Maybe I find conversational UIs awkward, or maybe I just got jaded REALLY quickly from Siri’s lacking capabilities early on, but I have hardly used it in the decade or whatever that it’s been around.
I outsource so much of my memory to the phone via Siri ALL THE TIME. It’s so useful. Even for things in 20m. I’ll easily forget if I don’t do this, and it’s reliable so it gives me confidence. It also keeps the notification present until I actually do the thing, so I have a kind of string around my finger until the task is accomplished. I can also snooze that notification as needed to rebring it up at the right time.
Every time I do this around non-tech people they go “wow I didn’t know you could do that.” I swear it’s literally life changing, particularly for anyone over 30.
A year or so ago I remember someone pointing out in a podcast how LLMs are great at taking something like general language and turning it into a series of predefined commands (the stuff available to shortcuts). It would instantly make Siri much more useful.
I think Federico Viticci rigged up something similar or at least a powerful demo using Siri + Shortcuts + ChatGPT to be able to answer all sort of questions better than native Siri.
I can’t imagine reminders w/o Siri because that’s how I add 90%+ of them. Grocery items, things to do at time X, or when I get to (or leave) work/home are the big ones.
Google can also do this. Alexa has lots of problems, but it can raise a blind in a pinch. We also spent a ton on Lutron shades because we discovered that we were just managing them too much manually (Siri then is great for controlling that).
You can also ask Siri the weather in the morning, useful in figuring out how to dress the kid.
1. Find my phone via Siri on homepod
2. Set a simple timer
3. Add to a list
4. Send a text message to one of a few contacts
It can and sometimes does do all of those things, but horribly unreliably.