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Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it?

Edit: why in gods name are people downvoting me for politely asking about someone’s differing experience?

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"Siri, play The Dragonborn comes at 25% volume"

"Here is what I found about "The Dragonborn comes at 25" on the Internet" opens Safari

Ah I never felt inspired to use it on a computer and always use physical volume controls in the car and through headphones, so I wouldn’t have run into that. It does seem like something that should be a day-one sort of feature.

"First you have to unlock your iphone"

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I swear I've gotten that response, from a nearby HomePod, while holding my unlocked iPhone in my hands.

I don't know what it is doing sometimes.

> Siri does what I need it to do

Not true for me at all, it fails at the most basic tasks, sometimes even at tasks it has done before. Three examples:

- "Timer 5 minutes" -> Loading spinner is shown. Siri disappears after a few seconds. No error, no confirmation. I then have to manually check if the timer was set or not (it was not).

- "Turn on the lights in the living room" to which it responds "Sorry, I cannot do that". I have Phillips Hue lights that are connected to Apple Home, of course Siri can do that. It did that before.

- "Add tooth paste to my shopping list". The shopping list is a list I have in reminders. It then tries to search for the query on Google. I then tried "Add tooth paste to the list shopping list in reminders" which worked, but if I have to be this wordy, it is no longer any convenient.

There are many more simple cases in which Siri always / sometimes fails. I also have the feeling that it performs far worse if asked in my native language (German) than in English.

Yeah that’s strange. I set timers constantly both at home and work and I can’t recall a single time it hasn’t worked. I periodically add things to lists without issue. I have zero experience using it in another language. Maybe their testing sucked for that?

The lights thing is insane and annoying.

"Turn on living room lights" - "There are no lights in the living room"

"Turn on living room lights" - lights turn on.

Naming some of my lights Greg has helped a bit.

The very first thing I tried when Siri was released -- "set an alarm for ten minutes before sunset" -- still doesn't work. "What time is sunset?" and "Set an alarm for 5:03 PM" both worked on day one, and still work. Zero progress.

Interesting. I think I probably mentally separate the information retrieval realm and the command execution realm more than makes sense for the interface. There’s no apparent reason that shouldn’t work based on what the user is given.

The only time I find Siri useful, or I should say ~potentially~ useful, is while driving text, call and to ask basic facts. The amount of times I've heard "I can't show you that right now" after basic questions is insane. I just stopped asking it questions. Recently I asked "what engine is in a 2022 f150". Trying it without Carplay now, it literally just displays text. It should be able to TTS those results. What on earth have they been working on if not things like that?

I know there at least used to be a setting to specify if you get a verbal or text response based on whether or not the phone is locked. Maybe that would get it to stop just displaying text?

I pretty much only use it when I can’t look at the phone so I’m not sure if it’s still there.

I have never been able to play music with Siri. Even something as simple as “play this specific album” gets completely bungled.

Interesting— I use that functionality constantly and listen to a wide variety of artists, some of them pretty obscure. Do you use Apple Music or another service?

I can think of one time recently where no matter how I prompted it to play an album for (decades old but probably triple platinum,) it kept playing some cardi b song with the band’s name in the title instead… but that’s probably like a 1 in 2000 request problem. Maybe its a genre thing?

It’s extremely hit or miss for me. Sometimes it works and I’m amazed. Other times it fails to play my main playlist that I’ve played 1000 times before.

Huh. I’d love to see what their UX testing looked like. It clearly missed someone doing what you’re doing with it, sadly.

Yea, I’m boggled. At this point Siri should be able to parse and understand a wide variety of forms of the same command, but it still seems to fail. This should be doable even without LLMs.

Yeah I can ask it to play specific editions of specific EPs named the same or similar thing to the albums or whatever and it rarely screws up. There’s got to be something significantly different in our approach. I wish I could test it.

‘Siri turn on torch’. Used to work, now all I get is “sorry, Torch isn’t available right now” this is at night when it is plugged in and I need to work as a nightlight to go open the bedroom door to let the dog in or out without blasting myself awake with the main phaser array next to my bed.

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