I mean, if anything, just appreciate how amazing humans are at differentiating these ambiguities.
I mean, if anything, just appreciate how amazing humans are at differentiating these ambiguities.
I think it's very worthwhile to point out these seemingly basic errors as a way to maintain appropriate skepticism about the limits of our technology.
That’s kind of weird. It’s not that Siri is especially bad. It’s that “Siri” is something different depending on how you query it. Other online search systems aren’t like that, and integration and consistency are typically Apple’s forte.
Look, I'm not arguing it's not a bug, but I'm just really surprised at how software people, who I think should know better, are surprised that such bugs exist, or more importantly that completely eliminating all types of this class of bugs is basically impossible with current technology.
Half the time, Siri replies with "I'm sorry, you don't have an app for that. You can try searching for one on the app store."
Repeat the same exact query to the AirPods seconds later, and bam, it starts the workout on the Apple Watch.
The aspect that's ruffling feathers, I believe, is that it's one of those cases where someone might have reasonably assumed something was built one way 'under the hood', and was confronted with an effect which forced them to see that it was not implemented that way at all. The issue isn't the 'bug'. It's the realization that their mental model was wrong.
Specifically, something has a name ("Siri") which might lead one to believe that everything from that manufacturer using that name refers to the same thing. (Isn't that the point of a name?) Clearly, it's not.
Your hypothesis sounds plausible, so I tested it. I have a Mac laptop, which has the same 'Location Services' that iOS has (AFAIK). I asked Mac Siri what time it is in London, and got a response for the one in England (further away from me). So that doesn't explain it, or at least not all of it.
Totally disagree, because the only way these assistants get better is with real-world usage (which is why I can definitely agree that one should wonder why Apple isn't improving as fast as the competition).
It was only a couple years ago that using Google Assistant was an extremely frustrating experience. I'd say it got about 5-10% of my words wrong, which meant it got my intent wrong about 25-35% of the time. These days I find its accuracy uncanny - it almost never makes a mistake with most of my "standard" queries. No way it could have gotten that good without real-world feedback and data.
I don't understand why anyone other than hobbyists can stand to use these things. They are so obviously years away from ready for serious use, and the novelty value wore off years ago.
Not shitposting here, these are serious comments about absurdly bad UX.
How can you stand to deal with humans?
I think the debate here is about whether anything has shipped that is actually "good enough". I don't think it's that controversial to avoid shipping stuff that's not good enough.
This is the difference between a usable product and something that is not
If my voice assistant is going to make a significant % of errors, it either needs to be very cheap for me to correct it (it's not -- usually you retry and if it keeps failing what do you do?) or I'm going to stop using it
Steve Jobs made great, not passable, products. It's a shame that Siri is so far behind