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Comment by lynx23 | Hacker News Reader

Siri, don't make me even start. I like much of what Apple does, but Siri is just hilariously bad. The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Keywords are randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have to use a different phrase to get what you want. They even broke "Where am I" at least in German. "Wo bin ich" is sometimes replied to with "Sein oder nicht sein" (to be or not to be) which indicates Siri is trying to be smart and fails totally. I am blind and use this feature when I have a feeling I might have been lost. Very funny if you ask a simply question like "Where am I" and your voice-assistant is fucking with you about pseudophilosophically. "Was läuft gerade" did also just fail a few hours ago. Siri just started to play something from my library, which is not what I wanted. All in all, its a embarrasing failure all around. Oh, and before I forget, when Siri fails to understand the name of the person I want to call, it says "OK, I am calling <your name>" and actually tries to dial my own number. This is so dumb, it feels like a joke put in there by an intern.

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> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years.

Input recognition quality falling all over the place - it's very much noticeable with their onscreen keyboards as well. Some "intelligent" mechanisms know better which button I tried to tap and I'm getting gibberish even with auto-correct off. It's the same on iPhone and Watch.

Apple has already forced me to re-learn keyboards once - with the MacBook Pro 2017 fiasco when I had to start carrying external keyboard with my "mobile" laptop. Haven't bought a MacBook since.

Their swype-style keyboard is an absolute joke—perhaps the most infuriating part of my iphone. I know that it’s easier to criticize than it is to implement, but my god, just a basic markov chain would yield more intelligible results than the shit it comes up with.

It's honestly a complete travesty. Strongly considering ditching my iPhone for the upcoming Pixel Fold or whatever it'll be called.

Can't you just change the keyboard on your iPhone?

You can, but it's not really endorsed by Apple. As such, some folks don't even know about that. Personally, I like to use SwiftKey.

//Edit: Would really like to know for what I got down voted for?

I haven’t downvoted, but might be because third-party keyboards have been officially supported for many year in iOS. Your comment gives the impression they’re some kind of hack.

Thank you! No, that wasn't how I intend to mean it. If I recall correctly, the implementation was very restricted when the feature first launched in 2016. And if I recall correctly, it's not a feature which Apple would mention ever again.

Therefore, I have the impression that this is not a feature Apple would endorse much.

It's completely supported, you can get keyboard replacements on the app store.

It's just less secure to use them than the one built into the OS because the third party keyboards might run input through some web service instead of keeping it completely local.

There is a default-off toggle for whether to allow a keyboard to use the network, but of course it's so much more useful enabled that I expect everyone enables it.

Personally i would higher consider the galaxy fold over the pixel fold. i remember when samsung released their first foldable phone it was a very expensive trainwreck and they are now at a point where i here they are decent

i would not for the life of me trust google with a 1st attempt at any hardware implementation. especially with one that will be pretty expensive

Samsung phones sadly intentionally gimp themselves and can't run GrapheneOS

Totally agree so I installed SwiftKey. It worked great for years and I’ve been super happy! Then in the last year, SwiftKey has been randomly crashing so while I type I swap between the SwiftKey and normal keyboard unwillingly several times per message. The built-in keyboard seems absolutely determined to believe that the word 'fuck' does not exist.

You can easily add fuck into your dictionary: Settings>General>Keyboard >Text Replacement.

This is useful advice but, the frustration is warranted if a user needs to modify a sub-sub-sub menu to undo a default that is not even grammatically correct.

for crashing reinstall of swiftkey helped me. seems stable ever since

For some very odd reason, swipe keyboard technology seems to have peaked around 2014, never to reach those heights again.

I remember being amazed by how great swiping was, and after using it recently (it's not really great on gboard or samsung keyboard either, not bad but just meh) I was wondering if it was just rose tinted glass. But nope, I booted up my old nexus 5 with a normal gboard (not even swiftkey!) and it was still amazing. The contrast was amazing even when I wiped typing data on both phones to make sure that it was a fair comparison.

I guess the most glaring difference was the subtle, but extremely important handling of edge cases or particularly ambigious letter combinations. Even the "bad" modern google keyboard is still 95% accurate, but the difference between that and the 99% accuracy on my nexus 5 basically makes all the difference. It goes from predictive magic to having to swipe across every single letter to make sure it works.

Very much agree!!

I remember not even knowing the spelling of words but being able to swipe in the general direction of letters I thought might be correct and it inputting the correct word.

Now now it seems I have to have near perfect tracing and pathing to get correct words.

It's very disappointing.

Could it be related to screen size and finger mechanics?

