How about we talk about the elephant in the room? Perhaps Siri is never going to be (shock horror) great?
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Apple's Greg Joswiak: Siri Wasn't Engineered to Be Trivial Pursuit
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Siri mostly gets confused with songs and band names for me, but honestly, some band names have odd spellings and songs with titles in other languages. Siri's been improving, and I expect them to flip the switch on even more improvements soon.
Straight up -- once you use Google Assistant on a daily basis, it's hard to take Siri seriously ever again. It is such a crying shame that we cannot install Google Assistant on iOS in place of Siri, since it works like a dream on Android.
Even if Google Assistant doesn't know an answer, it will pull a paragraph out of its search results and read it to you as if it were straight from Wolfram Alpha or something. It's remarkable. Then you look at Siri, which gives the irritating, "Here's what I found:" list of Bing search results.
I can't speak for Alexa or Cortana, as I haven't used either, perhaps someone can chime in on that.
Even if Google Assistant doesn't know an answer, it will pull a paragraph out of its search results and read it to you as if it were straight from Wolfram Alpha or something. It's remarkable. Then you look at Siri, which gives the irritating, "Here's what I found:" list of Bing search results.
I can't speak for Alexa or Cortana, as I haven't used either, perhaps someone can chime in on that.
Why does the article attribute a sex to Siri ('Siri is powered by deep learning and AI, technology that has much improved her speech...') In many languages the user can chose the gender of Siri, my Siri talks with a male voice!
Siri is actually a very useful tool despite people on this forum moaning about it all the time, the fact is that Siri is not going to be your friend. If you don't have friends to talk to, don't blame a virtual assistant.
Siri has come a long way over the years and I use it on a daily basis, my wish would be a Siri that can use several languages at the same time, as I am multi lingual so my music collection is in several languages which des not work well with Siri (and certainly even worse with the more language limited competition).
Siri is actually a very useful tool despite people on this forum moaning about it all the time, the fact is that Siri is not going to be your friend. If you don't have friends to talk to, don't blame a virtual assistant.
Siri has come a long way over the years and I use it on a daily basis, my wish would be a Siri that can use several languages at the same time, as I am multi lingual so my music collection is in several languages which des not work well with Siri (and certainly even worse with the more language limited competition).
...that has much improved her speech recognition capabilities...
Her?! I prefer a female voice on Siri but the gf prefers a male voice. How has the disembodied Siri become a 'she'.
Set timer, four minutes.
For how long?
Where's the 'deep learning' there? Can't Siri guess that if it perceives 'four' in relation to 'minutes' that it makes sense at least. But if it perceives 'for' then it doesn't. It's been like this for at least two years. Wouldn't it make more sense to just set my timer for four minutes rather than assume that I asked it to set a timer with the word 'minutes' in the sentence but I omitted any reference to numbers?
But if you say "set timer three minutes" and it sets the timer correctly and it does this many times it still gets 'set timer four minutes' wrong.
Not complaining about Siri, just pointing out the the 'deep learning' appears to be about as deep as an oil slick.
Her?! I prefer a female voice on Siri but the gf prefers a male voice. How has the disembodied Siri become a 'she'.
Set timer, four minutes.
For how long?
Where's the 'deep learning' there? Can't Siri guess that if it perceives 'four' in relation to 'minutes' that it makes sense at least. But if it perceives 'for' then it doesn't. It's been like this for at least two years. Wouldn't it make more sense to just set my timer for four minutes rather than assume that I asked it to set a timer with the word 'minutes' in the sentence but I omitted any reference to numbers?
But if you say "set timer three minutes" and it sets the timer correctly and it does this many times it still gets 'set timer four minutes' wrong.
Not complaining about Siri, just pointing out the the 'deep learning' appears to be about as deep as an oil slick.
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Try it again when you have iOS 11. I am running the public beta and it is faster than Alexa when it comes to turning on and off Hue lights. I think they made some big improvements. I used to have issues asking for Siri to play albums by Chicago (as one example). It would take me to maps. It now works properly when I say "Play the Chicago three album." I have never had issues setting reminders or alarms with it.
Siri still has disadvantages compared to Alexa, though. The fact that its "skills" are limited to a select group of apps makes it less useful for a lot of things I use Alexa for...TuneIn Radio, SiriusXM, SimpleControl, Plex, J River, etc. Apple has to decide whether they want to open it up or not. Heck, even if Apple just opened Siri up to work with Airplay, it would be very useful for my needs around the house.
I must be the 5%, cause Siri is utterly unusable for me.
I already posted this, but I'll post it again:
Naturally screwing s*** up since 2011.
Naturally screwing s*** up since 2011.
I tried to show off Siri to my new father in law (a few years ago):
Me: "Siri, call my wife".
Siri: "Which wife"
My father in law: "TWhuaaaat"?
