Gurman: Apple Working On Revamped Siri Experience That Doesn't Require 'Hey Siri' Trigger Phrase

[compwiz1202]

It sucks that CarPlay only works with Siri enabled, otherwise i would ditch that crap assistant completely.

I don't remember her ever failing in the car. She's just utterly worthless with HomePod

 

[compwiz1202]

You joke, but really, if something wants to live up to the promise of what these digital assistants claimed they were, they would understand the endless array of things we could call them.

And you know, they would both give the correct answer and actually play on how we had invoked them coming back with "Oi, it's 42, you hear?"

But Siri is utterly useless and braindead. As it is:

1 - She doesn't know you've invoked her.
2 - She wouldn't understand the question if she did know you were talking.
3 - She'll give an incorrect response.
4 - There won't be anything amusing about the response at all. It'll be the same maddening canned crap she always gives.

Well, and also, for everytime she does that, there will be ten times you didn't mean to invoke her but she'll randomly say something.

At least sometimes I learn some feature. I asked for lights on/off and she said she would keep logging to a minimum

 

[Tagbert]

Wasn't there a fourth rule in the prequels? I was so young when I read that whole thing.

There were originally 3 laws of robotics in Asimov’s stories.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The extended Asimov stories introduced the zeroth law “a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”

 

[compwiz1202]

I don't use Siri at all but accidentally launch it on the keyboard as it is a permanent key on my Touch Bar. It would be great to eliminate it. No call up phrase, doesn't this mean it will listen all the time at everything without being called up?

I think she will be always listen more with a phrase. She has to listen for Hey, Siri constantly.

 

[compwiz1202]

I don't use Siri at all but accidentally launch it on the keyboard as it is a permanent key on my Touch Bar. It would be great to eliminate it. No call up phrase, doesn't this mean it will listen all the time at everything without being called up?

I think she will be always listen more with a phrase. She has to listen for Hey, Siri constantly.

Wow, I’m honestly impressed and absolutely sure that it will be “one more thing” during the coming WWDC. 😝

For every five requests, Siri will recite a "short" ad

 

[compwiz1202]

Past two days it has been rotten, usually pretty good for all I use it for .
”hey siri turn on plug” , get plug not responding or mmmm working on it.
On the iPad it worked ok, back to normal today working well.

That's one of the most annoying is the working on it for a simple task like toggling lights

 

[compwiz1202]

I thought people already stopped pretending like they enjoy using Siri.

On a more serious note, conceptually, Siri and I suppose a lot of other voice assistants are really trapped in the past. They are mostly speech recognition + some more traditional NLP to map whatever was spoken to a set of tasks it can perform. All of that is (at least last time I checked) still extremely constrained, it lacks actual understanding of context beyond a few "tricks" it can do and it can't really improvise.

The more modern massive NLP models I've seen can perform much, much better than this. Models like GPT-3 can actually remember fairly long context, have excellent understanding of prompts and they can be taught to code. I always thought the future of voice/text assistants will be that: you give them fairly unconstrained (not recklessly of course) access to APIs and a scripting language and basically tell them what you need to do. I imagine things like "Can you check out the staff page of company X and give me all the names of the people working with AI?" and it will access a browser in the background, navigate the company staff page, read it and spit out the names of those people. To my understanding, it can even understand all kinds of APIs to use applications, say Microsoft Office. "Can you replace every date in this spreadsheet with tomorrow's date?" and it will do that as well.

I take it all big players must have understood this massive opportunity. In the light of that, I strongly doubt that Apple will invest much resources into this outdated concept for a voice assistant. I believe some time in the next couple of years voice assistants will emerge that will make today's attempts look like a joke (granted, they already look like a joke).

She's pretty much like any other tech. Great when it works; annoying as heck when it doesn't.

 

[Ashbash75]

She's pretty much like any other tech. Great when it works; annoying as heck when it doesn't.

You must be new to Apple 🤣

 

[philcourage]

I thought people already stopped pretending like they enjoy using Siri.

Gruber thinks Siri is getting better every day. Then again, it's Gruber.

The same guy that for years said that it was amazing that a rich person and middle-income person could get the same phone, as is the case with a bottle of Coke. Then Apple started selling the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and he changed his tune.

 

[W.O.P.R.]

Great idea! Siri doesn't get accidentally set off easily enough as it is. Let's shorten the phrase to activate it even more. Heck why not just drop the Siri bit and have the system attempt to run every phrase spoken in its presence without any triggers.

Person walks up to you and says "Hey Dude..."
From your pocket a muffle voice responds, "Playing Hey Jude by the Beatles."

 

[SR 7]

Why not just scrap Siri and start over. Apple ignored Siri for like 5 years after introduction. Everyone else has moved on to something that works. Changing "Hey Siri" is not going to fix it.

That's the Apple under Cook. Change the color of a car and say it's a brand new car. Apple doesn't innovate if you haven't noticed.

 

[theorist9]

I rarely have trouble with Siri not recognizing what I say. The problem usually comes from it misinterpreting my intent or just basic network connection failures.

