After a decade as Apple’s assistant, Siri still hasn’t figured out the job
theverge.com
theverge.com
I'd settle for an assistant that carries out simple tasks.
I don't expect much from my robot assistant, but the number of times throughout the day that she gets it blatantly wrong has become a running joke in our household.
A few recent examples:
Me, holding my Apple Watch near my face: "Hey, Siri, drive to Kroger <there's one I go to all the time that is 10 minutes from my house>"
Watch: "Now playing <some band I've never heard of, that isn't in my library>"
Simultaneously, iPhone: "Getting directions to Kroger <shows results that are ~700 miles away>"
Me, to my iPhone: "Hey, Siri, start a yoga workout."
iPhone: <starts playing a Yoga video on Fitness+, instead of starting the plain Yoga tracking workout I do every day>
I just remembered another one. I was mowing the lawn on Sunday and wanted to start an outdoor walk. The mower was off, and I had my AirPods in:
Me: "Siri, start an outdoor walk"
iPhone: "Ok, I've cancelled your alarm for tomorrow"Uses Siri on Apple Watch to start a timer Uses Siri on Apple Watch to start a timer "Hey Siri, set a timer for 3 minutes" "Sorry, you don't have the Timer app installed"
It seems like some basic feature (eg clock like features) should just be built in, and where that’s not feasible, perhaps some sort of device handoff, which essentially happens on the watch.
Examples: * when starting to type, Chrome address bar preferring to go to Google search, instead of the friggin site I've gone to a hundred times already! * Google maps, search seemingly doesn't deterministically remember my searches. If I start typing the same search term I did yesterday, well, odds are I'm looking it up again! Show that. * Windows start menu... oh don't get me started on that. :)
"Upon lights off – Sorry, I don't understand."
"Obama lights off – Sorry, still don't get it."
Sometimes it just picks up the "lights off" part, prompting me "Which room?" And when I say "Apartment lights off" again, Siri will then reply with "Sorry, I can't find that scene in the current home." At that point, I need to close the Siri prompt and do it again. If Siri understand me that time, then I will actually get that scene applied.
Not directly related to Siri, but VoiceOver icon labels are also getting worse and worse over the years. For example, the weather app. In the beginning, when you scrolled with the VoiceOver cursor through the hourly forecast, it would say "Sonnenaufgang" and "Sonnenuntergang" (Sunrise and Sunset) at the appropriate places. Starting with iOS 12 (or was it 13?) the spoken label changed to "Sonne aufwärtspfeil" (sun arrow up). So someone went in there, decided that the nice description from earlier wasn't good enough, and replaced it with a literal description of the icon, ignoring context altogether.
yah, for siri, i’ve found simple nouns (apartment) better than phrases (apartment lights off) for naming things in the home app, and for “all lights”, you don’t even need to create a scene (as others have pointed out). for rooms, you can just say “turn kitchen on” and it will turn all lights in its kitchen room on (which may or may not map to all lights in your actual kitchen, depending on how you set it up).
oh, and siri will refuse to do something if you curse at it: “hey siri, turn on the lights, you asshole” ominously responds with “sorry, i can’t do that (…dave)”
"Which phone number for Max?"
I wish I could train myself to say a different phrase.
“Turn on all living room lights” works. Also, “turn off all lights” will flip off everything in our house.
Groups are awesome. I have 3 blinds in the north of living room, so I called the, north west, north center, and north east. But they are in the north group, so I usually put them all up at once by saying “open north blinds.”
Also, it's a studio apartment, so there's not really "rooms" strictly speaking.
Scenes..I can’t really figure them out. They seem way too complex for what I want to do, which is to turn things off and on.
Really, this is what scenes are designed for but Siri is just too stupid to understand what they are.
HomeKit should really support overlapping groups, it is a feature I also miss. But as a hack you could use rooms as a secondary group mechanism since you don’t need them to represent actual rooms.
I started using this garbage with the 4S and while there have been under the hood improvements of onboard processing, etc, the core product has never gained the implicit context awareness promised and needed. As far as I can tell, it's a checkbox zombie "feature" that never met the usability threshold to become something for normal people but organizationally aged into slow development maturity.
