Hacker News Reader

Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

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?

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com