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Comment by Avamander | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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