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...
Me to watch: Hey Siri, call so-and-so on Bluetooth
Siri: calls so-and-so with Bluetooth selected but nonetheless the audio comes out the watch until I touch the phone.
Siri on Apple Watch is generally very weak.
Guess I’m going to be shopping for “oil of mustard” then
It’s really bad when I’m at the store looking at something in my list scratching my head over what “Silicon Matt to sit rock song” is supposed to be without any way to hear what was actually said or give feedback that what Siri did was wrong.
I have my phone set to only engage Siri with the long button press. It saves a lot of trouble.
It's redundant and counterproductive to have multiple devices listening for the code phrase.
I imagine that if I put 10 iPhones on a desk and say "Hey Siri", that wouldn't work out too well. Doesn't mean we have to start "blaming" people, companies and things.
To the article’s point, Amazon’s has no problem Determining which should answer a question if they are all the same account piled on your desk.
At this point to me it seems like most of it is basically toy technology without any real benefit unless you're visually impaired or unable to use your hands or something. People went from voice messaging to texting with other people because tactile inputs are often faster, so it's always puzzled me what the point is of talking to machines who can't even understand things properly half the time.
No. The "entire point" is to provide an easier way to do some interactions. On this point, they work super well. They're just not magic or perfect.
However, it definitely IS useful to state the point that way, because it makes it easier to argue that they're pointless toy technologies, thereby allowing you to feel superior.
Unfortunately iOS 15 significantly deteriorated Siri’s understanding of HomeKit in some situations. Here’s a few reproducible examples:
‘Hey Siri, shades down’: sets the shades to 99%, i.e. a 1% adjustment. I now need to say ‘closed’ rather than ‘down’ to close them.
‘Hey Siri, close the living room shades’: responds with the current shade status. I need to switch the ordering to get things working (Hey Siri, living room shades: closed)
Did someone delete a mapping file of common HomeKit voice commands to actions or something? At this point, I’d almost prefer no AI, and just a static command list. I guess I could create that with shortcuts, but with 20 or so accessories that’s a big chore to set up.
Heavily invested in HomeKit (to the point of having several HomePods around the house), and it feels like something changed and much of it I can't quite put my finger on.
But a few that I have been able to identify:
- Something has changed about how it handles figuring out which device you are talking too. I have had a HomePod in a different room go off (screwing up the room awareness), or my iPhone going off even when I am right next to a HomePod.
- All of my HomePod pairs (having 2 linked together) switched to the opposite HomePod for which one speaks, and there is no clear way to change this.
- Every action has slowed down, I can't figure out why but most of the time I get "one moment" while it tries to turn in lights or whatever.
- They added the ability for the HomePod to turn on and off the Apple TV. Which is great in theory but I have my own custom TV configuration hooked up to Logitech harmony and it will constantly ask me "do you want to control x or y" (one being my custom and one being the Apple TV depending on the room I am in). I want to disable this but I can't.
Edit: All I really want is a log. Please. A log of automated events that happen (I still don't know why my lights will randomly turn off... something is triggering it and I can't figure out what) and a log of what it thinks it heard and tried to do so I can address the "nothing with that name or function is found" or whatever it says when I say "Turn off the fan" and it doesn't know what I meant, and then I try again and it works.
https://www.engadget.com/ios-15-siri-on-device-app-privacy-1...
"But with iOS 15, many common Siri requests will be processed on-device, so no audio will ever leave your phone."
That said, it does feel like magic to be able to easily control all the lights and blinds with voice commands and Siri usually gets it right.
I just asked Google and Siri "what temperature do I need to cook fish to". Google came right back with 145F. Siri put up some stuff she found on the web, and didn't give a verbal answer.
I like almost everything better about the iPhone, but I really wish I could replace Siri with Google Assistant.
Edit: I must refrain myself from changing this comment into a pun about it seeming fishy.
EDIT: ok, here's the chart:
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...
some things are still 165, but some are now 145. ham in some cases is 140.
