Is anyone else an avid iPhone user, yet also someone who never uses Siri? I've used an iPhone exclusively for the past 8 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've used Siri. Interestingly, the one person I know who loves using Siri is my 70yr old dad.
I've given up asking her arbitrary questions - the other day I asked what the weather was like in Sydney. (I live in Australia, so the context is really obvious). She told me what the weather was like at "Sidney's tool shed" - wherever that is.
But I use siri daily for things like:
- Setting and stopping alarms and timers: ("Hey siri - set alarm for tomorrow morning at 9:25" / when the alarm goes off: "Hey siri stop")
- Turning on and off my lights. Its a delight every time to say "hey siri goodnight" when I go to bed and see all the lights in the house turn off.
Siri handles this fine on my new phone from the opposite end of the globe. This seems to support my suspicion that they ship increasingly less sophisticated Siris to increasingly older phones. Siri on my 6S Plus before this became almost useless once they switched to on-device processing. It's also much better at identifying objects in photos for searches.
I'm querying siri on a homepod, not a phone. And I just checked - she still answers with a weather report near "Sidney Tools". (Its currently raining and 17 degrees C, if you're wondering.)
I have a running theory that you can tell how long any FAANG bug will stick around by just imagining a 25 year old tech dude in the bay area. If Dave the bay area tech dude will never encounter the bug, you're in for a bad time.
For example, google maps used to give terrible directions at roundabouts (traffic circles). That makes sense because there's no traffic circles in the bay area. All the people who could fix the problem weren't aware there was a problem at all. Dave is terrified of roundabouts, so of course it took about a decade for directions at roundabouts to improve.
A corollary of this is that modern software works well proportionally to how closely your setup matches that of the average bay area tech dude. Everything works best if you have a new phone (preferably an iPhone), fast computer and you speak english. Woe be to you if your computer is old and slow, or you use a right-to-left language, if you're blind or you have a bad internet connection.
Macos feels laggy and slow on a slow internet connection because of course it does. Bay area tech bros are never in that situation! What would Dave know about slow internet?
I run into some things like this in Georgia. I wanted to know when the humidity and temperature were low enough to be safe. It's always nice in that part of California, so Siri has no concept of humidity and temperature. It just throws out a general weather report. The weather app at least has graphs for UV index, humidity, and temperature now. I think it must have come by way of Dark Sky.
This isn't just a SV thing, though. I downloaded a well-regarded weather app from a country in Europe that has pretty consistent humidity. The app didn't even show humidity. People have trouble seeing outside their bubble. SV just happens to have outsized influence, for now.
No kidding! She obviously knew what was wanted, but instead of doing her fing job, she tells you how to do it yourself. She doesn't like when I tell her to F herself. I hope some of those recordings end up with Apple training.
May they be hedging against a vulnerability where a malicious person with similar enough voice closes some crucial app in a sticky situation. It's not as harmless than setting reminders/alarms which I use Siri for.
yeah like in that movie when the Bomb Squad is using Pocket Bomb Defuser Pro 2023 and the bomber shouts over the loudspeakers "Siri, Turn off Bomb Defuser Pro" and then everyone was sad.
A moody teenager rips a poster of Jobs off their bedroom wall.
Siri's performance and quality seems to depend a lot on the on-board ML cores since it switched to on-device. It was basically unusable on my 6S Plus with its early ML cores, and now it's great on the 14 Pro Max I replaced it with. It seems like they ship a Siri to match the device capability.
I had the idea that Siri could only recognize "Hey Siri", and after that it would offload the task to Apple's cloud. If it's offline now, it would be great, but I don't see how the ML cores would help. Speech-To-Text is practically solved for most devices, after that you're interacting with a regular chat bot.
All I know is what I experienced: it got less reliable with the switch and stopped handling stuff it handled perfectly before, then got better with a newer phone.
I use Siri to set a timer. That's it. And I do it by holding my power button to activate her.
My only other use of Siri usually involved phrases like "stop", "go away", "close", "fucking close!", "you stupid fcking * ** close the **** thing" when Siri would pop up out of nowhere and interrupt whatever I was actually doing. I had it turned off, but occasionally somehow it's back on, listening.
