Your whole statement was basically your opinion about how you find Siri performs. You clearly cannot comprehend sarcasm ;-)
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Apple's Greg Joswiak on Siri: We Deliver a Personalized Experience Without Treating You as a Product
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Lol, no Apple is threating its customers as cows. Milk it till the last drop.
I guess I'll throw my hat into the ring and say that Siri has been pretty good for me, especially in the past couple of years. I really use it quite a bit. I would say I have about a 90% success rate, with the remaining split between Siri not understanding my diction in uncommon place/person names and the handsfree mic in my car being awful. That being said, when Siri does fail it is absolutely the worst thing in the world, at least in that moment.
I look forward to what improvements iOS 11 makes in Siri, especially with the cross-device machine learning.
I look forward to what improvements iOS 11 makes in Siri, especially with the cross-device machine learning.
That's Called discussion. Where we input our opinions, differences and agreements.And no, not everybody can comprehend sarcasm over the Internet based on text.
True, it doesn't sell actual private information - just very detailed demographic information.
Actually, iAds has been discontinued for awhile. And as far as I know, that program did not provide much demographic information to advertisers - which was one of the reasons, probably, why it didn't really take off.
The Apple Watch makes using Siri in the car a whole lot better. If you are listening to music, for example, when you tell the Watch to play something else, it will seamlessly start playing that music in the car. With the two vehicles I have had, using Siri meant you stopped hearing music when you used Siri with the vehicle's mic.
Siri works fine for me. We have Echo Dots in the house and they have their upsides, as well.
Our family is fully committed to Apple, and we love our Apple products. We are also happy that Apple doesn't see us as their product to monetise; this is a definite competitive advantage that makes also this portion of the Apple experience/infrastructure a premium component.
We value PRIVACY over Functionality (I have capitalised these as we prioritise them.)
But I would be remiss if I didn't say that we all think (without having benchmarked the competition) that Siri is a bit stupid and gets a lot wrong. We also think that the Deep Learning AI statements that Apple makes once or twice a year, don't seem to reflect our real world experience, i.e. we don't see where any of this has markedly improved the experience, and sometimes feels like Apple is just trying to keep those customers that are on the fence warm until the improvements can be delivered.
There are so many unattended things in much of the Apple default apps that should have been improved long ago. For instance:
- why can't i type a ZIP in Contacts, and see contacts populate both town and state info, or vice versa? This is very static info that would not need many personnel to keep current;
- why when I check "company" doesn't the default settings for phone, email, etc. change from "home"?
- why hasn't a task force worked to better harmonise iOS Settings and macOS System Preference panels (in as much as possible?) The Venn overlap is pretty great for quite a number of functions but not only are they inconsistent in icons, they don't even have the same names, i.e. "Text Replacement" in iOS and "Text" in macOS;
- why isn't find friends better integrated into Apple Maps? These two have many common as well as complimentary functions, and could generally be combined so that Find Friends has more info available to the user. Yet this hasn't happened.
The fact that these things were not solved, or better yet just attended to, years ago shows a lack of focus on these details of the user interface and no seeming commitment to incrementally improve the UI. In our experience, Siri suffers from the same lack of noticeable improvement.
Sending Joz out to bad-mouth partners that they dumped like two years ago seems rather, "any minute now" and rather tin-eared of Apple. When did Apple publicly bad-mouth somebody rather than take responsibility and show a commitment to fixing a problem? (In the Maps debacle, Tim held the team leadership responsible, but more importantly gave his commitment to fix it.) This departure from the "don't complain, don't explain, just fix it" approach seems pretty un-Apple like (and, the cocky "trivial pursuit" and cavalier slam kinda made me squirm as I read it).
p.s. I would also say that the fact the macOS can't recognise my 1000$ Thunderbolt display, and remember the manually entered settings (either "Default for Display" or "Screen Resolution", such that each user on our family Mac mini must reenter these setting almost ever time they login, and that two years of fruitless feedback and pleas via Feedback Assistant is a bit irksome and very Un-Apple "sweat the details" like too.
Finally, after all these complaints, I want to emphasise that we love Apple, and are very happy with the general direction of the corporation both product-wise and corporate-stewardship-wise, but there is huge potential for improvement in numerous small areas.
We value PRIVACY over Functionality (I have capitalised these as we prioritise them.)
But I would be remiss if I didn't say that we all think (without having benchmarked the competition) that Siri is a bit stupid and gets a lot wrong. We also think that the Deep Learning AI statements that Apple makes once or twice a year, don't seem to reflect our real world experience, i.e. we don't see where any of this has markedly improved the experience, and sometimes feels like Apple is just trying to keep those customers that are on the fence warm until the improvements can be delivered.