I've not seen charts for other types of meat though.
https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-s...
"The upshot is: Food safety is a function of both temperature and time. What the USDA is looking for is a 7.0 log10 relative reduction in salmonella bacteria in chicken. That is, a reduction that ensures that out of every 10,000,000 bacteria living on that piece of chicken to start, only one will survive."
Presumably because the whole AI assistant thing kinda turned out to be a fad and not as world changing as people were thinking around the time Siri/Alexa launched.
Turns out the thing it's good for it setting timers not ordering soup like Apple originally envisioned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP1YAatv1Mc
No it's not! The issue is that we as developers can't actually innovate on it. Look at what Apple did in its heyday with the App Store. Now it's commonplace, back then it was mindblowingly innovative unicorn goodness (I'm a bit biased :) ). And I understand, you can critique the App Store for many things, but the iPhone would be worse without it.
And they didn't create an "App Store" or any other free extensible model for Siri. They should have, because people are on aggregate more creative than any big company including Apple -- thanks to survivorship bias.
What Siri is actually quite good at is interpreting single words or small sentences. So it would be a perfect spoken command-line interface. I have had genuine situations where I needed to talk and couldn't type, but apps aren't allowed to make use of Siri, so I can't talk to apps, I need to type.
Siri and other voice assistants are amazing when you look at it as we look at a command-line.
They did, its just not well advertised. Any app on iOS can expose actions to Siri, for example the BBC Sounds app exposes actions to start playing a specific radio station. Those actions are then available from Siri on your phone, and any HomePods that have been granted access to execute actions on your phone.
On your point of looking at it like a command line, those same actions are also exposed to Shortcuts, allowing you to compose them in arbitrary pipelines. The output of one action can be passed into the output of another or even stuffed into a variable for later use.
I've developed for all three of the major voice assistants and Siri is by far the best simply because it completely throws out the window the concept of developing a "voice application", voice is just one possible entry point into an iOS app.
Yes, if Siri was open and any iOS app could easily make a "voice CLI" to their apps that would awesome. But, that's not the case at all.
I am a heavy user of Siri, too, with an Apple Watch and a HomePod in every room of my house. It's better than nothing. But it is still objectively terrible. It can barely do more than set timers, send text messages, and control the lights and music.
That's not useless, but it's not even close to what I wish I could do with my voice (which is basically what you describe).
I think they may have made some prgress since then, but I don't think the Speech.framework you linked to provides what we are talking about when we say a "CLI for voice". I think that API is only useful when you've already opened the app and it is able to record live audio (or process previously recorded audio).
So you can't just be like, running from the feds and shout to your watch or phone, "Hey Siri, destroy evidence, password 'Rosebud'!" and have your arson app torch your meth lab.
And here I am thinking about mundane applications such as: "Hey Siri, limit order 10 shares of ACME for $44.95"
or "Hey Siri, call John Doe via WhatsApp"
or "Hey Siri, invite John Doe and Jane Goodall to bowling on this Sunday 7PM via someSpecialCalendarAppThatIsNotTheStockCalendarApp"
The fundamental problem with voice assistants is an utter lack of common sense. Any human assistant not completely asleep at the wheel would flag the above because it's outside your normal patterns and ask for clarification.
Voice assistants will just go ahead and do it. And then play a Siberian Metal Polka song because they thought they heard that too.
To be fair, all the assistants are extremely bad at it, Siri just seems to be at the bottom of a bad list.
That's the problem, really. You have to use a stylized language on a commandline. A GUI is really just giving you a graphical diagram and guide to a really stylized language (if you reduce a GUI to its clickable/typeable areas.) It's very hard to draw an arrow pointing at a picture representing a particular predicate in the very restricted bandwidth of serialized sound.
The reason why "Shades" was so interesting to me was that its future teens clearly all knew the stylized language well, and obviously would have learned it in school. To have that kind of universal training in a certain form of computer interaction would require a universal OS, like what UNIX quickly became.
