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Comment by novok | Hacker News Reader

Siri is really bad on many basic things that they could hard code. Like 'turn off lights' become 'turning on the the lights'. There are many weird ass bitflips for basics like that in Siri that is incredibly frustrating that alexa and google are significantly better in understanding reliably. Whats even worse is Siri could hard code these basics and not use ML which tends to work %90 of the time, but bitflips %10 of the time and leading to everyone here complaining about how bad it is.

Even worse, I think Siri used to work better 3 or 4 years ago.

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I know we're just exchanging anecdotes but I never have this issue. On top of that, I have scenes and automations dialed in so "Good Night" (and similar scenes) do full-house automations for night, morning, and all kinds of different things. I even have some set up so that, when my car pulls into the garage after work, it kicks off a few automations.

We're a google household but I'm interested in switching. Do you know if it's possible to use YouTube Music or do I need to do a line change and replace all of my Google Hubs?

I'm not sure, unfortunately. If Google offered a way to test that without paying, I'd happily do it but Apple Music serves our needs really well.

If it's not apple music, it's a pain in the ass.

And even if it's iTunes Match and not Apple Music, it's still a pain. Half the time it tells me it's playing the song I wanted and in reality it's playing something completely different. The other half the time it can't find the song.

I find Siri is very good at recognising my words accurately. Better than Google, in my experience, but that could be due to differences in mic quality in the various devices. Where Siri sucks is at actually comprehending instructions beyond some fairly basic commands. "Here's something I looked up on the web" is it's default response to most of my outside-of-the-box queries.

It seems weird that we still have such a dumb Siri in a world where ChatGPT exists.

"I can tell you that if you ask again from your iPhone."

Whenever I'm doing laundry, I try to set a timer for 50 minutes and it always thinks I said 15 minutes... it really gets on my nerves. I have to pronounce the individual digits to get it to behave correctly.

I stopped using round numbers for that reason. Say 51 instead of 50 as a workaround. It’s really annoying.

I don't have experience of Siri, but Alexa is _bad_ at this for me.

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