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Comment by neurobama | Hacker News Reader

I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs. I use it to set timers, get the weather, play music via Spotify, occasionally dictate text messages, and look up trivia mid-conversation. It's been my replacement for Alexa ever since I got creeped out by Amazon's audio data retention. In this context I'm suprised to hear Apple employees are unhappy with it.

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I use Siri to set reminders except it is completely unable to handle reminders like “remind me this afternoon to follow up with Joe about the event on June 25”. It sees the June 25 and the reminder is now for the afternoon of June 25. I manage a theater, so this is a very very common scenario and it’s super frustrating. It speaks to there being no real understanding going on, just pattern matching on things that look like dates. I don’t need GPT4, but surely we can do better than this.

You could use shorthand for date and times in the title. I tried your prompt saying "J N 2 5" instead but apparently "this afternoon" is 5PM, so that's odd.

Siri hard codes this afternoon to mean literally right after 12 PM. So if at 1pm you ask it to remind you to do something this afternoon, it will put it at 12:00pm the following day. I just double checked it right now. It’s currently 12:18 PM, and I asked Siri “remind me to test this in the afternoon“ and it set a reminder for tomorrow at 12:00 PM

I gave Siri a lot of time and forgiveness before writing it off as an interface to set timers and literally nothing else, and even that Siri fails often enough to annoy me. I can imagine there’s a happy medium for other people, but I’m unsurprised that with as big a workforce Apple has now, there’s a contingent there with exactly the same opinions as a lot of us out here. Siri sucks, unless it doesn’t for you, but it still sucks for the rest of us.

Is it just me or Siri is very bad at picking up accents (mine isn't that bad having lived in the US for a while) and background noise.

One of the more impressive things about using the Google's voice assistant was, it did very well in noisy environments. Whereas with Siri, that is quite a bit of struggle. This is only about speech-to-text, not text-to-whatever.

It deals with my oven fan and similar regular kitchen noise pretty well. I hold it close to my mouth at parties, so I can't really compare it to e.g. Google Home or Alexa's far-field capability.

The Google Home on my kitchen counter hears very poorly if I talk behind it instead of in front of it.

Siri is also quite terrible at setting Homekit Scene. I totally gave up on it. For example I have a scene named "Play Music Everywhere" and even if I tell it explicitely with "Hey Siri set scene Play Music Everywhere" it fails miserably. Also simple task like: "Hey Siri play music on all HomePods" ends up with "Ok playing music Everywhere". When did I say everywhere??? I only want you to play on Homepods!

I worked for several years in IoT and as a consequence avoid smart home stuff like the plague, so this hasn't been a problem for me.

Yesterday: “Hey Siri, watch a movie in the dark” “Ok setting scene watch a movie in the dark”

Today: “Hey Siri, watch a movie in the dark” “I can’t find a movie called In the Dark.”

I also had a very frustrating issue randomly start happening because one of my lights had the word “lamp” or “light” in it. Thankfully googling the symptoms found others with the same problem and a solution, but it was baffling as there hadn’t been any changes made by me in over a year prior.

Well it's clearly better to use non-ambiguous keyword to solve that. Like my scene name equivalent to "watch a movie in the dark" was called "cinema". Another was called "sunset" for instance.

It worked for over a year before it became erratic. If it is problematic Apple should warn me in the UI. It worked again shortly after - making me think it is not deterministic.

I’ve a problem with setting scenes with a timer that it often asks who I am. Which is odd because it will identify me just fine normally.

It usually goes like this:

Me: Hey Siri, “bedroom on” in 15 minutes.

Siri: who is speaking?

Me: $Name

Siri: I don’t recognise your voice… setup personal requests bla bla.

Me: Hey Siri, who am I?

Siri: You’re $Name!

Me: Hey Siri “Bedroom on” in 15 minutes.

Siri: Who’s Speaking?

Me: @%#+#!!!

Siri then goes into a loop asking who I am and then ends with “Hi!”

Five minutes later,

Me: Hey Siri, “Bedroom on” in 10 minutes.

Siri: okay $Name I’ve set bedroom on for 12:08.

So it’s not the voice recognition, it’s whatever’s going on after that step.

How do you get Siri to actually work with Spotify?

When I try to use it I get consistently laughably bad results. `Play songs by Albert King on Spotify` yields something like "Playing songs by R Kelly on Spotify". No, thanks.

Even when I ask for songs, albums, or artists I have saved in my library, Siri invariably finds something else entirely unrelated to play.

What's really frustrating is that this used to work reasonably well for me.

Same for Google. I don't understand how it's got worse not better, given advances in machine learning.

Hey Siri, “add 2 minutes to the timer”. It can’t even do something so basic as that.

if you're using an anonymous timer, then it is difficult to access it later. you might have better luck if you set an id to reference later.

timerId = setTimer(float time);

function updateTimer(timerId) {};

maybe wrap that in a class, and use that when using Siri. you just have to speak the class definition first.

Hey Siri! set a timer using myCustomClassTimer!

It does have that ability on the HomePod minis that I have around the house. If a timer is set on one of them and then I want to reset it or add minutes to it, I can do so (but only when that HomePod mini hears me).

It works on watch and HomePod only.

The inability to set multiple simultaneous timers is annoying. I compensate by setting multiple alarms. "Delete all my alarms" works when I'm done, but it's certainly a hack.

"hey siri, start a 10 minute timer for the oven"

"hey siri, set a 30 minute timer for the rice."

it works just fine for me, use it all the time.