That honestly could be it! My past few galaxy phones have been narrower and taller than my old note4 (the nexus was more compact but with an aspect ratio that was more "square" ). The narrow and tall screens makes hitting keys a lot harder, now that I think about it.

I switched to an iphone mini and experienced a minor improvement in my typing accuracy, but it’s still pretty torturous compared to back in the day.

I read somewhere that that’s about when they switched from hand coded lists to machine learning for autocorrect.

I find swiping better than screen touch-typing, but still not as good as old QWERTY.

What are your talking about? You done like it converting “your” to “your” on every damn time you type the word?

Note: the above paragraph was typed with swipe typing. I actually typed “Y O U” for both of the above instances of “your.”

Apple swipe typing is the opposite of AI: it’s like an idiot is going behind you taking even correct words you swipe and turning them into gibberish. Don’t even get me started about its obsession with “it’s” and “we’re” to the exclusion of the words without apostrophes. Ughhhhhh

I never write on an iphone, so didn't know today's ridiculous apostrophizing is an autocorrect thing - but that could explain why people sound like idiots or would that be sound like idiot's on the internet.

The keyboards on the Apple M Macbooks are good, having used one myself... Except there's this feeling that Macbook keyboards fundamentally "work" differently to all other keyboards out there.

I'm primarily a Windows wizard, I use my Macbook for specific tasks and it's not my daily driver. I can type on my Macbook mostly fine, but occasionally it misses some of my key inputs. I know the keyboard works, the key in question types in properly when I press it again, but nonetheless I have the occasional input go missing as I type.

I don't know why this is the case, it annoys me, and I'm left wondering if it's the keyboard with no obvious defects or my typing which works flawlessly with literally all other keyboards I ever come across.

Sounds like user error, I don't have any such problems with my M2 keyboard.

That’s interesting because I use the same keyboard with my Mac and Windows work laptop hooked up to a dock, and Windows + Teams (where I’m doing the majority of my actual typing words not code in a day) constantly has weird artifacts of switching lettering, like it’s kicking off some async process to grab keystrokes right as I open a message then flushes the buffer out of order to the application. It’s really weird and I thought it was user error at first but I’ve noticed this never happens on my Mac.

Then again Teams specifically is just kind of the worst. At least they finally added the full range of emoji reacts to messages. (Still doesn’t beat Slacks custom emojis but oh well).

I have the same issue with slack and any facebook app frequently -- especially if you type, delete, type quickly. I think there must be some damn crdt within the draft edits feature that causes the final state not to match exactly what would be expected from the input sequence.

It's very annoying because it feels like I'm being gaslit by the device -- the errant results can pop in after some delay .... "was I misreading what I saw had been typed earlier on screen??"

I have this issue using some keyboards. I think it has to do with key spacing and pressure required. You could be missing the key by hitting the edge of it.

The butterfly keyboard from previous Apple laptop generations is absolute trash. Every time it takes me a few minutes to get used to it.

It's infuriating when I ask Siri to play a song and it decides to pick an obscure remix of the song one day, the actual song another day, then another remix another day.

Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a more complex/verbose option from the results list?

I wound up in a screaming match with my Homepod recently.

“Siri, play Beethoven”

!!!

Had the same experience at a friends house trying to get Alexa to play Bach. I gave up after a half dozen attempts.

These products are just hilariously bad.

Names are a hard problem though. How would it know how "Bach" is pronounced? It seems you would need pretty advanced multimodal AI, some sort of GPT which is trained both on text and audio.

That's kind of my point, it's a product that doesn't work. It's a language interface that can't understand language.

FWIW I tried many alternatives like "Bach classical music" etc to no avail.

How do you pronounce Bach?

“Bach” is a word like any other, and unambiguous in English pronunciation.

There is no "English" here, it's a name of a concrete person which has only one correct pronunciation.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/De-Bach....

The accurate pronunciation in German is irrelevant. Siri is always constrained to one language (Settings > General > Language & Region), and when set to English you get English pronunciations.

Same way Siri understands the english “Los Angeles” even though the G sound is completely different from Spanish.

The english IPA for Bach is straightforward.

You’re talking as if there is an anccepted standard English pronunciation of Bach. The only one I know is the German one which I would use when speaking English. Perhaps I would soften the ending.

My point is that there's nothing particularly special about this name of foreign origin, compared to any other word. Every word has lots of variations in how they're pronounced.

The audio clip the person posted was for a true German pronunciation, which happened to be very different than how 99% of English-speakers would say it.

