The other day in a hurry and driving somewhere, I ended up w/ both Apple Maps and Google Maps open, simultaneously giving me directions.
"Hey Siri, close Google Maps"
"To close an application, swipe up from the bottom of the phone..."
To paraphrase a quote from Steve Jobs, if your voice assistant asks you to touch the screen, you blew it.
But I use siri daily for things like:
- Setting and stopping alarms and timers: ("Hey siri - set alarm for tomorrow morning at 9:25" / when the alarm goes off: "Hey siri stop")
- Turning on and off my lights. Its a delight every time to say "hey siri goodnight" when I go to bed and see all the lights in the house turn off.
I have a running theory that you can tell how long any FAANG bug will stick around by just imagining a 25 year old tech dude in the bay area. If Dave the bay area tech dude will never encounter the bug, you're in for a bad time.
For example, google maps used to give terrible directions at roundabouts (traffic circles). That makes sense because there's no traffic circles in the bay area. All the people who could fix the problem weren't aware there was a problem at all. Dave is terrified of roundabouts, so of course it took about a decade for directions at roundabouts to improve.
A corollary of this is that modern software works well proportionally to how closely your setup matches that of the average bay area tech dude. Everything works best if you have a new phone (preferably an iPhone), fast computer and you speak english. Woe be to you if your computer is old and slow, or you use a right-to-left language, if you're blind or you have a bad internet connection.
Macos feels laggy and slow on a slow internet connection because of course it does. Bay area tech bros are never in that situation! What would Dave know about slow internet?
This isn't just a SV thing, though. I downloaded a well-regarded weather app from a country in Europe that has pretty consistent humidity. The app didn't even show humidity. People have trouble seeing outside their bubble. SV just happens to have outsized influence, for now.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522993/apple-siri-on-dev...
All I know is what I experienced: it got less reliable with the switch and stopped handling stuff it handled perfectly before, then got better with a newer phone.
A moody teenager rips a poster of Jobs off their bedroom wall.
Gold.
My only other use of Siri usually involved phrases like "stop", "go away", "close", "fucking close!", "you stupid fcking * ** close the **** thing" when Siri would pop up out of nowhere and interrupt whatever I was actually doing. I had it turned off, but occasionally somehow it's back on, listening.
Other actual attempts at using it have been no better than 50% effective, so it wasn't worth the trouble. And I was speaking very clearly and articulately.
I've observed a friend (a Googler who had Google-fied his house) have frequent useless conversations with the Google assistant, so maybe 50% is the best you can hope for. No experience with Alexa, but I'd be too scared to even turn it on; I might end up with three refrigerators delivered the next day.
I do have an older iPhone 10 and maybe it's just not up to the task of running Siri? But if so they should disable it rather than put on this extremely amateur feeling show.
For what it's worth we have an Echo Dot in the house and I find it to be both orders of magnitude more responsive and more likely to actually do what I asked for. No unwanted refrigerators have arrived as of yet.
When I try typing "Play [song] on repeat", it never understands that; it plays it, but not on repeat.
There's zero excuse due to mishearing me, since I'm typing everything. Siri is just defective, and I think it's a great measure of how dysfunctional Apple and poorly-run is. Why are all of Apple's AI and online-service efforts amateur hour?
How, after all these years, is it still so stunted? There are Telegram bots with better interaction.
"How do you say Thank You in Dutch?" => "I can't translate into Dutch yet."
Oh come on, there are only half a dozen online translators which can do it.
Some mid-upper level manager in Apple should be ashamed. And every exec above them in the line to the top.
Oh no, that's awful. I mostly translate between Spanish and English, it didn't occur to me that Siri was less capable than Apple's own Translator app, it makes no sense.
“Get directions to the nearest gas station.”, “What’s the score of the Giant’s game?”, “Play Master of Puppets”, “What is 4’3” in centimeters?” And many, many more.
big mistake. Turns out I say "Hey Sarah" a hundred times a day, and all my iDevices pipe up and simultaneously say "Yeah?" "WHAT'S UP" "HEY OVER HERE" "Hi it's me Siri what do you need?"
How could I have been such a fool!???
In case you are earnestly somehow unaware, Sarah is among the most popular feminine given names of all time, with Hebrew origin but also popular with Christians, Muslims, nonreligious people in areas influenced by those religions, and in just about every country and culture influenced by any of those. It's hard to even think of a culture which doesn't use the name Sarah in some form; I'm drawing a complete blank; where are you from? Alpha Centauri?
Siri is a better option than the alternative "voice assistants" on the market, but they're all bad in my book, and I don't want any of them.
I briefly enabled so I could text mum to say when I was nearly home. Avoids sneaking a traffic light text. Turns out it was waaaaaaaay more distracting and time consuming to get siri to text a single word, so back into the box it went
I try to use Siri for the same things, but she suuuuuuucks. If I ask her to play a song, 9 out of 10 times it will do something idiotic- like I say "hey siri play tears in heaven on spotify", she might reply "now playing tears in heaven by a shitty kazoo cover band". If I say "navigate to the closest olive garden", it would say "navigating to olive garden corporate headquarters, estimated travel time 43 hours 12 minutes." But never mind, I can see the olive garden I was looking for, it's at the end of the street I'm on.
These are artificial examples because I can't remember specifics right now, but trust me - the real examples were just as dumb.
She's great at setting timers or alarms though! And I can reliably use her to pause, skip, or adjust volume when I'm showering or something.
My dad on the other hand loves his full size HomePod stereo pair and uses them frequently, almost entirely for playing music with voice commands. I think there are other things he might find it useful for but I haven't shown him those yet.
Just like HDD failures, it is not a question of if but when.
I haven't bothered yet to add a open/close sensor so the current open state is lost if I use the remote. I have to invert the actions when this happens. Annoying but I only need to use it this way occasionally.
My "integration" with Siri is to set up an iOS shortcut and use Siri to trigger it.
Aside from setting a timer, I've not seen Siri do anything more useful in 9 years. You haven't missed anything.
"Siri, timer, one hour thirty"
"Timers can't be set for a time of day, so I set your Timer alarm for 1:30"
Every damn time. Siri hates Brits.
My mother loves using Siri, she always uses it when she wants to look things up. It seems quite useful for people who aren't proficient at typing quickly, easier to ask Siri.
That's literally the only thing.