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Comment by victor106 | Hacker News Reader

I love most things Apple but unfortunately Siri is not one of them.

Siri on HomePods are a disaster. You have to shout at it even for it to pickup what you are saying. Mostly when the volume is a little high.

I haven't tried Alexa and Google Assistant but from what I saw other friends operating it seems more of a smooth experience but I could be wrong.

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>Siri on HomePods are a disaster. You have to shout at it even for it to pickup what you are saying. Mostly when the volume is a little high.

I have the opposite experience on the HomePod mini, it's actually one of the thing that they are better at. My google home device is entirely useless to try to talk to if something is already playing on it. Compared to Siri that will understand me.

The issue is more with Siri itself being dumb and not that great.

I’ve only used Alexa in stand-alone units, and Siri on my phone and watch. For me, Alexa regularly fails, and the overwhelming majority of my interaction attempts play out like this:

Me: Alexa, Badezimmer 10%

Alexa: Ich kann nicht Prozent auf Spotify finden

*Five attempts later, it actually works*

(It was even less reliable in English)

Siri mostly hears the right words when I ask questions, and the voice keyboard (is that the same speech-to-text engine?) is correct somewhat more often than the swipe keyboard (although that doesn’t say very much as the latter seems to have become very confused as a result of me learning German).

I‘ve had Siri set to German for forever (my native language). It regularly has problems recognizing me saying things in English mid-sentence, like when I request it to play a song. I do this a lot (car commuter).

For fun, I set Siri to English for a day and I was blown away at how much better it is. Both in recognizing requests, despite my accent, and in the quality of the voice synthesizer. Song requests became trivial and everything felt much more fluent. English Siri is even able to express emotions (happiness), which is something I’ve never heard in the German version.

I’ve simply never found Siri useful - I don’t know how much of that is fighting comprehension, vs fighting Siri’s generally not great search behaviour. I find talking to machines awkward in general as even for the best cases I still find myself making deliberately structured sentences such that I prefer typing. (Obviously typing doesn’t work for the “assistants”, but I don’t have any of them due to the above issues essentially ruling them out)

I have to make a list of it sometime. My primary issues are with how apple deal with multiple devices in somewhat close proximity. The HomePod always picks up the request irrespective of how close or far I’m from it. My phone might be right next to me but unless I pick it up and unlock it, HomePod takes priority. Which might be fine if there’s a way to either control other devices or to handoff the request to a closer device.

“Not you, I want the Siri on my phone” or “switch to my phone/iPad”

“Skip the song on my iphone”.

Much worse is the responsiveness.

“I don’t understand”

“Still working on it”

“I can’t seem to be able to connect to the internet at the moment”

“I’m sorry. Can you please repeat?”

With all the on-device ML stuff I assumed they’ll get Siri to operate without the internet for basic recognition and switch to network mode for more complex use cases.

I wish Siri had a hierarchy of preference. In the end I switched it off on the Mac and iPad and mainly use it with my phone. I have to press the button to use it on my watch.

> Siri on HomePods are a disaster. You have to shout at it even for it to pickup what you are saying. Mostly when the volume is a little high.

I always speak in a normal (or slightly quieter) volume and never have an issue with Siri activating.

My biggest issue is that my HomePods need to get restarted or power cycled periodically (e.g. after a power outage or network update). I wish they were a little faster and had better self-healing but generally work pretty well as room speakers which is primarily what I got them for.

I think it's at least partly due to Siri attempting to be more privacy respecting and doing more work on-device rather than server-side like Google and Amazon's offerings.

Counterpoint: I have a HomePod mini in one of my rooms and it reacts easily to any mention of Siri in other rooms. So I am actually impressed with how good it is in reacting.

I had a similar issue where a HomePod mini in our living room always responded when in the kitchen, so I just disabled the microphone on the living room HomePod minis.

I have a google home and it is insanely good at hearing you speak. Even with the exhaust fan above the stove and the sink running, I can still talk to it like I would talk to another person in the room.

Interesting. My alarm clock is gf’s kid saying (at increasing volume) “hey google alarm off”. “Hey google quiet” and so on.

My Google Home mini (first gen I believe) has actually become atrocious at recognizing anything while it worked very well in the first years. Sometimes it still works well after rebooting but not always

Funny, I have the opposite experience with Siri on HomePods, especially compared to our Nest Hub which is shockingly bad.

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