So maybe this is a conclusion coming off the above at an odd angle, but what I'm actually saying is that commandlines are hard and people don't like them. Visual, and even tactile stuff have the ability to offer so much feedback and so many affordances for amateur operators in comparison to audio that audio can't compete. Audio feedback is all exposition and nothing to hold onto or see. And just like film exposition, it often comes too slowly to keep people's attention, or too quickly for people to understand. It's always going to be easier to grab the knob and turn it, or to find the button and click it.
The major advantage of audio interfaces is that they're cheap both materially (you don't need a screen or a control panel) and for the user (you don't have to stop walking, or sit down, or grab a thing, etc. you just speak.) For me these advantages are actually dominant over innate usability, which is why I also believe with you in the huge potential of audio interfaces as a platform.
I just think that the only way to get there is to build a universal and open verbal protocol, with standardized interfaces for accessing databases, media, and networks. Something that children can (will) learn, and will have a lifetime of use. An opinionated and efficient design moonshot like the web (or the Bourne Shell or Gnu Corutils) turned out to be. A platform whose innovation comes from addition of new ways and not from subtraction of the old ones. A platform that holds onto backwards compatibility as long as is practical, thinking in terms of how many decades to keep things around, not how many releases, or possibly even a closed kernel that will never change built on top of some mathy orthogonal basis system.
* I wish this hadn't been deleted from youtube.
I recall there was a post here by someone who used voice to write code. They had to end up with a lot of vocal “shortcuts” for various bits, that ended up making their speech much less legible than a normal “query” language.
Is this the series?
I know I can't be the only one, right?
And for places where I can't just go to a computer or phone, e.g. my car, I find Siri frustratingly difficult to instruct to perform specific tasks, especially without taking my eyes off the road or hands off the wheel. Even setting a GPS destination by voice alone is hit or miss much less finding a podcast that hasn't been pre-loaded.
I say this because of two things I've heard (possibly misconceptions)
One was that people who stutter can sing ok
the other was the movie "the king's speech" where playing classical music while talking would prevent the king from stuttering.
I just that since I was young I have always preferred text over voice whenever there was a choice, and this is no different.
I think the singing thing is true but someone who is extremely self conscious of how their speech comes across is never going to sing instead.
Maybe because it’s that I’m white and speak english, but it’s dictation is unbelievable and I can even send Facebook messages or texts an average 9/10 times without needing to modify it.
I’ve never - for instance - had an issue where I’ve said ‘set a timer for 5min’ and it’s never worked.
I think everyone’s mileage varies.
You can set the region in the settings, maybe that influences the way Siri interprets time? (I would be surprised if it does, but you never know)
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_b...
I have a lot of trouble understanding how plain text in the email saying 6:00 PM Central Time could have been interpreted as anything other than 6 PM Central Time.
It was also annoying that you apparently can't edit a calendar entry. I had to go to DuckDuckGo to search for how to change the time and you need to click and drag the box containing the event. There is no UI to just type in a time. I guess they did this to be able to deploy an identical app on Mac OS and iOS? Neutering desktop applications so they work better on mobile is an increasingly annoying trend.
But you have worst IMHO in other languages! When speaking German units are spoken before the tenths (fünf-und-dreizig to say 35). That completely confuses Siri when saying dates, hours/minutes, or just big numbers.
I speak German to Siri everyday and she never has this issue with setting alarms. Maybe it’s a dialectical difference?
https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-the-time-is-always...
https://uxdesign.cc/youre-holding-it-wrong-how-to-blame-the-...
Google Assistant is several galaxies above it in every aspect.
I find Siri very capable and useful. It's surprising to me when I don't get what I want out of it.
I cannot put into words just how frustrating it is to have the device change a correctly spelled, correctly chosen word because it thinks I may have meant something else. Double points if I backspace to change it back and it re-"corrects" me again.
That's just awful design. Another quirk is that it can autocorrect the last word you typed when you press "send". Sometimes I proofread myself and still end up bitten by the autocorrect because it changed something when I pressed "send".
On Android when you backspace once after an autocorrect it reverts the autocorrect. It's not great but still better than what iOS does.
