What does Siri Evaluation do? Is there a huge department of people whose work is to tell Apple that Siri sucks?
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Apple Relocating Siri Evaluation Team in San Diego to Austin
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They are responsible for reviewing Siri recordings in various languages, including Hebrew, English, Spanish, and Arabic, finds itself in the midst of Apple's larger AI strategy. They might be seeing their careers going like telecom workers saw the IP phones obsolete their usefulness.
hey Siri
now: Siri
future: Siri y'all
or maybe they moved to Austin, Steve Austin the "6 Mil$ mans"
now: Siri
future: Siri y'all
or maybe they moved to Austin, Steve Austin the "6 Mil$ mans"
hm, I'll put the food and entertainment in Austin over San Diego any day.
But that's exactly why this move is so bad for employees — the upsides of San Diego are completely different than those of Austin, I doubt anyone who actually chose to live in San Diego (with their temperate weather and great schools) would be any happier in ATX than a hard-partying Texan would be to move to a frankly milquetoast citylet in CA.
Bad move. Rather than further consolidating a function like speech recognition they’d be better splitting it up into regional teams each with an ear for local dialects, accents and idioms.
To understand your customers your have to live where your customers live.
To understand your customers your have to live where your customers live.
Well Austin does have the famous 6th street and great bbq 🍖 Tesla also moved there headquarters there as well. Austin is not a bad move
If there currently is such a department, their jobs should be relocated to Venus. The number of strange and long-lasting Siri regressions over the years is cause for outright termination.
You think if Siri didn't understand something, it could ask you to repeat your input instead of dumb non-related answers. That is what badly needs to change.
I’ll take the Pacific Ocean; quick access to dozens of prime locales; and staying on the West Coast to dozens of other cultural options, to anywhere in Texas seven days a week.
This is super misleading conclusion/comparison and not at all the same thing. One is voluntary quitting (if you’re unwilling remain employed and move) and the other is “we hired too many people during covid, and aren’t doing as well as we thought, so.. sorry”
Translation they don’t want to pay CA tech rates and going to Austin as it is cheaper.
I have a feeling this is going to work out about as well as when Tesla tried to do similar. Anything major they move will be back in CA eventually.
I mean, it requires moving from California to Texas, so moving from poop to crap. Pretty even trade.
Austin is actually a pretty nice city, but if you told me to move from California to Texas to keep my job, I'd quit on the spot.
Then again, we Siri users might be better off if every person on this team went to work on something else, because they're certainly not cutting it in their current role of improving the responses to Siri queries. Siri is quite useful, but it should be significantly more useful by now--even after this much time it still routinely fails to generate useful responses to relatively simple, relatively common, well-formed queries that it correctly heard the text of. At this point, it should work significantly better than it actually does.
Then again, we Siri users might be better off if every person on this team went to work on something else, because they're certainly not cutting it in their current role of improving the responses to Siri queries. Siri is quite useful, but it should be significantly more useful by now--even after this much time it still routinely fails to generate useful responses to relatively simple, relatively common, well-formed queries that it correctly heard the text of. At this point, it should work significantly better than it actually does.
Today I learnt that Siri has a quality control team. I guess it won’t be hard to relocate two people to Austin. They can hire a car and make a road trip of it.
The Siri evaluation team? Do they play ping pong all day?
Suggested reading
Meta is back in the office three days a week, as WFH continues to die
The company that said it was all in on remote work is now bringing everyone back to the office.
www.theverge.com
Even the companies building tech to enable remote work are bailing on the concept. Zoom, maybe the company most benefitted by the rise of remote work, recently told staff that they’re expected to be in the office two days a week if they live within 50 miles of an office. Meta, of course, is investing billions in the metaverse and specifically the idea that the office of the future may be inside your Quest headset. (Now with legs!) But like so many other companies, it’s deciding that the best way to build the remote-everything future is to do it in person.
Try talking to it with a Texas accent, I guess.
I can already tell you how this works out. Southern California is littered with a ton of small space startups. It started after they wrapped up development on Apollo I think, companies were like "ok now we're going to have ya'll move to <insert random state in the south here>. So if you want to keep your job, get packing!"
Most engineers told them to go F themselves and started their own companies. The ones that succeeded grew and got bought out by those companies. Then eventually, history repeats itself.
It's funny because I know at least one guy who founded 2 different space startups because of this lol.
Hey Siri, relocate your team to Texas.
I've relocated my team to Tajikistan.
I've relocated my team to Tajikistan.
If this article said that the team consisted of two people, I'd believe it, although I'd think they were slacking a bit.Today I learnt that Siri has a quality control team. I guess it won’t be hard to relocate two people to Austin. They can hire a car and make a road trip of it.
The fact that it says explicitly there are 120 people on the team is what you'd expect, but leads me to ask what the heck they're doing all day.
Or maybe it's not their fault--maybe they dutifully go through the incoming data and identify the problems, write them up, then the dev team ignores the reports and does nothing.
That "voluntary quitting" is more like an ultimatum. Uproot you (and your family's) life for a chance to keep your job.
Nobrainer. Lower wages, lower taxes, more people that need a job, any job. Most of this department is not relocating, so it's a way to lay off a lot of people, that will be replaced by lower income workers. Guess Apple is no different from any other extortionate tech co.