So how would you have to pronounce "Chopin" in "English"? This doesn't make sense. There aren't even consistent pronunciation rules for many genuine English words, like "ead" in "read" and "thread". It's not even straightforward for English speakers to correctly pronounce "Eliezer Yudkowsky". Which means it's even harder for Siri.

Lots of Americans seem to try to pronounce Bach the composer "correctly", which leads to batch, bash, buck, ... which is fine, the German hard "ch" is very hard to form for English throats, and it's always better and more polite to at least try than to simply pretend foreign words and names are just weirdly spelled English ones, but it's not as straightforward as with a John Bach from Ohio.

> Siri is always constrained to one language

Not only Siri — the whole iOS. You can’t type a sentence switching languages in the middle, without changing the keyboard language all the time, if you have autocorrect enabled. It will change what you type into utter gibberish, even though without the “correcting” what you type is perfectly correct. This system is quite visibly designed by people who speak only one language and don’t understand that people may want to use multiple languages at the same time. The keyboard should support a mix of languages, instead of making a XOR between languages, because otherwise when it starts, it’s almost always in the wrong mode, and if it isn’t, it will almost certainly be wrong by the end of what I write.

I've had multiple teachers teach me different languages (other than english), not one called me by my english pronunciation. It seems that it's just people who speak English that try to do this.

Cumberbach

That is completely wrong. People have many names in practice, especially historical persons. Even living people often present themselves differently in different languages.

For some examples:

- the famous Romanian/French modern sculptor Constantin Brîncuși (which uses a vowel that has no direct correspondent in either French or most dialects of English, and it pallatelizes the ending sh, so that it's pronounced in two syllables, brîn-cush with a slightly pronounced ee at the end), but also Brancusi (in French, roughly bran-cu-see).

- in Japanese, since Japanese speakers have relatively few syllables they are familiar with, almost all foreign names are expected to be Japanized; for example, if your name is "Stephen", you would be expected to present yourself as, roughly, "su-tee-ve-n", and write your name with the corresponding katakana characters in certain official documents

> it's a name of a concrete person which has only one correct pronunciation.

This is an insane standard. The [x] at the end of the German word doesn't exist in English; most English speakers wouldn't be able to pronounce it if they wanted to. When the demands you're making are literally impossible, the problem is you.

So just because the "th" sound doesn't exist in many languages, like German, they should pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Anthony Hopkins" or "The Beatles" incorrectly? That seems to me a way more "insane" standard. By the way, the Scottish are perfectly able to pronounce "Loch Ness", which has the same sound for "ch" as "Bach".

> So just because the "th" sound doesn't exist in many languages, like German, they should pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Anthony Hopkins" or "The Beatles" incorrectly?

They're going to use the sounds that exist for them, yes.

> That seems to me a way more "insane" standard.

I hope you never get to make any decisions. Dave Barry once wrote about someone thinking "What an idiot I am! Here I am, a Japanese person, in Japan, and I can't even speak English!"

But then again, Dave Barry was joking.

> By the way, the Scottish are perfectly able to pronounce "Loch Ness"

The population of Scotland is 5 million; if you want to talk about "most English speakers", the Scottish aren't even worth noticing.

> > So just because the "th" sound doesn't exist in many languages, like German, they should pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Anthony Hopkins" or "The Beatles" incorrectly?

> They're going to use the sounds that exist for them, yes.

That wasn't the question I asked. They will at least try to pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Chopin" correctly, they won't act as if there was a correct German way to pronounce those names.

I think there's something about sounds that you learn early on in language acquisition - maybe your brain develops differently.

'th' is the obvious one that non-english speakers struggle with. I remember a dutch guy laughing at my attempts at various dutch words - I literally could not hear the difference between his pronunciation and mine.

And 'ch' (as in Loch or Bach) is a sound in Scottish english but not in English english.

I lived in Scotland till I was 4, then moved to England and all traces of my previous Scottish accent are long long gone. But my friend, whose surname is Donnachie, says I'm the only English person she's met who pronounces her name correctly - I guess because I learnt that sound early on.

Similarly, my dad, who learnt english in India, still struggles with a "j" sound (he says "zudge" instead of "judge"), despite living here for 50 years and having a posh middle-class English accent that sounds just like a "native" english speaker.

> And 'ch' (as in Loch or Bach) is a sound in Scottish english but not in English english.

You need to talk to a Scouser! Back and Lock will be pronounced Bach and Loch.

I lived in Japan for a while. My name contains sounds that just didn't work for them. No one pronounced it correctly.

I was not upset, annoyed, or confused. It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life.

Be strict in what you send, forgiving in what you receive.

Also you want your voice assistant to play you music not hassle you about correct pronunciations.