It’s particularly annoying when writing a tweet. I’ll correct a misspelling and — presumably as the text field loses focus when I tap on the “Tweet” button — it’ll change the word back to the misspelled version and use that for the tweet text.
Boggles my mind how you can let something like that into prod. The things it leads to are
- Errors that make the message hard to understand that are (here it replaced “that” with “they and “here” with “get”) only caught while proof-reading or not at all
- Having to go back and re-type 3 words for correction.
I check the word I just swiped for misrecognition, not one that was previously correctly recognized, god damn it.
The actual success rate of that piece of garbage is maybe 5%.
That said: Of course I’m happy they have a swipe feature at all, albeit significantly worse than Google’s (about on par with Microsoft’s). But you don’t have to make the feature intentionally worse, do you?
This is inarguably worse than what we had with T9 like 20 years ago, all running without cloud support on a limiting embedded platform.
If you’re wondering why “Access is denied” then that should inform you about how Apple deal with negative customer feedback these days.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit/adding_use...
EDIT: Yes I'm already aware it can be useful/quick for doing X :)
edit: For that they don't need to be networked, of course.
[Edit] Google Home seems to be pretty good at separating your voice from background noises, like shower/TV.
One of the other things I used them for frequently before disabling it on all my devices and removing all of the networked mics from my house was things like "remind me to $THING at 21 tonight".
On the iPhone, the speech to text can be done on the phone. I'm not sure if this is the case for Siri, but it doesn't need to be done in the cloud.
That said, the words to intent mapping doesn't appear to be something that the on phone model is able to handle.
I bet it wouldn't have to be if its vocabulary were restricted to timer related words.
I’m not sure it’s worth the development time. But it’s like: Let’s create a UI with all info we think the user wants, and everything else will be done by Siri.
It's your lucky day! There is an "Enable Ask Siri" checkbox in System Preferences on macOS, and a similar toggle in the iOS Settings app.
I want a check box that says: "Ask to enable Siri", which I can uncheck. So "Enable Ask Siri" should be off, and "Ask to enable Siri" also off.
- play some song or playlist
- open all the blinds, or a set of blinds, or all lights, or some lights. And close then close them/turn them off.
That’s about it. The only reason it works well for those use cases is because the equivalent menu/physical controls take too much time to use vs voice commands.
Sure lots of cars have this already with voice, but Siri et al are much more reliable at it.
But what's more interesting is that through talking with others we've discovered one interesting thing about what it's like for other people to hear a voice in their heads:
In most people's dreams, when someone talks, they can hear the voice, which has a specific pitch, rasp, etc. For me and my friend, in our dreams we can never characterize the voice. We just become aware of the sentence spoken and the time passed (even though in a way it feels immediate), but if we focus, it's clear that we cannot recall any sensation of hearing a voice in any way. It blew our minds off when we realized that other people's dreams are different in such a way.
I can think of sentences. But they are not spoken in my head. There is no voice, which would be male or female etc. And I only do that when the sentences are the goal. They are not the means.
I’m not sure that this is true. I think in terms of my dreams they are closer to what you describe as your experience; mostly visual, with speech something that’s more often understood than heard. I imagine most people have something similar, and not so analogous to real life.
I do have an inner monologue in my waking hours though, and it’s very interesting to think about what it would be like to not have one!
Then I noticed that I don't think with my internal voice when coding. I'm still thinking but not with sounds in my head. That blew my mind and made it easier for me to understand other's internal experience.
I wonder if people who rarely have an internal voice are less interested in things like podcasts, where the information in conveyed aurally.
That's correct. But neither can you think in sentences in that case, unless your relationships are just calculated means to an end. Whether you want to continue a relationship is not a conclusion of a sentence, but something you know without words, just like you know without words whether you want to eat the dish that's on your plate.
- My fingers will more reliably get me to where I want to go in a reasonable amount of time.
- I don't desire for The Google to know the instant I turn my lights on or possibly take a dump.
- It's only a matter of time before "always on" turns into "always listening".
Right now I can ask Alexa to open or close the curtains, to start cleaning my house, or to play some music or podcast — all without having to find where my cellphone is or risking getting trapped a couple of hours on the internet.
