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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

I’m frankly surprised that Siri hasn’t moved to on-device voice recognition. It’s by far my biggest complaint with Siri: random, unpredictable delays or outright failures to recognize simple messages because the network is unstable or unavailable.

There’s other trash too: the other day I tried asking Siri to play a song from my library, but it misinterpreted the song title and proceeded to activate a seven day trial of Apple Music Voice to play some random track on Apple Music. I didn’t ask for that subscription!

To be fair, for the tiny subset of functionality I do use - navigate by voice, set timers, get terrible jokes to amuse passengers - it works fine.

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> because the network is unstable or unavailable

All of Apple’s services by and large handle spotty networks horribly.

Take Apple Music for example: if you want to play music you’ve downloaded to your device, it’s often better to switch into airplane mode, because with a present-but-poor signal it will still try to load album listings etc over the network, and sit there on a spinner.

Spotify is just as bad in this regard! It used to handle spotty connections flawlessly a few years ago, but at some point it was altered to keep trying to pull album art and track listings from the network even for downloaded albums.

I have an issue with the Spotify app on the Apple Watch. I’m not sure if it’s an apple or a Spotify problem, but I have loads of trouble when I’m using the watch app to play music when I’m at home, near my phone and near my Wi-Fi network. However if I leave the house and walk away without my phone, leaving the watch to use this 4G connection only, it works flawlessly.

If I come back from my run Spotify will often stop playing as soon as it gets home in range of the phone.

Is there not an option on Spotify to only stream on wifi?

This is a common developer curse. I just ran into an issue at my job where customers were having an issue in the field that we just couldn't reproduce in the office; it took a long time to put together that the issue was related to failing downloads on sketchy networks because all of our networks are stable and fast.

This is so annoying! Every single time I try to play downloaded music on a bad connection it stalls instead of just playing the audio I literally have stored on my device. 100% agree with you that turning on Airplane mode makes it easier to play AM on iOS.

Not that this excuses it, but I've been able to get this to work by going into the "Downloaded" tab in the Music app. That seems to play directly off the device.

Siri does use on-device voice recognition. Active airplane mode and you can still use it.

Edit: for some commands only it seems. I agree with OP, this is odd.

Its a question of if it can determine the intent ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) on device or if it needs to go to the cloud to understand it.

Seems like it does - cool! - but why does it sometimes spin for several seconds when faced with a seemingly simple request? I'm guessing it has some path where it tries to use the network if possible, but if the network is spotty then the requests timeout and it reports a failure?

It probably takes more time to run the analysis locally on a phone chip.

When Google brought the Assistant locally to the Pixel, one of the talking points was how much faster it was.

Not on HomePods as far I as know.

I hunch that on-device recognition leveraging the onboard ML hardware will be a whole new thing. The Siri brand is so damaged now I expect they’ll launch something new instead of “but it’s actually good now!”

Whats the excuse for this ? Whisper is open source, resource efficient and can easily work on device. I wonder why they havent switched to that.

Yes, incredibly frustrating that to ask Siri to play a song from your library on your device you need a network connection.

Except they already do this? Since iOS 15, Siri has used on-device recognition. That's why you can go into Airplane mode and do things like ask Siri to change the brightness.

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