There are so many unattended things in much of the Apple default apps that should have been improved long ago. For instance:
- why can't i type a ZIP in Contacts, and see contacts populate both town and state info, or vice versa? This is very static info that would not need many personnel to keep current;
- why when I check "company" doesn't the default settings for phone, email, etc. change from "home"?
- why hasn't a task force worked to better harmonise iOS Settings and macOS System Preference panels (in as much as possible?) The Venn overlap is pretty great for quite a number of functions but not only are they inconsistent in icons, they don't even have the same names, i.e. "Text Replacement" in iOS and "Text" in macOS;
- why isn't find friends better integrated into Apple Maps? These two have many common as well as complimentary functions, and could generally be combined so that Find Friends has more info available to the user. Yet this hasn't happened.
The fact that these things were not solved, or better yet just attended to, years ago shows a lack of focus on these details of the user interface and no seeming commitment to incrementally improve the UI. In our experience, Siri suffers from the same lack of noticeable improvement.
Sending Joz out to bad-mouth partners that they dumped like two years ago seems rather, "any minute now" and rather tin-eared of Apple. When did Apple publicly bad-mouth somebody rather than take responsibility and show a commitment to fixing a problem? (In the Maps debacle, Tim held the team leadership responsible, but more importantly gave his commitment to fix it.) This departure from the "don't complain, don't explain, just fix it" approach seems pretty un-Apple like (and, the cocky "trivial pursuit" and cavalier slam kinda made me squirm as I read it).
p.s. I would also say that the fact the macOS can't recognise my 1000$ Thunderbolt display, and remember the manually entered settings (either "Default for Display" or "Screen Resolution", such that each user on our family Mac mini must reenter these setting almost ever time they login, and that two years of fruitless feedback and pleas via Feedback Assistant is a bit irksome and very Un-Apple "sweat the details" like too.
Finally, after all these complaints, I want to emphasise that we love Apple, and are very happy with the general direction of the corporation both product-wise and corporate-stewardship-wise, but there is huge potential for improvement in numerous small areas.
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Rather be treated like a product with functional AI than feeling like a tool hopelessly repeating things to Siri.
Right, Apple refused to give details on what kind of demographics they actually had as potential customers. Which meant that 1) advertisers were working in the blind as far as specifying valuable targets, and perhaps 2) Apple didn't have as great demographics as thought. You can't sell quality ad space if your audience is mostly teens playing games.
Now they're going for the money to be gotten from app search ads instead.
And so Apple is once again currently advertising some of the target demographics using personal info which Apple knows (or has guessed) from our iTunes account info, purchase history and location:
On the contrary, Apple sells access to us when they charge banks for letting us register our own cards on Apple Pay. In that case, we are the product being sold. Apple allows all the normal purchase info to flow to the banks, which banks find very valuable.
Apple also demands collated information on Apple Pay purchases to be regularly sent back from the banks, which was formerly proprietary information, and is a privacy issue that caused UK and other banks to pause signing up for a long time. This way Apple can cleverly claim they collect no info at time of sale themselves (which is not quite true, since they do collect at least the purchase location).
Apple also makes billions each year from selling Google access to us in the form of being primary search engine. We are absolutely the product being sold there.
Apple might not sell our info directly, but they sure pimp us out to others.
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Well, at least Siri isn't a Zombie, because it clearly lacks brains.
Seriously, it's the dumbest of the assistants, and while they've given it a new look, the pig is still dead.
Try creating a contact for a business, then 'Siri, call XXX'. She'll go search the web.
Ask her to check the temperature in a city nearby, and it'll give it to you for a city overseas. Ask for directions, and it tries to get you over the water too. Absolutely no location awareness whatsoever.
The old voice dialing feature was more reliable than Siri. Worse than useless - beyond frustrating.
Seriously, it's the dumbest of the assistants, and while they've given it a new look, the pig is still dead.
Try creating a contact for a business, then 'Siri, call XXX'. She'll go search the web.
Ask her to check the temperature in a city nearby, and it'll give it to you for a city overseas. Ask for directions, and it tries to get you over the water too. Absolutely no location awareness whatsoever.
The old voice dialing feature was more reliable than Siri. Worse than useless - beyond frustrating.
I appreciate Apple's attitude on this very much, even though I personally choose to not use Siri. There are plenty of alternatives if people don't care as much about privacy, but ultimately I'm sure Siri will improve to the point where people don't find it so lacking as they seem to now, and at that point Apple will have years(!) of established history that they care about this stuff, unlike their rivals.
I just tried all of these things and they worked as expected. Is my phone broken?
Agree, they are just ready to take 1 grand+ from all of their customers so this is them trying to play nice.
I hate how they say Siri is as accurate as google now. Siri does names horribly, and worst of all, the results just suck!
Google now has integrated it so well with google music, youtube, and google search. So let's say I believe Apple's PR lie that Siri is good at recognizing words, it sucks at doing anything useful with those words!
