take me to the closest McDonalds” - brings up maps and starts navigating to the closest McDonalds.
After further experimentation. Siri doesn’t understand Nearest but does understand “closest” to mean that I don’t want a list.
My biggest frustration with my car's built-in navigation is that when I ask it for the "nearest" item, more than 50% of the time it tells me to make a U-turn because it picked the mathematically nearest item, rather than picking the conventionally nearest item.
There are all sorts of ways to handle this request, but Siri's is the laziest, and in doing so asks more of the user's attention. If you just say "McDonalds" to either voice assistant, you also get a list. From that perspective, it's as if Siri ignores any information that might be gleaned from the rest of your sentence.
Siri learns from us but we also learn from Siri, and we might find that some words don't matter. You mind as well just say "McDonalds" if Siri is going to ignore the rest.
Reminds me of some of the chatbots that I use to make. No matter how hard I tried to test them, they always worked as expected. The minute someone else used it, it fell apart. Subconsciously, I knew what would work and what wouldn’t.
Nice
With Hey Siri turned on, you will reliably get all three words. With it off, you will usually get Chuck or Truck, or sometimes FIRETRUCK depending on timing.
This seems to be for people who start talking before the Siri prompt is fully active like “Set <button> Timer for 5 minutes”.
But shows that Apple is typically pre-recording if not also pre-processing.