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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

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threeseed

They do have a search engine though with Siri Suggestions. Which has a user base of ~1.5b+ people.

We only see the tip of the iceberg so who knows what else it is capable of.

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“Hey siri, what is today’s date?”

“Sorry, I’m having trouble connecting to the network”

“hey siri, what’s the weather today?”

“Now playing Eminem Love the way you lie featuring Rihanna”

Hey siri, turn the TV off.

Which TV? Bedroom or Living Room or Everywhere?

(Only 1 of the 2 TVs is ever on)

I won’t spam this thread anymore, but I would be pleasantly surprised if it improved.

And AppleTV itself is hot garbage for this kind of stuff even though it's a veritable supercomputer that should be the hub for Siri and home automation.

- Hey Siri, <do something that involves AppleTV in any capacity>.

- I'm sorry, one of your devices is off

And that has nothing to do with an LLM. That has to do with speech to text algorithms. It also doesn’t take advanced AI to do a simple intents based answers.

Yes we are aware that Siri doesn't use LLM yet. That is what this thread is about.

Me: Hey Siri, call <my city> Toyota.

Siri: I'm sorry, that contact is not in your list

Me: Siri, what is the number for <my city> Toyota.

Siri: <my city> Toyota's phone number is 123-456-7890 [said too fast to remember or write down in one go]

Me: Siri, call <my city> Toyota

Siri: I'm sorry, you do not have that contact number.

Me: &$@@&/&&/&!!!

I work around this by asking it to find Toyota in <my city>. Then if it finds the dealership, it asks if I want to navigate there, or call them.

I find the worst errors to be when I ask it for information, or to send a text, and it instead places a phone call to someone. It will even call people that I have never called on my phone (a fact it should know), without asking first.

Just tried this exact interaction. Siri gave me a list of nearest Toyotas and made the call. Seems to be working just fine.

Starting to think all these Siri complaints are either made up or really outdated.

I only use Siri with the original Homepods. It has always been terrible. You cannot even tell it to start playing movies on the TV that you have already purchased from Apple itself in the TV app. It will start to play some random song or something.

I should be able to say hey siri, start playing <name of media> on <name of Apple TV>, and it should be able to start the TV and start playing it.

A friend has one that constantly plays U2 out of nowhere. He doesn't even listen to U2, and maintains that he's never requested it.

This isn't in response to a prompt either. He'll unpause the connected TV and it'll just start blasting U2.

Yes, the U2 Songs of Innocence album.

In case someone doesn’t know they gave that album to all iTunes users as part of a promotional thing when it came out.

On my iPhone if I connect the Bluetooth headset and accidentally push the call/cancel button out comes U2…

If you have the magic phrase to make it work, I'd like to know. I tried for about five minutes while driving yesterday, to no avail.

For me, Siri is like an 80s text adventure game, except I was better at those.

Edit: just now I was able to call by interacting a second time with Siri, and using the physical button. Using the button never would have occurred to me while driving.

You must be the one user that Siri works perfectly for.

I spent a decade lowering my expectations, and they're still not low enough.

The perfectly obvious use cases Siri overlooks are maddeningly numerous. My go to example was "text this photo to <contact name>" For years I checked each new iOS release to see if that was enabled, and for close to ten years, no. I'm not sure whether it was the most recent, or the one before (I gave up somewhere along the way) but now you can (finally) do it.

"HeySiri, send this photo to name in messages." "Ready to send" "Send it" "It's sent"

done

Perhaps the verb "text" is unclear to Siri?

Like I said: it does it now. It didn't from inception until something like 2021.

Siri never tells me it has trouble connecting to the network, it says "something went wrong"

If you're asking for an LLM this will get worse because the first L means "large", as in too large to fit in a phone without a network connection.

two minutes later

"Hey Siri, what is today's date?"

"That's sweet, but I think of you as a friend"

"What? The date, Siri, what is the date?"

"You're so sweet"

"Sigh"

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