Wow, very interesting! Just last night, while going to bed, I noticed that the voices of my living room HomePod (Australian female) bedroom HomePod (British female) sounded a bit different than they did earlier in the day. I had recently unplugged them, so I didn’t think twice. After reading this article it all makes sense now.
So I guess I can report that in some parts of the US, the new voices have started to roll out.
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That's all well and good... but it boggles my mind that seemingly simple directions yield the proverbial, "I can't do that, Dave." response from Siri, on my iPhone.
* Hey Siri, lock my iPhone. (When you notice that someone has your iPhone and is rifling through your personal stuff without permission, for instance.)
* Hey Siri, turn off my iPhone. ("No Siri... I don't need directions on how to turn off my iPhone; I wanted you to do it.")
* Hey Siri, read this webpage to me. (When your eyes are otherwise occupied by something more important, such as driving.)
* Hey Siri, open google.com in Chrome. ("No Siri... that's Safari. I said Chrome." Same issue with Firefox, obviously.)
* Hey Siri, open Notes and take dictation for me. (All of the necessary sub-components are right there waiting to be invoked... it's basically just the front door itself that's closed! Am I the only person who wants to do this -- and not pay Dragon's hefty price for the privilege?)
* Hey Siri, do any damned thing period when I'm off the grid. (Yeah... apparently that's just never going to happen, because Siri lives entirely in the cloud.)
"All-encompassing life assistant"? Yeah... not so much.
A few of your gripes don’t hold water.
For instance, asking Siri to lock your phone or turn it off could have catastrophic results until secure, single voice recognition and security is implemented. And those things are easily done on a Mac or iOS device via Find iPhone, which was way ahead of its time when it came out. Having Siri do security related actions via an insecure voice command makes zero sense.
I agree that asking Siri to read a page would be nice. But there are pretty simple ways to have Siri read you a web page in the Accesibility Settings until this feature comes to Siri. Which I’m sure it will.
If you ask Siri to open Chrome she will do it. And Google is already the default search engine for Chrome .
And as far as Notes, are you kidding? I say “Siri, take a note...” several times a day, and she creates a note and writes down every word.
Do other personal assistants like Alexa and Google work when they aren’t connected to the internet? I can’t imagine they do, but I honestly don’t know.
Siri/Himepod have grown leaps and bounds Over the past year. If my phone slips under the couch I can now ask my HomePod “hey Siri, where is my phone?” and it pings it for me. Multiple alarms and timers can now be set. And the Siri Shortcuts app has been a massive change for the better. I’m not aware of anything from Google or Alexa that allows this level of customization. The improvements keep coming, and the gap between assistants is quickly narrowing. A recent study with 800 quarries showed Siri moving up from 4th place in 2017 to 2nd place in 2018, behind only Google. I’m guessing that WWDC this year will bring about an ever more massive change in the Siri ecosystem.