With the older versions of windows like 95 and 98 (that's the oldest experience i have), i read the manuals, tried things and slowly learned the intricacies of the OS.
Modern smartphones, tablets and computers seem to come with increasingly sparse manuals, let alone documentation. Take iOS for example - i have no idea how to manage windows on my ipad, i don't know how to close them, window manipulation is not obvious and so on.
Siri is so bad compared to Alexa, I laugh out loud when I occasionally try to use it and it has no idea what is going on.
This would be a boom for competition and the entire ecosystem.
Will Apple’s ego allow it to be bruised like this? No.
What does a digital assistant get you? It possibly saves you a few seconds, or allows you to set a task while walking or driving rather than forcing you to remember the task all by yourself and then later use the phone with your hands when the time is available. This does not save you time, instead it only saves you impulse control. ie, the task takes the same amount of time, but now feels like it requires no declarative action on the part of the user.
It's not even clear that voice commands are better than using a GUI. If I'm unfamiliar with a GUI, I can look visibly for cues which point to the function I'd like to use. Voice commands require me to memorize the commands and syntax which might be used. It's more of a "simplified command line" than it is a GUI.
And then of course, n% of the time, a perfectly-formatted voice command fails for invisible reasons. And so n% of the time it does not save you time.
But Apple's been branding some simpler heuristics as Siri and those are excellent: - Suggesting data to add to a contact based on scraping from elsewhere - Associating a phone number that's calling me with a person who emailed me with a phone number in the signature - Suggesting apps to open based on time, location, connected peripherals, or recent activity - Suggesting driving directions based on calendar items or history
None of these make me say "wow! AI!" But they do make me feel like my phone "just works" which is even better.
Google’s speech to text is amazing, possibly related to the “less privacy” part. Siri can handle slightly more complicated commands but so many times I see it transcribe what I’m saying… then in a blink change all the words.
But I also have a Homepod in my livingroom and using Siri on the Homepod is really useless, it just feels abandonded. The worst is when Homepod handles my Siri commands, which always happens because the iPhone sends the requests there, except in random occurences. Then it fails almost always ("can't do this on Homepod") but then there is no way I can force it to handle it on my iPhone.
Madness. I don't know who at Apple actually uses this.
I don't allow voice assistant products in my house, and on devices where it's non-optional (mobile phones), they are turned off on all devices in my house. I also personally find it absurd that there would be anything /so/ important you can't wait a handful of seconds to use your hands to do with higher fidelity. Everyone always talks about using maps or something in your car... you shouldn't be changing destination while you're driving anyway, you should have a destination in mind (or not) and be focused entirely on driving with both hands on the wheel. If you need to futz with your GPS, pull over, whether you're talking to it or using your hands.
> I also personally find it absurd that there would be anything /so/ important you can't wait a handful of seconds to use your hands to do with higher fidelity.
I think people often choose a voice assistance because the opposite is true - the tasks they send to their voice assistant are very unimportant. They are playing a song, starting a timer, or finding out what time a baseball game starts.
Changing the brightness level using an app sucks. You have to dig out your phone, unlock it, open the app or go the widget, find the light you want to dim, click on it and then slide the brightness to where you want it. With a voice assistant like Alexa I can just tell it what light or room to dim and what level to dim. It's WAY WAY faster to say "Alexa, dim the kitchen to 50%" than to go through the app.
Similarly with music or timers. It's just way easier to tell Alexa to play that radio station or album or song or to set a 10 minute timer than dig through smartphone apps and deal with hooking up speakers somehow.
Of course it COULD spy on me, but so could any of my electronics with microphones and a net connection which is most of them these days. What's stopping your smartphone from spying on you or your laptop even with the voice assistant disabled?
But in all the time I've had it, I use it for literally two commands, both of which I use often:
1. "Set timer for x minutes" 2. "What song is this?"
Using it for anything else bubbles up too many false positives to make the experience worthwhile.
Edit: I know I can put Siri behind a button too, maybe I can give that another chance.