Other actual attempts at using it have been no better than 50% effective, so it wasn't worth the trouble. And I was speaking very clearly and articulately.
I've observed a friend (a Googler who had Google-fied his house) have frequent useless conversations with the Google assistant, so maybe 50% is the best you can hope for. No experience with Alexa, but I'd be too scared to even turn it on; I might end up with three refrigerators delivered the next day.
Same here. Even that simple task (setting a timer) only has about a 75% success rate for me. The other 25% it spins for 30 seconds then says "hmm something went wrong". Trying for anything more complex, even playing a song or album, is just asking for trouble. I honestly can't believe how bad Siri is despite years of development.
I do have an older iPhone 10 and maybe it's just not up to the task of running Siri? But if so they should disable it rather than put on this extremely amateur feeling show.
For what it's worth we have an Echo Dot in the house and I find it to be both orders of magnitude more responsive and more likely to actually do what I asked for. No unwanted refrigerators have arrived as of yet.
I use Type to Siri on my Mac; all I ever use it for is "Play [song]". 70-80% of the time it goes: "something went wrong..."
When I try typing "Play [song] on repeat", it never understands that; it plays it, but not on repeat.
There's zero excuse due to mishearing me, since I'm typing everything. Siri is just defective, and I think it's a great measure of how dysfunctional Apple and poorly-run is. Why are all of Apple's AI and online-service efforts amateur hour?
My only usage of it is as a push-button dictionary/translator, "define x", "how do you say x in Spanish". For every other use I've found it extremely limited, you have to ask the right questions, otherwise it defaults to a web search on my wife's phone, even if she's not in the room.
How, after all these years, is it still so stunted? There are Telegram bots with better interaction.
> "How do you say Thank You in Dutch?" => "I can't translate into Dutch yet."
Oh no, that's awful. I mostly translate between Spanish and English, it didn't occur to me that Siri was less capable than Apple's own Translator app, it makes no sense.
I use Siri all the time and am half your dads age.
“Get directions to the nearest gas station.”, “What’s the score of the Giant’s game?”, “Play Master of Puppets”, “What is 4’3” in centimeters?” And many, many more.
Man, I used to love using Siri, until I had a daughter and named her "Sarah"
big mistake. Turns out I say "Hey Sarah" a hundred times a day, and all my iDevices pipe up and simultaneously say "Yeah?" "WHAT'S UP" "HEY OVER HERE" "Hi it's me Siri what do you need?"
In case you are earnestly somehow unaware, Sarah is among the most popular feminine given names of all time, with Hebrew origin but also popular with Christians, Muslims, nonreligious people in areas influenced by those religions, and in just about every country and culture influenced by any of those. It's hard to even think of a culture which doesn't use the name Sarah in some form; I'm drawing a complete blank; where are you from? Alpha Centauri?
You are not alone. I've been using an iPhone for over a decade now. I've had Siri turned off the entire time. I have never turned it on. I do not now, or ever, want a "voice assistant" or any technology that listens to me and tries to understand what I want by listening to me. I want technology that does exactly what I tell it to do and nothing more.
Siri is a better option than the alternative "voice assistants" on the market, but they're all bad in my book, and I don't want any of them.
I briefly enabled so I could text mum to say when I was nearly home. Avoids sneaking a traffic light text. Turns out it was waaaaaaaay more distracting and time consuming to get siri to text a single word, so back into the box it went
I switched from Android a few years ago because my company gives out iphones as a perk. I used "ok google" extensively, and loved it. It was incredibly good at answering obscure questions and doing things like navigating or playing a song. It would do what I wanted almost every time, even if I was trying a new command for the first time.
I try to use Siri for the same things, but she suuuuuuucks. If I ask her to play a song, 9 out of 10 times it will do something idiotic- like I say "hey siri play tears in heaven on spotify", she might reply "now playing tears in heaven by a shitty kazoo cover band". If I say "navigate to the closest olive garden", it would say "navigating to olive garden corporate headquarters, estimated travel time 43 hours 12 minutes." But never mind, I can see the olive garden I was looking for, it's at the end of the street I'm on.
These are artificial examples because I can't remember specifics right now, but trust me - the real examples were just as dumb.
She's great at setting timers or alarms though! And I can reliably use her to pause, skip, or adjust volume when I'm showering or something.