But that's exactly the issue here when people use the correct pronunciation, which happens to be different than how normal words in their language are pronounced, but the voice assistant assuming normal language, which leads to absurd misfirings. The issue is not people not knowing how to pronounce something, the problem is that it's a hard problem for "dumb" AIs to know how a certain name is pronounced, as long as they are not multimodal LLMs.

> It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life.

As a point of interest, this is actually backwards. You're born recognizing all the sounds; what you learn is to ignore the difference between sounds that aren't distinct in your language.

You do keep that ability for the rest of your life, but it isn't helpful when you try to learn to recognize foreign sounds.

Well, sure.

I don't know if "th" exists in Polish or not, but a common (perhaps dominant) spoken way to refer to "The Beatles" is[0] "Bitelsi", which not only loses "th", but also like half the other sounds in the name[1].

Thing is, we understand it just fine. More than that, if you overheard me saying to someone, "puść teraz Bitelsów" ("put on the Beatles now"), there's a good chance you'd identify the name from context. If you didn't, you could always ask to verify (well, not if you were actually overhearing me...).

----

[0] - Or at least would look like that written down. Polish is mostly a "you say it as you see it" language, but with foreign names, often enough people write the correct form but use localized pronunciation.

[1] - I'm sorry, I'm not a phonetician.

Want to flummox the Japanese tongue? Try a sentence like "Darth Vader is Luke's father". It hits most of the highlights: interdentals, labiodentals, and that weird 'r' sound English has that Japanese sometimes tend to conflate with 'l'. Even a competent Japanese English speaker is likely to render it as "Dāsu Bēdā izu Rūkusu fazā". Depending on the region they may mess up the 'f'; the syllable 'fu' is actually 'hu', but pronounced with very pursed lips in Tokyo Japanese (not so much in Kansai).

Unless they're bilingual from childhood, most people are not able to pronounce sounds outside their milk tongue without difficulty. That you expect English sounds to be perfectly pronounceable by non-English-speakers is probably more reflective of the fact that quality English education is widely available where you live than anything.

Do you have to say Johan Sebastian Bach. Siri will work with that

> Bach” is a word like any other, and unambiguous in English pronunciation.

There is another pronunciation if you want a holiday in New Zealand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_(New_Zealand)

Reminds me of the doublewide that served as a motel suite I stayed at in Australia. It was dirt cheap and better than you might think -- very cozy.

GPT doesn't need to know, I told it to convert possible mistranscribed text to commands, "Play me some back" => "Play me some Bach"

Yes, GPT is particularly good understanding, even when you misspell things. It would make a good front-end interface to something like Siri. take the human input and make it something that makes sense to the dumb computer.

Yes, but large language models are very compute intensive and require a ton of RAM. So they wouldn't be able to run locally (this is currently possible with Siri), would be relatively expensive and possibly slow. So they might still be a while off.

The problem I've had with Siri and music has nothing* to do with parsing individual words. What I've found recently is that if you don't give an exact match Apple just puts in random shit. Hey Siri play the album Rubber Soul by the Beatles on Apple Music gets me random songs by the Beatles because apparently I have Rubber Soul named "Rubber Soul [some edition info]". Hey Siri play songs by the band Duran Duran literally just plays the eponymous album because reasons. You don't need AI, machine learning, GPT, LLM, or whatever fucking buzzword is all the rage, you simply need to revert to behavior that was standard in iOS 15 and earlier. The upgrade to iOS 16 completely nerfed Siri on my phone, starting with some mandatory trial subscription bullshit.

It's to the point where I've given up trying to use Siri while driving.

* Almost nothing. I still have to say "play underground eight zero s on soma fm" because reasons.

It's one of those products that makes me think: "Do the eng directors in charge of it even use this thing??"

Yeah, some others also had the impression that it got worse over time in some aspects. I wonder whether this was some kind of tradeoff with other abilities. Or perhaps they rewrote the code, which had unintended side effects.

I take your point but really like the mirth of a man who died 30 years before audio recordings being represented by a hip hop version of one of his pieces! He never recorded a canonical version of anything!

He did lots of canonical midi-recordings on paper though.

Funny, my Android Auto playlist for "Bach" is actually Wendy Carlos, a CD rip of Switched-on Bach 2000, which she did on an early 90's Mac II using MIDI sequencing.

In general I find that 80's and 90's era CD's ripped directly to FLAC still sound really good.

Soundtrack to that dog movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85A2rWA5O3o

Hahah yeah I said “Siri play classical music on Spotify” and siri said “I’m afraid I can’t do that” and then starting playing Sabaton (which is Power metal and the exact opposite of classical music).