I was thinking more specifically of the dictation feature, which I assume is driven by the same speech recognition engine as Siri. I use it frequently, but I've found its accuracy is merely OK – – on average, I'd say I need to make two to three corrections per sentence. When I don't feel like typing, using dictation and then correcting the result is better than typing it out from scratch. But it would be nice if I didn't need to do so many corrections.

 

[Ashbash75]

Great idea! Siri doesn't get accidentally set off easily enough as it is.

My wife's snoring sets off siri sometimes 🤣

 

[jhfenton]

Yesterday, Siri scared the crap out of us; we watched Netflix, and a person said something that resembled the "hey siri" command, and Siri began talking loud from the iPad.

My iPad often seems to trigger itself—set to respond to "Dis, Siri"—when I'm watching LigaMX football. I haven't figured out what common fútbol phrase it is that triggers it, but it shouldn't be able to trigger itself, whatever it "hears" coming out of its own speakers.

On Thursday, I was on a Teams call on my iPad, and we were introducing ourselves and talking about where we were physically located. After one participant said he was in Silicon Valley, HomePod Siri launched into a description of Silicon Valley.

I definitely don't need easier triggering.

 

[Cole82]

I still don't understand why I can't choose another own name for Siri. If you have a Sarah in the house, Siri becomes...really, really challenging. I imagine the same would be for Alexa. I would also love to differentiate by device or device type (call my HomePods something different than my iOS devices)

If I can teach a dog what his name is, why can't I do the same for devices that have more processing power than 1960's NASA mission command?

I'd call mine Marry-Kate and Ashley. Maybe they'd get into less trouble.

 

[philcourage]

That's the Apple under Cook. Change the color of a car and say it's a brand new car. Apple doesn't innovate if you haven't noticed.

"Can't innovate my ass!", said Phil. Then he proceeded to introduce the trash can Mac Pro.

 

[compwiz1202]

Is Siri even capable of doing something “in X minutes” - I’ve wanted that feature years - that and the ability to say “and” to link two enquiries together.

But who am I kinding, it’s got to the point where I have to ask it to turn the light on 3 times.

Yes. it works to stop music in X hours. And yea what is so hard about toggling a light??

 

[compwiz1202]

I'm certain it's broken.
Last week, there were several different responses to the command:

"hey siri, turn on mini 3"
1.siri: "uh-huh"...10 secs later light bulb was activted.
2. Siri: "I'm sorry, mini 3 is not in your apple music"
3. Siri: "I'm on it!"
4. Siri: (10 seconds later) "I'm on it!"
5. Siri: "on it!"
6. Siri: unresponsive.
7. Siri: gives me a definition of whatever was misheard.
8: Siri: activates several incorrect devices.
9. Siri: "the mini 3 is not responding" but has completed the request.
10. I'm on the phone and Siri is rattling off non sense with out the wake words being uttered.
(Nudge-nudge.."not eavesdropping eh Apple?")

The home app is the buggiest I've seen in quite a while, so I don't think Siri will ever work correctly until there's a paradigm shift in the base code of homekit, and it is completely re-engineered.
Right now homekit is band aids over band aids.

Yea she did the same thing to me with a light the other day. Asked uh-huh? but still eventually turned it on

 

[philcourage]

And yea what is so hard about toggling a light??

LOL
Really, if that fails one time just move your ass to the light switch and call it a day. 🤣

 

[compwiz1202]

“Gurman says that Apple is working on a way for ‌Siri‌ to be able to understand phrases and commands”

That would be a good start

Heck freaking Zork could understand commands with conjuctions and prepositions in the 80s

 

[jweinraub]

How about get that AI to work so when I say the word 'seriously' it doesn't trigger... what the the friggin point of this exercise anyway? Introducing more and more bugs just to save a microsecond? Kudos, Tim Apple, kudos!

 

[jsalda]

Great, now every time I say the word "Siri" (or even "Seriously" for that matter), she's gonna come on...

 

[compwiz1202]

Amazon does it with "Alexa". I have a few echo dot speakers and I must day Alexa is so much more advanced than Siri. Using Siri can still be a very frustrating experience.

My question is can can Siri do a weather/news etc report when the alarm goes off. Alexa did when we had it, and Bixby does it.

 

[compwiz1202]

They also need to do something about having multiple devices. Why when I say "Hey Siri, turn on my 6 a.m. alarm." from my bed does a different device respond every night? It could be my iPhone that's across the room on my dresser in my bedroom, my HomePod mini that's on my bedroom nightstand, the HomePod in the living room, etc.

Sometimes two or more of them set the alarm.

Very annoying.

It's always the LR one that takes over everything. I can be in the BR asking the homepod something in a normal volume, and the LR will answer. Sometimes I do wish things like alarms/timers would set on all of them. Is there some setting for that?

 

[compwiz1202]

If they change Siri‘s voice again without making her functionality better, I WILL throw my iPad against the wall in frustration.

And don't forget to change the tone again