It's not hard. Give this software a neutral name and a neutral voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRauhbZqJCY
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/change-siris-voice-on-iphon...
If we could "just talk to our device", I'd be able to ask it to change her name to whatever I want.
But, yeah no. I don't _want_ to really "just talk to my device". Years ago, simple things just worked (i'm on android)... I could just say "e.t.a." to google maps and it would say the eta to my destination. Now it just gets confused or starts talking about the wiki page or some such nonsense.
I've never seen a more complicated tech demo of Siri that implies I should get more out of it, so saying it fails broadly in any way is meaningless. (edit: typo)
It's a piece of software on your phone you effectively get "for free" that you can completely ignore if you so choose.
Cortana is always waiting for me to talk on Windows. Google Assistant is always waiting to hear "Ok Google" on my phone.
I never want to talk to my computers, ever. I wish I could remove this functionality entirely.
Sure it's far from perfect, but it almost never failed me to call or text someone, ask about weather, take a note/reminder, switch the lights using my smart outlet, or to set an alarm (my personal highest use-case).
Sure it could do more, but I don't thik it didn't "figure out the job".
They're huge classical music nerds, and I've watched them, in vain, recite to Siri over and over and over the desired concerto, orchestra, etc – trying to find the right incantation to get their Homepod to play the music they want. Usually they just get fed up and play it with their phone.
My dad likewise chuckles when Siri inevitably gets his spoken grocery list wrong. One of his favorite games is getting people in earshot to work with him to figure out the correct pronunciation of words for Siri to understand what they're saying.
I think how people accept Siri as a tool is by finding the few things that she does perfectly and never doing anything but those few things. Ever.
Anyway, here's a scattershot of some stuff I just tried that Siri fell on her face over (on iOS 15):
* "Send a text to Katrina, Mom, and Dad that 'I don't need their help'" > Creates text to Katrina: "Mom and dad that I don't need her help"
* "Show me photos I took last month" > Simply opens Photos
* "Show me photos I took in Scotland" > Simply opens Photos
* "What are the hours of the closest grocery store?" > shows assorted list of nearby stores, no hours shown
* "What is 13 modulo 5?" > 13% = 0.13 [clearly the Calculator app doesn't support modulo operations but still: at least say that?]
* "Which novels won the Hugo last year" > No response, link to Wikipedia for Hugo Awards and an article on "Novels that won both the hugo and nebula awards"
* "What time is low tide today?" > no response, link to various tide times websites
* "When is the next Jon Stewart episode coming out?" [an Apple TV property] > no response, shows list of websites talking about Jon Stewart
* What’s the weather for tomorrow? > I can’t see the weather that far out but here’s the weather for the next ten days.”
* “When will it stop raining?” > It looks like it’s raining right now.
Literally 10 seconds later, it started to rain, giving my Apple-hating friend enough material.
"Time in PST" gives me 3 links. The first 404's, the second has no clock but alerts "No locations currently on PST" (which is true, its PDT right now – but come on), and the 3rd has no clock but prompts me to install a "FREE iOS app." Fail, big time.
"What time is it in PST" gets me a web snippet showing "PST is 8 hours behind UTC." Fail.
"What's the current time in Pacific Standard Time" runs it through Wolfram, giving me a LOT of unrelated info but admittedly also a clock showing the correct time. Success... sort of. Wouldn't help while driving.
"What's the current time in PST" gives me "Sorry, I can't help with that, but you can ask me the time for a specific city." Fail.
"What's the current time in Los Angeles" correctly shows me a Siri prompt with the time. Success.
Asking it to play a certain song or band or anything more than a 3 word command will fail or result in long stalling with an eventual "sorry didn't get that" reply. This is on WiFi.
Often I'll think of something while out cycling that I want to remember later. So I try to tell Siri using my watch. Siri just tells me "Sorry, I can't help you with notes on Apple Watch".
But it will let me send myself a message. So I do that instead. I'm not convinced iMessage was meant as a note-taking platform, but hey, maybe Apple have plans.
Google seems to be somewhere in between.