Hacker News Reader

Comment by mulderc | Hacker News Reader

I have consistently found Siri works better than Alexa for what I use a voice assistant for. Google assistant beats them both though.

At this point I feel like I rarely have any Siri issues and use it all the time so I am confused when people mention how bad it is.

View on HN

There was a period of time where siri bitflipped statements about %40 of the time for me. "Turn lights off" became on, "turn lights on" became off. And it understands my partner far less, despite both of us being native speakers.

What I have always found strange about Siri is how radically different the experience appears to be for each person. I know plenty of people where it works great but then you have tons that say it is shit. I have never seen a good explanation as it seems like Alexa and google assistant is fairly consistent person to person as compared to Siri.

It only ever understands me if I adopt an American accent; and that not consistently, presumably because it's bad (and often comically exaggerated). But my actual (British) voice never as far as I can recall.

So maybe the varied experience is largely just whether you're American and if so have the right regional accent? (For what it's worth, my go-to impression is I think what you'd call 'valley girl', or whatever the male equivalent is. Since I feel liiike that's basically what all city-dwelling Americans sound like to me anywaaay. Do they sound that way to you allso orrr no? ;) )

I regularly have this, daily, and as recently as this morning.

I think a lot of it has to do with constant changes that suddenly break phrases people are used to using.

For a personal example, I had a six-month period where Siri stopped understanding the word 'half' (as in, 'Hey Siri, volume to half'), and either ignored or misinterpreted any command that included it.

Never had that experience.

Do you use any Apple Home / HomeKit automations? She is very frustrating and verbose. And constantly starts playing U2 on my HomePods even though I swear that I have deleted that album four different ways.

A year or so ago I was dealing with a mouse problem in my house. How this often manifested was a mouse running over one of my HomePods during the night, which would trigger Songs of Innocence to play and wake my partner and I up. I’ve never hated U2 so much in my life.

Yes yes yes this so much.

I sooo wish i could delete that *** album because every time it gets me wrong it starts playing it. And I don't even like U2. If I didn't have that it would have nothing to play because my music library would be empty.

There seems to be no way to do it...

I'm amazed to see multiple posters in this thread still getting Bono-rolled by Apple products a decade later. I moved it to my “hidden purchases“ almost as many years ago and it has never resurfaced; has Apple changed something since then?

I have used HomeKit for a VERY long time now and I can't remember the last time Siri had an issue controlling devices. It works 99% of the time and the 1% of the time it doesn't work is a rather specific part of the house where my watch has connectivity issues so Siri hangs.

I use it mainly as a frontend for Home Assistant. Alexa worked way better but it's not as good for privacy (to put it mildly...)

I really really would love to see some LLM love in these services rather than all this scripted 2010s stuff.

What? Siri catches what I say correctly probably less than 50% of the time. Nevermind its ability to actually do useful things. You ask it for trivia, it returns a “here’s what I found on the web” response. Google gives me the answer.

Google is superior, especially with knowledge questions but when it comes to things like sending text messages, controlling smart home devices, starting timers, setting reminders, Siri is almost flawless for me.

That’s been my experience as well.

And for controlling smart home devices Google is wildly inconsistent, and near constantly glitching.

This is the only thing I want it to do (through home assistant) and it doesn't do it well at all :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com