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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

Siri that actually works sounds very appealing to be honest. All the integration and UX is there. It just doesn’t work today. So an LLM based Siri that can understand my request is worth an upgrade (for me)

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On the contrary, Siri already works perfectly (or rather, used to work) for a lot of things... It's just Apple keeps on randomly changing stuff, and every time they change something, shit breaks.

"Hey Siri, good evening" - "I turned on the `good morning` scene."

"Hey Siri, timer five minutes" - "I set an alarm for seventeen hundred hours"

"Hey Siri, weather" - turns on the lights in the bathroom

I wish I was joking or exaggerating... The last thing I need is an LLM, just please fix the obvious problems and then maybe iterate on that

Additionally, in a multi-person household adding things to a shopping list should take any authentication. Not everybody has an iDevice or needs to have an iDevice - my petsitter, babysitter, maid and random family members should be able to add stuff to the shopping list just because they are in the room with the homePod. On Alexa, it works - but we have to deal with all the advertisements for crappy AliExpress junk. As soon as Apple figures out shopping lists for whoever is in the room, I'll be dropping all my Alexa devices.

Not sure exactly which way round you are asking -- should requests be tied to the person or be generic?

In the HomePod settings there is a section for "Personal Requests". When enabled, adding reminders will then go to the device / account of the person speaking. I'm not sure what the behavior is when set to off. You can change the setting for each HomePod.

In an ideal world, anyone who can access the HomePod physically _should_ have the ability to contribute items to the shopping list, regardless of whether that list is being shared among multiple users or not. At present, in order to add items to a shared "shopping list" in Reminders, each individual must authenticate themselves through voice recognition on their personal iOS device. It's not possible to add items to the "shopping list" without this initial authentication. Additionally, enabling personal requests is a prerequisite for adding items to a reminders list on HomePod devices. Even when it's set up correctly, it takes nearly a 20 second lag to add things to a list. With Alexa, it's instant without the need for authentication.

Yeah, I'll get random weeks in which "text <wife>" works fine, and other weeks where it says "which one?" and gives me her email and phone as different contacts. No changes on my end that'd cause it.

Makes me wonder how voice assistants handle people with multiple partners. Maybe "which one" is actually the right answer for some users?

My wife is "Jen". I used to work with "Joe Chan". To this day, if I say "text Jen ...", there's about a 20% chance it'll reply with "OK, saying ... to Joe Chan."

Dude. How about optimizing for the option that I've actually communicated with this decade, and 4 times already today?

It works great if you know the exact incantation, but the discoverability of those incantations is terrible, and that's the exact problem.

I spent the past 30+ years typing exact incantations into a computer. I give Siri an exact incantation today and it works, I give Siri the same exact incantation tomorrow and it breaks.

> “Hey Siri, timer five minutes" - "I set an alarm for seventeen hundred hours”

I think I figured out the issue with this one, finally: Siri understands “Set a timer for 6:30” as a request for a timer for however far in the future 6:30 is. And it also understands “set a timer for 6” similarly.

And Siri doesn’t seem at all intelligent about when to stop transcribing.

So Siri has a rather large chance of interpreting “set a timer for 5 minutes” as “set a timer for 5” and ending up with utter nonsense.

A LLM that jointly handles language and audio might do much better.

Something's not right. I say "hey siri 10 minute timer" or somesuch like five times a day. I'd play with your timing and word order. For instance my kid has trouble making music work with siri in the car, but if I say "hey siri play the album technique by the band new order" just like that it works 100% of the time.

Exactly, just figure out how to run Whisper on my phone and it would be the best phone on the market. Whisper plus Mixtral on my phone and it could do anything.

Not sure what you're needing that you're note getting -- there is certainly a lot that it doesn't do -- but Siri works like a champ for me these days for maybe 70% of the things that I would do with my phone or ever computer without it. I initiate all calls with it, do tons of texting with it, cue up all my music in the car with it, constantly add things to reminders lists ('hey siri... add soy sauce to the grocery list' results in soy sauce on my grocery list... in the condiments sublist)

I hadn't noticed the improvements until I started using my apple watch a lot... I had given up on it a few years back, I guess.

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