Then Siri had the gall to claim NO MUSIC WAS PLAYING as this super loud music was assaulting our eardrums. My wife thought my exasperated struggles were the funniest thing, it felt like HAL-9000 with the “I’m sorry I can’t do that Dave” moment.

> Hahah yeah I said “Siri play classical music on Spotify” and siri said “I’m afraid I can’t do that” and then starting playing Sabaton (which is Power metal and the exact opposite of classical music).

As a Sabaton fan, I laughed out loud. Technically they have classic music sounding (roughly) songs, e.g. Christmas Truce, but yeah, that's a massive fail.

I've had the exact same experience with Google Home.

"Play music on dining room speaker." (dining room speaker starts blaring music at high volume) "Turn down dining room speaker." (No response) "HEY, GOOGLE. Stop music on dining room speaker." (dining room speaker music volume decreases) (from the dining room speaker) "Can't find dining room speaker." (dining room speaker volume increases, blaring music)

I did follow the advice here to rename all my speakers lowercase, since google home's VOICE interface seems case-sensitive:

https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/jsadkp/i_unders...

And since the Google Home android app is, literally, the worst and least-reliable mobile application I've ever used, the voice interface is pretty much all I've got.

One of the most infuriating things about any voice assistant, IMO, is the absolute clunkiness with which you have to try and control music.

I use Android Auto in my car for safety. God forbid I'm listening to a song and want to queue up another one right after. I don't think I've ever gotten that behavior to work without either skipping the current song or adding the second song to the end of the queue. And even that's assuming that it even recognized the proper song out of my library and didn't try to go to Youtube or something.

Meanwhile, if my buddy is riding shotgun, I can just say "Hey, put on Peace of Mind next"

I switched from Apple Music to Spotify and have yet to figure out how to get it to play a playlist. So it’s either “tap on the screen while hurtling down the highway” or “awkwardly tell it to play each individual song after each one completes”.

Ok Google doesn't work well either.

20% of the time it can't play songs on Spotify, and I have no idea why.

I assume it’s because as the number of features increased, the accuracy of recognising specific phrases went down. The eggcorn in the machine.

I think part of this might be Spotify’s fault. I moved from Apple Music to Spotify Premium and my biggest complaint (aside from literally one SPECIFIC song I really love not being on Spotify at all) is that there is no HomePod support (you have to airplay the music to the HomePod) and Siri support is shoddy.

You get the same issues on Android. There is zero intelligence, it's embarrassing. You can have a song in your library that you've listened to every day of your life, but it'll still decide you actually want to listen to some weird track you've never heard of just because the names are similar.

It gets real bad if you listen to music in a language other than the language you have Siri set to. It's attempts at deciphering Japanese punk or Bollywood song titles are terrible.

It also has a habit of invoking whenever I say "Hi sweetie" to my neighbor's dog.

I stopped using Siri because it does recognise the artist/song I want, and then it plays a completely different thing, not even a related genre.

I understand this isn’t necessarily Apple’s fault, but I bought a HomePod (which are very expensive smart speakers!) because I assumed it’d be the most convenient “smart” speaker with good audio quality. It does deliver on audio quality, but despite supporting literally every other smart speaker under the sun Spotify has no support for HomePod and instead you have to AirPlay from your phone. So my kid can’t listen to Spotify, and the HomePod is useless to anyone but me or my wife.

I think this is Spotify's fault. They're in a weird feud with Apple and won't properly support their app on all of Apple's platforms. I don't know who they think they're winning over but it just makes me dislike them more, I'll pick the Apple ecosystem over their app if push comes to shove.

It's unbelievable that Apple hasn't been able to do better.

My 'favorite' Siri 'feature' is when I ask for directions to 'home' it gives me directions to the local Home Depot.... really???

EDIT: After thinking about this for a while, the reason this irks me is that 'directions to home' is one of the most basic asks. I am not asking Siri to play some obscure unreleased track from an underground British punk band. I am asking for directions to my home, and it fails.

Brought to you for your convenience!

Or when it unexpectedly decides to "call" someone when I asked it to play some song while I'm driving.

I'm mindful my English pronunciation is not 100% accurate, but Alexa gives me no problem at all.

I speak midwestern American English and it’s been constantly trying to text the wrong person, which is weird because a year ago ON THE SAME PHONE this never ever happened. If it’s not working for me it’s definitely a degradation. Siri had worked reliably for me for literally a decade!

