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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

All of my current experience with Siri tells me there is a 50-50 chance of the result coming back as “Sorry, I have having trouble connecting to the network” or playing a random song from Apple Music.

Just last night, we were entertaining our toddler with animal sounds. It worked with “Hey Siri, what does a goat sound like?”, then we were able to do horse, cow, sheep, boar, and it somehow got tripped up on pig, for which it responded with the Wikipedia entry and told us to look at the phone for more info.

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You’ve touched on what is probably the biggest reason I don't use Siri more: Apple does not limit it to what’s important to me as user.

I have thousands of contacts, lots of photos, videos, and emails, all in Apple’s first-party apps and yet Siri is more likely to respond with a popular song or listing of news articles that’s only tangentially connected to my request.

> me as user

This becomes more complicated when Siri is the interface on a homepod in a shared area. Who's data and preferences should be used? Ideally it would recognise different voices and give that person's data priority, but how much can/should be shared between users? Where are these data - they shouldn't be in the homepod, so it would have to task the phone with finding the answer. I'm sure something good could be done here, but it wouldn't be easy.

If I'm not mistaken, it recognises voices already? At least once I had it tell me it didn't recognize my voice and couldn't do a thing I requested.

My father in law's iPad responds to me, and my phone to him almost every time either of us say 'hey Siri'.

These are called Personal Requests and are already handled as a use case by HomePod.

>All of my current experience with Siri tells me there is a 50-50 chance of the result coming back as “Sorry, I have having trouble connecting to the network” or playing a random song from Apple Music.

Well, this is about adding ChatGPT-level smartness to Siri, not just the semi-dumb assistant of yore.

Federico Viticci's S-GPT is doing some pretty neat things using Shortcuts

https://www.macstories.net/ios/introducing-s-gpt-a-shortcut-...

Some examples from that blog post:

> I’m feeling nostalgic. Make me a playlist with 25 mellow indie rock songs released between 2000 and 2010 and sort them by release year, from oldest to most recent.

This doesn't just return a list of songs, it will create the playlist for you in Music.

> Check the paragraphs of text in my clipboard for grammar mistakes. Provide a list of mistakes, annotate them, and offer suggestions for fixes.

> Summarize the text in my clipboard

> Go back to the original text and translate it into Italian

I haven't tried it myself, but it has other integrations like "live text" where your phone can pull text out of an image and then could send that to GPT to be summarized.

Version 1.0.2 makes improvements for using it via Siri including on HomePod.

Today I asked Siri for the weather this week. She said daytime ranges from 31C to 23C, so I then asked "on what day is the temperature 31 celsius?". And, of course, what I got back was "it's currently twenty seven degrees".

The weather ones are so annoying: "Is it going to rain today?". "It looks like it's going to rain today". "What time is it going to rain today?". "It looks like it's going to rain today".

The only requests that work consistently well for me are:

"Hey Siri, whats the weather?" and "Hey Siri, what the X-day forecast". Everything else is a huge mess.

"Set a timer for 10 minutes" works pretty well. Most of the time.

It seems ironic then that specific thing failed spectacularly for me today. Siri put the text "set a timer for 15 minutes" into the text field of a reminder. I have no clue why, and no timer was set.

But you know what? Still better than Alexa for managing my smart home stuff. By miles and miles, IMO.

And god help you if you give up halfway through a command with a prompt. “Cancel”, “stop” and “nevermind” don’t work for half of that for some reason, so you have to walk up and tap the HomePod to cancel.

> All of my current experience with Siri tells me there is a 50-50 chance of the result coming back as “Sorry, I have having trouble connecting to the network” or playing a random song from Apple Music.

Meanwhile, Google and Amazon have decided that the data center costs of their approach just aren't worth it.

>Google Assistant has never made money. The hardware is sold at cost, it doesn't have ads, and nobody pays a monthly fee to use the Assistant. There's also the significant server cost to process all those voice commands, though some newer devices have moved to on-device processing in a stealthy cost-cutting move. The Assistant's biggest competitor, Amazon Alexa, is in the same boat and loses $10 billion a year.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-assistant-mig...

Both companies made big cuts to the teams running their voice assistant tech.

> there is a 50-50 chance of the result coming back as “Sorry, I have having trouble connecting to the network”

Doesn’t the locally-run LLM bit solve this particular grievance? I’m picturing a personal AI à la Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

Yes. I dont understand the criticism of the current Siri in this context, the point of a language model on the device would be to derive intent and convert a colloquial command into a computer instruction.

Siri was so good before iOS 13, I'm not sure what they did in that release but it went from around 90-95% accuracy and 80-90% contextual understanding - down to 70% and 75% respectively.

As someone who dictates more than half of their messages and is an incredibly heavy user of Siri for performing basic tasks I really noticed this sudden decline in quality and it's never got back up there - in fact, iOS 16 really struggles with many basic words. Before iOS 13. I would have been able to dictate these two paragraphs likely without any errors however, I've just had to edit them in five places.

me: hey siri weather

siri: The temperature is currently 54 degrees. Expect clear skies starting in the evening, going down to 52 degrees tonight.

me: hey siri what's the high today

siri: the high today will be 84 degrees

me: hey siri will it rain today?

siri: Expect heavy thunderstorms around noon

Note nothing it said in the original was actually wrong...

The more they can move Siri on device the less that will happen.

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