I use Siri for setting timers and reminders. It's pretty good at parsing numbers. Other than that, It hasn't been very reliable for me. Apple really needs to overhaul Siri's intelligence.
My personal use as someone his 30s is mostly as a kitchen timer with a HomePod mini (not my phone), to turn on/off lights, and to occasionally toss things onto a to-do list.
My dad on the other hand loves his full size HomePod stereo pair and uses them frequently, almost entirely for playing music with voice commands. I think there are other things he might find it useful for but I haven't shown him those yet.
I have never enabled Siri on any device. Precisely for fear of this kind of shit, or the ones where humans are listening to the recordings that are obviously being made, and all of the other logical conclusions one can reach on how this can be abused.
Just like HDD failures, it is not a question of if but when.
I have never even setup Siri. Sometimes I've been tempted to enable it so I can say, "Siri, call 911!" if I'm assaulted or injured on the trail. I doubt it would help, but it's occasionally disconcerting when my phone isn't quickly accessible.
In my experiences working on voice OS, it's boom or bust depending on the user. Some people use it rarely if ever and some people live by it, and there's little in between. I think it makes sense in most cases to view voice commands as an accessibility feature.
Siri killer apps for me are asking for factoids via my watch, and opening my garage door as I approach while driving (my building uses an app that requires multiple taps + swipes to open the garage door, using Siri makes it palatable.)
Are you using proprietary garage door software? Would live to have any better kind of integration there so any setup details that aren't crazy specific to some manufacturer would be interesting
Not the parent, but I use Shelly devices flashed with the shelly-homekit firmware and I can control them with the HomeKit app or Siri.
I haven't bothered yet to add a open/close sensor so the current open state is lost if I use the remote. I have to invert the actions when this happens. Annoying but I only need to use it this way occasionally.
My apartment building recently switched to an access control system called Brivo. It replaced a keyfob + garage door opener system with an app. Overall not the greatest as it's now difficult to get into the building if you leave your phone at home.
My "integration" with Siri is to set up an iOS shortcut and use Siri to trigger it.
For sure. I stood in line for the original iPhone, owned every model (except the 5C) up through the 6, then an SE, X, and now an 11 Pro since it came out. I played around with Siri when it debuted, but didn't use it much. I turned it off at some point (I think it was when Apple was catching grief for keeping recordings or something like that) and haven't missed it. I'm not against it especially -- it just never really became part of my life.
My colleagues and I had a moment of fun somewhere in remote Iceland, offroading on the way to a glacier. On an iPhone 3G, we were able to ask trivia questions and get pretty useful responses.
Aside from setting a timer, I've not seen Siri do anything more useful in 9 years. You haven't missed anything.
My trust of what Siri is capable of is laughably low but I do use it for reminders ("Remind me on X day...", "Remind me in X hours...", "Remind me when I get home...") and for timers. Occasionally I'll use it for unit conversions but I usually use Alexa for that since I'm in my kitchen often when I use that and it's just right there. Other than that I don't use it.
I only use it to set timers and it sucks at that half the time, not even going to bother with the faff of doing anything more complex. It's quicker to just do it myself as I'll probably have to unlock the screen anyway.
"Siri, timer, one hour thirty"
"Timers can't be set for a time of day, so I set your Timer alarm for 1:30"
I was that way for a long time, but the Apple TV remote got me using it and I now occasionally do use it on my iPhone, mainly while driving to play music on reply to texts. Definitely has come a long way and is useful, one of my friends never types texts anymore and just dictates through Siri.
My mother loves using Siri, she always uses it when she wants to look things up. It seems quite useful for people who aren't proficient at typing quickly, easier to ask Siri.
The first day i asked her for the weather, songs and alarms.
The second day i turing tested her, asked it philosophical questions and insulted it the worst way.
Yes, that was pretty much it.
Ironically, she will complain if you cuss at her and call her names, but she won't turn herself off. And when she pops up without my request, and I want her to go off, it seems there's no verbal way to make her go away... even verbally abusing her.
iPhone user since 2009. I used Siri for about a month when it first came out because I really liked hearing a British man's voice said "SSSSHedule" to me instead of "skedule", but then I learned it was sending all audio to the cloud and noped out.