Doesn't work for me. I get this:

>There's already a [number] minute timer. Replace? Confirm/Cancel

Running iOS 16.1, so unless they added this feature in the last few months I'm not sure why we'd see different results.

edit: Perhaps you're using HomePod? Apparently Siri on HomePod supports multiple timers, while Siri on iPhone does not. Goofy.

My Apple Watch supports multiple timers, and yet my iPhone does not (iOS 16.4.1).

I mean, I guess a watch is supposed to be for telling time or whatever, but this is just a weird feature omission…

siri definitely has multiple timers. BUT you can only have two though and it only works on Apple Watch and HomePods.

I know, right?

Also a little known hack to set a timer you don’t have to say the whole thing just press the Siri button or say hey siri ‘n minutes’ and it will set a timer for n minutes.

On Alexa I run many times simultaneously. Didn't know it was a special feature. I just name them.

Latest update(?) it quit announcing expiration by name if only one was running. Just beeps, and maybe I forgot what it was supposed to be timing. Annoying.

Especially annoying if more than one person in the house is setting timers.

>I use it to set timers, get the weather, play music via Spotify, occasionally dictate text messages, and look up trivia mid-conversation.

I use my Google Home similarly. But understand that these use-cases are utterly trivial, and Siri (by most accounts) and Google (from experience) still manage to get them wrong too often. It's unbelievable.

I have Google Home products and a YouTube Premium subscription. By 1 of 10 times when I ask for music it'll default to Spotify, which I have never used. How? Why? One of my speakers now reacts to every request with an error when it's not the primary speaker being spoken to.

It's a novelty, nothing more. I wouldn't rely on this stuff for anything. In fact, it's a bug or two away from being permanently removed.

Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are all generally good at those things but honestly not much else. I use my Google Home every day for timers and to turn on/off lights. I don't think any of them will ever be the helpful AI that they were initially promoted as, though.

I'm shocked how much the quality of Google Assistant has degraded over time.

I have a Mini that consistently misunderstands broadcast requests and says "sorry I'm not playing anything right now". When it occasionally speech-to-text converts a broadcast word, it consistently cuts off the first word or letter, even when it's "I'll be right down" users will get "L L be right down".

It used to support simple offline requests like SMS and Navigate when data was unavailable. No more.

It used to integrate with Google Keep. No more.

No longer recognizes the word "torch" as a synonym for flashlight. Why would I be asking to turn on my phone's "porch"?

Painfully slow replies, even under ideal network environment... Just spinning forever, often until a timeout that it doesn't even have the decency to respond with a proper error message.

It's just amazing how they launched a product with a clear "this is where we are, this is our vision of where we're going" and they still sell it but instead they're going in the opposite direction.

See, at least Siri usually is ready to take your input the moment you press the button, even if it then casually discards your input because it can’t reach apple’s servers or whatever.

Google Maps: I swear, about half the time I try to activate voice search, it sits and spins before even accepting any voice input at all. Why can’t it just start reading the microphone right when I activate it, and then submit the saved audio whenever it’s done getting set up? It’s so abysmally poor that it’s usually faster to scroll through recent destinations or literally grab the phone, unlock, and put in a destination.

This is just a market begging to be disrupted. I want to see a startup combine Whisper, GPT, and a competent TTS model into a killer voice UI!

What flabbergasts me is how often the screen will display a successful speech-to-text capture, and then it poops the bed anyways. Like, you did it! You did the hard part! The part that feels like goddamned magic to me, converting the noisy messy reality of sound-waves into text. And then it drops the ball on the simple pile of "if" statements it takes to convert that text into an action.

My pet theory is that they were launched by the A team, who got replaced by the B team when the A team left for greener pastures. Or maybe they got it working, but in a bid to get another promotion they kept tweaking it, making it worse in ways that matter to us but not the promotion committee.

>I don't think any of them will ever be the helpful AI that they were initially promoted as, though.

I must disagree. ChatGPT-style LLM functionality with ElevenLabs-quality realtime voice synthesis will absolutely supercharge these products. The ability to e.g. answer kids' questions in simplified English according to parental prompt guidelines, or drill down on complex educational topics, or maintain context over many back-and-forth conversational interactions will be huge.

Strongly agree, tons of educational and entertainment value will be unlocked.

I'm really excited for LLM D&D dungeon masters.

> I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs

This is mind-blowing to me because I'd guess that ~50% of my interactions with Siri are buggy. I mostly use it through CarPlay.

It even fails to call the correct contact in my phone, which should be the easiest thing it does.

I'd argue that microphones in the car are laughably bad, which probably hurts recognition. But it should be better.

A) This happens whether in the car or not, and in the car I'm often using AirPods to get better noise cancellation. There's no excuse for this. I could talk to my Pixel 5 while driving from across the car.

B) It's not always a recognition thing. Siri often knows what I said and has a completely baffling response to it.

I have Alexa and I hate it as well as hating Siri. At this point when bing (and maybe Google IDK) can handle general knowledge questions with AI answers (and a disclaimer) I basically consider Alexa / Siri unmaintained.

I generally find Voice Over Utility to work better, in terms of available commands and what it can do, but it's also harder to use.

Same experience. I use it for the same purposes and it’s great for hands-free, screen-free interaction of these simple tasks.

> I use it to set timers

Yeah, literally all I use it for is to set a timer when I've put warm beer in the freezer.

You do know that Apple was also caught retaining raw request data from Siri as well, right?

I’m also surprised you’re surprised?

That’s exactly how Siri is supposed to be used.

If it can do something — well, that’s the usecase. It just works.

If it can’t do - then why would even one be trying to do that! That’s not how it’s done.

That’s the Apple way. And that’s exactly how Siri is perfect!

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