-1 Siri
are you using iOS 11 i just asked siri to lay my recently added music and it worked fine. as far as setting a reminder for the past - that doesn't and shouldn't work - the time on your screen says 1 - i assume in the afternoonI would be glad if a dog barked at me in place of Siri's "natural voice" if it were 10% more intelligent than what Siri is today. The most pathetic piece of crap ever maintained by Apple.
The way this comes across to me... it's like a cleverly written PR piece, obtained directly from Apple, defending Siri and trying to spin the reader's mind into believing that Siri is on par, in general, with Alexa and Cortana. The quote from Joswiak just sounds arrogant. It also makes him sound like a bit of a smartass that's making an excuse for a poorly managed product he was "in charge of" for longer than he should have been. All of us here know that Siri is far from being on par with either Alexa or Cortana at this point in time. If you've tried either of the other two, you know firsthand what I'm talking about.
Who writes this stuff, anyway? I suspect it's either someone at Apple... or someone that's being paid by Apple. The "Reality Distortion Field" lives, maybe? Cleverly written... but not quite clever enough to hide the true agenda and who is behind it. With "HomePod" just around the corner... why not bolster some confidence in Siri amongst your biggest mouthpieces and true believers? Right, Apple?
Who writes this stuff, anyway? I suspect it's either someone at Apple... or someone that's being paid by Apple. The "Reality Distortion Field" lives, maybe? Cleverly written... but not quite clever enough to hide the true agenda and who is behind it. With "HomePod" just around the corner... why not bolster some confidence in Siri amongst your biggest mouthpieces and true believers? Right, Apple?
Unfortunately, a lot of people judge it based on its behavior a few years ago. It has been improved since then.
Do you have travel time enabled (Calendar > Default Alert Times > Time to Leave)? Do you have the address for your appointment et into the calendar? Both of those things are required.
Actually, I just said it and I know a great many others who feel the same way.
Hopefully, one day you will understand that your experience is YOUR'S. Not everyone has the same.
Good luck.
These trivial tasks work reasonably well when constructed this way. It's very mundane though and not always faster or the intended result. I've learned to talk like this so I can get some milage out of Siri when I can't touch my device. But I'm not a robot and don't want to talk in specific way so the software can parse it better. That's not Apple and that's not how a human computer interaction should work. It's also not how Siri is marketed.
Apple markets Siri in a completely different way and that's where the expectations do not line up at all. Google is better most of the time, but also fails in spectacular ways. Voice recognition and language processing simply isn't fully there yet, and the products will always feel beta. It's a marketing feature for now, you have to have it (check samsung, check the AR features) even if it sucks.
Spinning the negative perceptions by retro-actively changing what Siri should be isn't going to fix this. They may want to change some of the older commercials that use Siri like trivial pursuit.
And hell yes, I want my voice assistant to also be trivial pursuit. I love the idea of an all-knowing, all-capable voice activated AI, but the tech is just not there yet. Not by a long shot.
Siri can be very frustrating at times, but at least some of her limitations are due to the way Apple handles your privacy. Whereas other services (such as Google) are building a massive database on everything about you to give you more relevant queries, Apple is trying to find ways to do this without storing any of that data outside of your device.
Apple is very often slow about these things, and the reason why is because they spend a huge amount of time thinking about how things should work, and then trying to build out the infrastructure to support it. Many of the upgrades in the next OS are merely laying a framework for these upgrades, some of which we won't see until iOS 12 and macOS 10.14.
Whenever Apple makes a seemingly stupid change to the way something works, my experience has been that I see the reasoning behind it two years later. First they get people to do it a different way, then they remove the old way entirely and give you the new way.
Let me put it to you this way: Apple spends billions of dollars experimenting, testing, and designing these things. Do you really think Apple isn't aware of every single failed Siri request? They know what doesn't work, and the reason why they haven't fixed it is because the way things are currently built doesn't work the way you think it does.
All that being said, Siri still seems woefully lacking compared to other services, and Apple needs to stop playing catch up and start finding ways to really be innovative with what she can do.
Apple is very often slow about these things, and the reason why is because they spend a huge amount of time thinking about how things should work, and then trying to build out the infrastructure to support it. Many of the upgrades in the next OS are merely laying a framework for these upgrades, some of which we won't see until iOS 12 and macOS 10.14.
Whenever Apple makes a seemingly stupid change to the way something works, my experience has been that I see the reasoning behind it two years later. First they get people to do it a different way, then they remove the old way entirely and give you the new way.
Let me put it to you this way: Apple spends billions of dollars experimenting, testing, and designing these things. Do you really think Apple isn't aware of every single failed Siri request? They know what doesn't work, and the reason why they haven't fixed it is because the way things are currently built doesn't work the way you think it does.
All that being said, Siri still seems woefully lacking compared to other services, and Apple needs to stop playing catch up and start finding ways to really be innovative with what she can do.
Siri sounds beautiful, but she's as dumb as a brick... I have to repeat myself often, she gives me the wrong feedback, ect. Apple should focus on making her smarter than the competition, not blame customers of not understanding the underlying technology or fluff off criticisms with trivial soundbites.