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Comment by ezfe | Hacker News Reader

>3. Siri tries (and frequently fails) to identify me and my wife by our voice, and then won't do things (like turn off the music, find our iPhone, etc.) because she can't figure out who we are.

I've never had this issue in my household. Have you tried re-training it?

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Shouldn’t we give him the benefit of the doubt over the HomePod?

Why? One is a human and the other is not. Humans have far more failures than limited tech.

Thank you. This is a perspective that is often overlooked. We all know the shortcomings of software engineering - why are we blaming the user first?

A suggestion to fix it isn’t “blaming the user.” I’ve had to retrain mine. It’s annoying that it failed and I had to do it, but I’m also glad I spent 20 seconds fixing it instead of worrying about blame.

With respect, I'd just like to add that this is the company that famously said "You're holding it wrong". Voice assistants fail in surprising and strange ways. Retraining might help, it might not.

I have no idea how what Steve Jobs said about the iPhone 4 over a decade ago is supposed to be related to a random HN poster's suggestion for fixing a HomePod.

I have definitely had this happen as well. It gives a weird response (can't recall what it says - something about not knowing who is requesting the action) and ignores the command. I was able to snap it back into gear by just power-cycling the HomePod but still...

We have a similar issue with Alexa. It can hear me and the kiddo, my partner just doesn't exist.

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