Five Useful Siri Shortcuts for iOS 12

[EdT]

So far, the only shortcut that looks to be useful at all, and not a duplication of existing Siri functionality (for me speaking American English), is the translate text function, which is itself very limited by Safari’s horrible text selection behavior. Also, I have the Google translate app, so...

I’m probably going to delete the app and forget about this “new iOS feature”.



If you’re in Apple’s tested speech range, Siri is very useful for extremely basic commands and statements. Go outside the most average vocabulary, though, and it looks as stupid as it actually is (entirely stupid; there’s no such thing as AI, just human-made, algorithms, scripts, and some occasional modifications of them via user input). Speech to text is abysmal for anything even slightly off the most average, or lowest common denominator.



Accent? Actually I think others already asked you this.

I was born and raised in Nebraska. Supposedly we have one of the most neutral accents in the US, and many news broadcasters were either born or trained in this region, from Kansas/Missouri to the south to the Dakotas and Minnesota in the north.

 

[manu chao]

If you’re in Apple’s tested speech range, Siri is very useful for extremely basic commands and statements. Go outside the most average vocabulary, though, and it looks as stupid as it actually is (entirely stupid; there’s no such thing as AI, just human-made, algorithms, scripts, and some occasional modifications of them via user input). Speech to text is abysmal for anything even slightly off the most average, or lowest common denominator.

I think that is an important part, Siri works ok if you say very common commands, if you say what it expects you to say. For example, setting a timer works 99% of the time, if anything it might very occasionally misunderstand the number [of minutes]. Though once Siri offered to me the option to search the web for: "Set a ten minute timer", but, hey, it got the speech-to-text part right.

What I find really discomforting with this Siri experience is not that it might misunderstand one word for another, but that it 'guesses' such a wide range of words when fed more or less the same pronunciation.

Accent? Actually I think others already asked you this.

I do have a slight accent but not one that ever really trips up a human listener.
(I know that wasn't a question for me, but it's certainly a possibly relevant point for my troubles with Siri.)