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Comment by yunwal | Hacker News Reader

The last HomePods sounded great, but it’s hard for me to imagine them taking off without fixing Siri. Siri is still remarkably dumb compared to Alexa and certainly when compared to GPT3.5 tools. If you ask Siri “What is 220°C in F” it will correctly hear the words you’re saying, then convert 220F to C.

Because of this, I never use Siri outside of contexts I’m sure Apple has tested thoroughly (e.g. read my last text).

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Tangential thought: First Gen HomePods, a years old product, are currently selling on eBay for nearly their retail price. Lots of people, myself included, love them purely because of how good the audio is and how easy the pairing is between HomePods and iPhones/Macs/AppleTVs. I’ve had two paired to my AppleTV for years and the audio for music and movies is amazing.

Again, more anecdata: I have never used Siri and wouldn’t even factor in if my audio setup can convert temperatures when purchasing it.

If it's been a while since you've tried the assistants, I suggest that you watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2MGqmuEdtU

Google has snuck a pretty large lead for a large category of queries over Siri and Alexa has fallen behind considerably.

Unfortunately, Google’s tendency to randomly sunset products with no good replacement or migration strategy means I’ll never really incorporate it into my life in a big way, but yeah Google Assistant is pretty solid.

I thought that the main reason between the last generation of HomePod flopping was because they're so locked down. And apparently they still don't support Bluetooth streaming even though it has built-in Bluetooth?

Only a handful of techies cared that it was locked down. The problem with the original was the $350 price point.

Worked perfectly for me on my iPhone.

Same. I wondered if it was making a locale-based assumption about what you wanted, but it works converting the other way too.

Strangely it’s working for me today, but not yesterday when I was cooking and couldn’t touch my phone with wet hands.

I wonder if background noise has something to do with it. The fact that Siri accurately displayed what I was trying to say made me think it understood me perfectly, but it’s possible it will do something else in the background if it’s not confident it hears you correctly.

Either way, I have issues with Siri all the time.

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