I’ve also noticed my autocorrect has gone bonkers. It’s constantly trying to change the case of the word “guess” into “Guess”, the brand I guess? Despite me never ever having shopped or mentioned this. The autocorrect has gotten very aggressive and I type so fast that it’ll take me three or four tries to get it to revert to lower case. It also has some weird context sensitivity to proper nouns they added so if I say “I guess James can come over” it’ll change that to “Guess James” like it’s a name (in iMessage only I suppose) and I have to delete that entire “name” and carefully retype!

SwiftKey on Android does the same thing to me to random words, I think it's learning some words should always be capitalized because I once used them at the beginning of a sentence.

OMG yes, the latest updates to the keyboard are a nightmare. I went so far as to turn off autocorrect as I’d rather have my spelling wrong but the meaning the same. It straight up makes up entirely new phrases I didn’t type.

> autocorrect has gone bonkers.

It’s gone feral with punctuation, and things like “they’re” get changed to “there” or “their”. Common misspellings seem to appear when they weren’t typed.

It's odd that Siri was better under Eddy Cue, for some reason, even though he is mainly the content guy, then under Craig Federighi or the AI/ML experts like John Giannandrea.

Every few months, Siri decides I live at 123 East Foo street. Just adds the E when I say “directions to home” and tries to go miles off course. Lasts a week or two, then back to normal.

If I spell or type out the address, it still adds the E, with no apparent way to get to my actual home address.

As a bonus, last night I said “cancel my 6am alarm” and it said “you have 29 alarms around that time”, and proceeded to read through each of them. My wife nearly died laughing as it started to rattle them off.

Some people would argue that Siri has alignment issues and that Apples datacenters should ne airstriked now

Yours picks the local Home Depot? Such luxury! It's not uncommon for Siri to navigate my to the other side of the country, even when I speak the entire address.

The worst part about Siri in my opinion is how it can do bulk actions when it mishears you. You want the ceiling light off? Okay, turning off all the lights. Or the opposite, it turns *everything* on, which can be even more annoying.

They're all complete crap. I use Google Home to ONLY turn my lights on or off and it gets it like 60% of the time. Sometimes it accepts the command and it just doesn't even work and says something went wrong. Pressing the light button in the app is 100% consistent. Incredible.

I've been superstitiously switching between "turn the lights off" and "turn off the lights" (also with music). It seems like every few weeks or days it prefers one over the other.

I say to Siri “close the blinds” eyes and it replied “I don’t see anything like that in your home”. I say again five seconds later “close the blinds” and it closes the blinds.

I have the same problem with my “blinds” - I started calling them “shades” instead (not the usual term, in my vernacular at least) and have had much better luck. YMMV!

I think it works if the Google Home and the lights are configured in the same room, otherwise it goes crazy and does the whole house.

It's not a good reason but I believe this happens because voice command has to go to Google server, Google talk to light vendor API, light vendor communicates with your device, and lights go off only if all of this succeeds.

Meanwhile, button in vendor app will not use internet so lot less can go wrong.

The voice commands are worse than touch screens and touch screens are worse than the optimal solution which is a tactile interface of switches/knobs. I stopped using Alexa voice controls for lights since its inconsistent and switched to a bluetooth switch, much more reliable have only had a few instances where it didn't work.

I don't do lots of home automation mostly because the automation isn't practical in a new build house that has switches in appropriate places. There are extremely rare circumstances where I want a light on/off in a room I'm not in. However, it would be a fun project to build a nice remote control with switches and knobs that you can program and have it talk to the home automation solution. To make it even more fun, I'm talking hard flip switches and volume like knobs, really tactile.

It's also surprisingly unaware of how poorly it's performing. I have recently noticed that when you ask it to send text a text message for you, it follows up with a suggestion that you turn on auto-send for siri-dictated messages, even after it took you six tries to get it to understand you.

Siri does ok for me on this. It also gets the shades right if I say shade instead of blind, otherwise the error rate is higher. Overall, I’d rather live with Siri than without. Google does ok as well, Alexa is utter crap for these tasks.

I thought Siri was bad for me because I was on a watchlist for maybe discussing Apple negatively in front of the pod, and they purposely messed with me, doing the opposite of my commands, acting randomly, etc.

Kidding aside, with all those non-deterministic assistants, it will be hard to see when you’re hellbanned from a service.

> Very funny if you ask a simply question like "Where am I" and your voice-assistant is fucking with you about pseudophilosophically.

well sure, not funny for the person actually going through it, but as the premise of a skit seems to hold some promise.

I believe GP stating s/he’s blind in the previous sentence means s/he’s grabbed the short end of the stick on this one

Apple does lay some turds. MobileMe. Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called. Maps until recently. Usually they fix them, but Siri never seems to get better.

