Comment by kybernetyk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kybernetyk | Hacker News Reader

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Siri complain time? Well, my newest problem with Siri is: Let's say I want to play some classic song (like Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd). So I say "hey siri, play sweet home alabama" - and what I get is not the original one but some newish remake/remix/reinterpretation.

Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original?

Oh also ... what's the "next song pls" command in German? With Alexa I can say "Alexa, weiter" and the next track plays. With Siri? "Weiter" won't do anything. I have to say "Hey Siri, nächstes Lied" ... or I can just switch to English and say "Hey Siri, next" which then works.

Oh another one: The German Siri pronouncing English song titles with the German voice-set makes my ears hurt. Like you would read an English word but pronounce it like you would a German word.

But then again some Band/Song Titles she gets perfectly right. Cannibal Corpse sounds like perfect English.

Those AI assistants are a hot mess and get worse with time. Seems like feeding more and more data into your model won't make it better.

Does "Hey Siri überspringen" work?

Voice assistants really need to get away from their pretense that they're magical at understanding languages and just provide a long documentation page showing what you can say... and also take feedback on that page so people can provide more idiomatic ways to express that same command.

Apple do actually have such documentation[1 English][2 German] but it's far from comprehensive, and the examples are tediously long ("Hey Siri skip this song", when I know "Hey Siri skip" works)

1: English: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/siri / https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208279

2: German: https://support.apple.com/de-de/siri / https://support.apple.com/de-de/HT208279

>überspringen

Even if it works - it's still way too long. "weiter" is a very short word. "überspringen" is like having a deep conversation with my mp3 player :)

If you do insist on speaking German, is it any wonder you need to use long words? :-) /s

I think I have worked out a way to do this with a custom Shortcut (using an If condition on Device Name to use the Music Skip Forwards action on the device executing the Shortcut), but I'm pretty sure it would end up as a longer interaction.

Edit: Drat, Shortcut approach doesn't work, looks like the Shortcut runs on your iPhone, so the device name is always the iPhone's

It's somehow managing to get worse in this area. You were once able to say "not this version" and it would try a different version of the same song. Now it just replies "I found some results on the web, but I can't show them here".

(This is especially infuriating when it does it on CarPlay)

Are you using Spotify or Apple Music as your streaming service.

We had endless problems with cover bands and tribute songs rather than the mainstream song when we used Alexa with Spotify (which baffled us as I expect that would be the most common configuration).

We currently use Apple Music and Google Nest devices since our mesh network has them built in. Music works fine. Podcasts are a curse on humanity — if you say “play podcast”, it always defaults to the last episode you played, even if it was months ago. You have to specify the latest episode of so and so podcast EVERY TIME, and even then it’s flaky. It’s like it forgot that podcasts are a derivative of “broadcast” where timeliness is relevant.

Apple Music. Don't know if you can use Spotify with the Homepod's Siri

> Why on earth would you play some unknown version over the popular original?

I heard the original implementation of Alexa had a banned list of words that shouldn’t appear in the song title unless there are no alternatives, including “remix”, “live”, and “explicit” (among others).

Seems such an obvious and easy solution.

I've also been baffled by this. Some syntax helps (".. by $band"), especially when an album and a track have the same name (which is a related issue for me).

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