Google now has integrated it so well with google music, youtube, and google search. So let's say I believe Apple's PR lie that Siri is good at recognizing words, it sucks at doing anything useful with those words!
When Apple actually bought Siri they bought a product that was a good 3 years ahead of the competition - they then actually gimped the product for 3 or so years removing features then bringing it back as innovation.
Siri now is a good year or two behind its competition and their is zero excuse for it really.
The stuff google is coming out with is amazing really and they have created a product that is intergrated with all their products now - mail, maps , web searches ect in a very seamless way. Apple deffo need to up their game.
Apple seem to waste a **** load of money of everything these days , and not make the stuff they care about better.
Siri now is a good year or two behind its competition and their is zero excuse for it really.
The stuff google is coming out with is amazing really and they have created a product that is intergrated with all their products now - mail, maps , web searches ect in a very seamless way. Apple deffo need to up their game.
Apple seem to waste a **** load of money of everything these days , and not make the stuff they care about better.
I am constantly asking it to call my Wife at work, at mobile, on Speaker. I know car play is nice but my iPhone with Siri and Bluetooth Stereo is actually every nice. Even with multiple iPhone in the room my phone answers to "Hey Siri" instead of the others (might be the distance?). Finally I got a xmas gift last year for Google Home and we have to constantly unplug it. Anything triggers this thing. I enabled to acknowledge beep because it was constantly going off and wanted to see what we may have said to have it trigger. Well I guess my dog knows how to speak English or we have ghost that need to check the weather because this thing goes off in the middle of the night with no one in the room.
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I trust MS and Amazon more than Google. Given Apple's track record on Privacy I trust them as well. It's the reason iAds failed. Also I remember when the whole fiasco came out that Apple is recording every wifi and cell tower hit by your phone and Congress had a hearing. During the hearing, Eric Schmidt said just like Apple, we also capture this data. Later he admitted to use that data to sell it. Which Apple responded by stating that unlike Google we do not sell this information. But use it to further enhance our services.
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I agree with you on the Maps/Find Friends issue and haven't had the TB Display issues you have. But Zip Codes is not a "static" item. In fact, in the US there are monthly changes. I know I have to maintain a database of them. Also while Apple might have a source for this data, they would probably have to pay a per unit license to have it on each iPhone. DB is about 60MB but you can definitely trim it down 10MB. What I am really saying is I really hate Zipcodes! I wouldn't wish it on any one to maintain it. Google with all it's funds can't keep up to date with changes either.
Perhaps the deeper issue here is that all of this is merely an illusion of privacy. After all, everything is passing through an ISP, and unless you're running your own VPN, you really can't be sure what's going where for permanent storage.
So, there could always be an option of not "letting it all hang out" online –and showing some restraint proportional to one's tolerance for any given data being harvested, no matter what you believe regarding privacy; and using effective tools such as Google Translate, Maps, etc.
Unless Apple is somehow offloading Siri's "learning/training patterns" onto IBM's Deep Learning computing, it is simply too late to catch up to Google's superior AI. But maybe it's better to have a team rather than a Walled Monopoly of service.
So, there could always be an option of not "letting it all hang out" online –and showing some restraint proportional to one's tolerance for any given data being harvested, no matter what you believe regarding privacy; and using effective tools such as Google Translate, Maps, etc.
Unless Apple is somehow offloading Siri's "learning/training patterns" onto IBM's Deep Learning computing, it is simply too late to catch up to Google's superior AI. But maybe it's better to have a team rather than a Walled Monopoly of service.
It's hard to say if I have noticed any improvements with Siri, being Siri is server-based, not iOS-based embedded. So the results vary. Here's how I divide Siri based off my review. Right now as I'm typing to you, I'm using dictation and it's fairly accurate for the most part without myself having to correct any grammatical errors. If I ask Siri general questions about a movie showtime or what's the nearest coffeeshop, I get fairly accurate results.
But there are times where I ask Siri a question or the definition of something, and she struggles to decipher or understand the word correctly, even if I am talking slowly and pronouncing my words accurately. So there are room for improvements, and this is coming from somebody that use the Siri on a consistent basis.
But I believe I mentioned this to you before, but iOS 11 is more interesting to me regarding the improvements with Siri than anything else. Because I believe that will be indicative of the HomePod ultimately be relying on the user experience. Time will tell.
But Apple are working hard at making Siri tell game of thrones jokes! What else do you want?
2010 flashback alert!
Apple has since had a strategic change in direction after realizing that user privacy would be a unique value-added feature for their customers. Google on the other hand has quadrupled down on selling out their users.
I'd be happy if Siri actually worked.
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People do understand what it means for Apples privacy policy.
You pay directly for Apple, you don't with Google. People make a choice which they are happy with.
I use it and complain all the time wishing siri would actually work.
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If it worked more often, voice is actually more natural than using a keyboard to perform a task.