For what it's worth, I think Alexa has gotten worse, but for different reasons.

>Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called.

It was called Ping for anybody wondering.

>Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media network was called.

"iTunes Ping" or "Apple Music Connect".

Yes, they tried it twice.

iCloud Drive still sucks and it terrifies me I have so much stuff on it when it doesn’t even do snapshots (the way Dropbox does).

Alexa has always worked better from across the room, but nowadays an Echo device will do very little aside from weather and timers without trying to sell you a subscription.

By the way—-

Alexa’s inability to just answer a question and go away is why my son didn’t get in trouble for knocking it off its table (and breaking the top), and why we didn’t replace it.

I finally caved in and switched the Siri language to English on all my devices, after trying and failing to keep it in my native language on my iThings while simultaneously keeping my new MacBook in English (because I prefer it on computers, and I wanted the read time out loud at the hour-function turned on - it kept reading it out in a mixture of both languages, wtf?). Turns out it is much better in US English, but still completely useless .

I just set timers using the crown on my watch now, combined with custom google assistant commands to control what I need (lights, tv) through my Nest. Playing and controlling music is too much of an extreme sport for my taste on either assistant, and I've stopped using it for calls too as there's always a 5% chance it will call up some random person I knew decades ago but haven't removed from my contact list because reasons. The name is of course totally different from the few persons I do call on a regular basis.

It's great for joking around with my kid though, laughing at the misinterpretations and stuff like that. And that's about it.

Oof that sucks for you. Siri is an absolute joke. My two major gripes:

- After four years it still doesn’t understand my youngest son’s name. I added a phonetic spelling to his Contacts card. I told Siri 200 times: “my son’s name is pronounced XYZ”’ I religiously corrected his name a 1000 times when text to speech misunderstood it. Nothing. Joke.

- Siri is triggered by anything that even vaguely resembles “hey Siri”: “…they seriously…”, “…ok see here…”, “easier”. And once that dumb piece of %$£~ is triggered she HAS to finish her cutesy “listen to me being a helpful and funny assistant” sentence. Again: sad joke.

I get the impression that Apple makes an effort with accessibility and would be horrified about this blind/“where am I” example. Hopefully there’s an employee here who sees it and can get it in front of the right person.

Your chat bots shouldn't need a safe word to stop messing around.

What totally strikes me as odd is, that Siri on iPad even reacts to the Audible player in the background.

Most false positive triggers stem from Audible books as well as audio play from the Apple Audio.

Sometimes I feel Siri is desperate to be triggered, because if hardly ever, I use it in the car when I have to change direction and need to set a new course on a Map app.

> Keywords are randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have to use a different phrase to get what you want.

The most striking example for me is that the word "half" - as in, "Hey Siri, set the lights to half" - stopped working for six months, then started working again.

I found this on the web for "make me even start".

> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years.

Has it really or have your expectation increased instead? Or is it because they initially only worked well with business us english and have been trained over the years to support many more languages, dialects and even variations of said dialets/language + slang and profanity?

Also at the beginning people where talking to these slowly, articulating every word. Now everybody take it for granted they should be understood and talk in their lazier and more natural way.

I've never activated speech recognition on any device I own. But last week I was in a videocall with my partner's mexican family and early in the call they were trying to make my mother in law's Amazon Echo to stop the music and it only really stopped when my sister in law started using profanity words, something like "no mames! chinga to pinche madre Alexa cayate!"

Apparently this stuff became so used/trained by people not using them in a polite way that they eventually only react when you talk badly to them using slang and profanity.

In my experience using Siri for only a handful of defined tasks over the years “set a timer,” “remind me to X at Y,” and so son, it has objectively gotten worse.

Yeah, it's worse.

If you think Siri is bad, give Apple autocorrect a spin!

Oh dear $deity. Why does it insist on capitalizing "and" in the middle of a sentence?

On my phone, I've somehow gotten into a situation where I can't type "butt" without it autocorrecting it to "Butt".

"well" and "we'll" here

Android GBoard turns "were" into "we're". "Ill" into "I'll". "Its" into "it's". Makes me look illiterate with all the extra apostrophes.

There needs to be a way to reset this kind of learned behavior.

I must have accidentally corrected "and" into "abs" once because now my iPhone always corrects "and" into "abs" when I use swipe gestures.

"Bob abs Katie are here".

Since I never notice it until I send the message, it's becoming so cocksure about the correction that there's no going back.

There is someone else I know that always texts me with "abs" instead of "and"

I think there was a dictionary you can reset.

EDIT: "Settings > General > Reset; Tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary"

Thanks!

