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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble getting Siri to even understand me. I have a HomeKit scene called "Apartment lights off" (it turns off all the lights in the apartment surprisingly enough) and I often ask Siri to apply that scene. The amount of times Siri completely misunderstands me for something strange baffles me.

"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.

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I am suspecting the problems you have are due to the name of the scene. It appears certain keywords do overrule locally-defined names. Whenever I put an address book entry for a taxi company with the name "taxi" in it, Siri isnt able to call it because it assumes I want to search for a taxi nearby. A similar thing might be going on with "apartment" and homekit. Frankly, a bit cynical, but by now, I am suspecting some intern put a rule in which contains "apartment" and has a very high priority, or somesuch...

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.

> “I am suspecting the problems you have are due to the name of the scene.”

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)”

Except I don’t have this issue with Google Assistant. It guesses the correct word/phrasing nearly every time. Siri, OTOH, fails much more than it succeeds.

"All lights to max"

"Which phone number for Max?"

I wish I could train myself to say a different phrase.

Try using groups instead of scenes. Also, key by room, or even use blanket universals (rather than say apartment).

“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.”

The problem with "turn off all lights" is that if I have some third-party devices in HomeKit that are not actually lights but are registered like lights, they go off as well.

Also, it's a studio apartment, so there's not really "rooms" strictly speaking.

You can always assign them to rooms even if you just have one room. But I think groups would work for your case. Like say put all your actual lights in the actual group. And then say “turn on actual lights.”

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.

Grouping won't work at all since if I group the accessories, I will lose control of the individual lights.

Really, this is what scenes are designed for but Siri is just too stupid to understand what they are.

Scenes are activated, they don’t have direction, they don’t work at all for turning things in and off, instead you have to create separate on and off scenes.

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.

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