I find Siri mostly adequate for controlling lights, and adding timers and reminders. I very much wish she had something more closely approaching Alexa’s comprehension. But when it comes down to it, I’m willing to let Siri listen to my living room, but I’m not willing to let either Alexa or Googgle Home listen to my living room - Apple has a clear funding model: “we will sell you very nice gear for fairly high prices”, and a strong motive to not be seen “spying” (since privacy is a big selling point with them - if they were caught collecting creepy information it would have serious financial consequences for them), while Amazon and Google have stronger motives pushing them towards being at least a little creepy, since their finding model is based on collecting information about me and/or selling things to me.
I’ve actually recently added a second thing listening to my living room - Sonos Voice Control. It largely sidesteps the creepiness debate by promising to never send the data off-device (all voice requests are processed locally).
I’m slightly astonished Siri isn’t better and more capable by now - I have a strong feeling the Apple Siri team has always been “swinging for the fences” - they refuse to give Siri any command syntax, they want her to be “just like talking to a real person”, but then she’ll make mistakes that would make you angry at a real person - she’ll sort of mostly process something and then head off confidently in the wrong direction, instead of saying she doesn’t understand or can’t handle that request.
Me: Hey Siri, how many lights are on?
Siri: 11 lights are on and 3 lights are off.
Me: Hey Siri, which lights are on?
Siri: 11 lights are on and 3 are off.
That second answer is bad. Either she doesn’t understand the question, or she (or the developers) can’t be bothered to answer it correctly. I’d be much happier if she honestly answered, “I don’t know how to answer that question”, rather than making herself look like an idiot. And just to add, Siri knows the names of all the lights, I can ask her to turn any light on/off by name - there’s nothing keeping her from listing out the names of the lights that are on - or just saying she can’t do that. It’s not a matter of listening and transcribing the speech - they do that really well. It’s that they’ve built this system that they’re determined to pass off as totally smart “just like a real person”, while they frantically try to backfill in the actual smarts.
It has all the hallmarks of a bad 80’s sitcom episode, where someone takes a job as an personal assistant where they don’t really know the language but they said they did in the interview, so they keep making mistakes. Hey Apple, instead of giving me an assistant that pretends to be human and is bad at it, how about one that has clearly defined syntax that maps directly to actions, and just tell me if I’ve given the command wrong, or you can’t process it.
Eh, at this pout I have a mental list of things I know I can ask Siri (set a timer, “remind me in an hour / tomorrow to do X”), and if I want music, I ask the Sonos system. It’s pretty good at getting that right (and though I have it hooked up to Apple Music, it’ll work with a bunch of services).