Minor correction: Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Reset, then tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary

on mine, at least. Apple does enjoy moving these things around from time to time.

Not going down that part of the settings tree, that looks really dangerous.

I wish you could selectively edit it. I use “The” (obviously), Te (Māori) and “TE” (echo time, I use MR scanners a lot).

Everything is a mess when I type.

I have a similar problem, but it is literally every English word that is also a common name. I send texts like "I Will run by the store and May grab dinner for tomorrow, Hope to be home by 7". It's infuriating.

We used to laugh about autocorrect mistakes, but over the past few years it has gotten exponentially worse. Instead of just screwing up the word I'm typing, it'll decide I meant a different phrase and change the previous word too. If you're not saying exactly what it expects you to, it can be extremely frustrating.

I've started turning many of the autocorrect-related features off entirely.

Just try their swiping.

I use it. I don't like it. (I haven't found anything else that's much better, and that's with a fair amount of SwiftKey use; nothing beats now-dead Swype.)

Routinely - routinely - I try to swipe out "and". Often, I get "abs" (I don't work out, let alone write about it), but the most common and bizarre one is "Abbas". The only Abbas I know is the Palestinian president, and I don't write about him at all, let alone enough to justify having that be a common word that comes up.

I realize that with put/out/or it's just not easy to distinguish. But I'll live with that. Abbas?

I assume some users are using new names on a daily basis. If you run a plumbing business, you may never have texted Abbas before - but if Abbas asks you for a quote, you'll be doing it today. Although I agree that people write 'and' far more often.

I assume they have some sort of special-case inclusion/handling for names in swipe dictionaries - it'd be embarrassing if your swipe keyboard recognised George and Donald as words, but didn't recognise Barrack.

But I'd just punch in the letters individually just as I would for any unusual word. Misinterpreting "and" is like how Swype used to put in "née" for "me". Look, maybe I'm not as precise as I should be, but one is a word that people use a couple of times a year, and the other a couple of times an hour.

And "Barack" isn't the most common spelling. I wouldn't expect it to know "Fillmore" either.

Shouldn't frequency of use matter? Why go to all this effort and not put some kind of weighting on its word choices?

My phone has somehow decided that ‘20’ should be changed to ‘2.0’. This is the only combination of numbers to do this (so far).

I'm also blind. I use airpods, and sometimes I'd like to know where the phone is. I ask Siri, where is the phone? Or "make a sound." Siri just says some stupid joke, or "I'm right here." So not useful, just make a chime or something.

Even basic stuff like changing the lock rotation can't be done with Siri. I just don't understand how it could be that bad. I feel like I could sit and code a better parser that would be more useful. And Siri was the first really big voice assistant, they've had 13 years to get it working.

just wait a few month

"as an ai language model, I don't know your location"

> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years

This isn't unique to Apple: my Amazon devices have definitely become slower to respond, and less accurate when they do, than they were a while ago.

I think part of the issue is that the companies have not found a way to “properly” monetise the services (my echo thingies where dirt cheap and I've never done anything with them remotely like making a purchase) so they are essentially throwing money at the infrastructure to keep them running due to the fear of the backlash if they just let the services die.

When it fails you in German, do you switch to English?

I don’t even attempt to talk to assistants in my native language because I know they’ll fuck it up. I just go straight to English.

I'm English and my wife and kids are french so naturally all our devices are set to french - our Google speakers do not understand my terrible french accent but bizarrely work perfectly when I speak English but only if I do a completely over-the-top french accent.

Same with Hindi. Needs a ridiculous English accent to understand Hindi. I call it the British Colonial Administrator accent. Like this guy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6_896OhnaQ

> Siri fails to understand the name of the person I want to call

After too many frustrated attempts, I found a crude fix for people I call frequently - use the shortcuts app to set a single word to trigger that specific call. Use words that are hard to misunderstand, like "newspaper" or "fantastic". Silly hack but so far it's been working flawlessly.

> They even broke "Where am I" at least in German.

Probably should be careful with "I am sinking!"

> "I am sinking!"

Wat are you sinking about?

Reference: https://youtu.be/yR0lWICH3rY (partially German, but I believe works without understanding German)

I never bought one of these devices, because I refuse to speak in foreign languages to them.

When I am on the confort of my house, I want to use my native languages as much as I can.

The project has been on the department trading bazaar, selling itself out to survive.

"So we in the MacOs trading station, will push siri enable notifications on powerbutton wakeup, if you push the following answers on keywords up the likelihood.

Deal? Deal!

Thus she existed on, living long and prosperous.. through diplomatic victorys, that destroyed the qualities that could not keep her alive on her own..

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