See What It's Like Using Siri on a Mac in macOS Sierra

[sehix]

The most "exciting" feature, which is Siri according to Apple, still remains the most useless and boring feature to me. Especially on a Mac.

It's slow, not all that smart, and requires data to work.

Siri might become useful when she reaches the level of the assistant in the movie "Her". But until then, it's nothing but a nuisance and a gimmick.

Too bad that Siri's holding a gun to your head to make you use it. Must be hard.
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Agree. Just like Podcasts and Stocks and News. Know exactly zero people who use them. I certainly have no use for them so I'm not sure why Apple would package them as native apps. Why would anyone need said apps?

And of course you know every Apple customer in the world, what they need and what they want to do with their various devices. Omniscience is such a burden, isn't it?

Sorry, missed the /sarc tag there for a moment.

 

[Mudcrutch]

So fairly pointless and awkward for those that work around others.

 

[sehix]

Because Apple decided it's greener to recycle rather than repair an otherwise perfectly fine Mac once your RAM, SSD/HDD/FD or battery dies.

Socketed memory has historically brought any number of tradeoffs with it. Increased potential points of failure, higher device failure rates, greater limits on packaging possibilities, cost of materials increases, etc etc etc...

When memory device MTBF was lower, and failure rates higher, it made some sense to have replaceable memory on devices. At some point the higher cost to manufacture and increased customer support costs related to replaceable memory overran the benefits of socketed memory with total lifecycle costs.

This issue has been around at least as long as I've been involved with computer system engineering and design, which has been since about 1977. While socketed memory was a definite advantage at one time, the pendulum has mostly swung the other way for most applications, certainly for consumer products, including personal computers.

 

[C DM]

So fairly pointless and awkward for those that work around others.

Kind of like phone calls, having a conversation, playing music, and many other things are. Surely that must make those things pointless anywhere else and overall in general, right?

 

[sehix]

Day late and a dollar short seems to be Apple's new motto.

Yep. The iPod, iPad, and iPhone were the very first music player, tablet computer, and smartphone ever to hit the market. Nobody had ever thought to make products like them...
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1 billion? Is that all? That means about 4.3 billion a month on average.
Far less than I expected for the number of devices out there.

Yep, nobody uses it out there.

 

[dtich]

i just wish there was the "Hey Siri" option as the phone.

um.. are you seriously thinking that that will *not* be a feature....??? re. lax.

 

[Glassed Silver]

Socketed memory has historically brought any number of tradeoffs with it. Increased potential points of failure, higher device failure rates, greater limits on packaging possibilities, cost of materials increases, etc etc etc...

When memory device MTBF was lower, and failure rates higher, it made some sense to have replaceable memory on devices. At some point the higher cost to manufacture and increased customer support costs related to replaceable memory overran the benefits of socketed memory with total lifecycle costs.

This issue has been around at least as long as I've been involved with computer system engineering and design, which has been since about 1977. While socketed memory was a definite advantage at one time, the pendulum has mostly swung the other way for most applications, certainly for consumer products, including personal computers.

Expanding memory has certainly extended the life of quite a lot of machines I worked on so far.
Not only my machines, but also in my family and for several customers.

I'll take the expandable memory any day of the week.

Glassed Silver:mac

 

[kwikdeth]

Too bad that Siri's holding a gun to your head to make you use it. Must be hard.
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yeah, it kind of is, actually. ever try to use any kind of voice services on iOS after turning off Siri? If you disable Siri, you lose them all. Even things like speech-to-text in a message. Siri's on-off setting is a global control for voice services on the iPhone.

Praying that the mac port does not continue that nonsense.
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Expanding memory has certainly extended the life of quite a lot of machines I worked on so far.
Not only my machines, but also in my family and for several customers.

I'll take the expandable memory any day of the week.

Glassed Silver:mac

everybody's missing the point... soldered ram = less machines they have to support. Most of the 2009-2010 macs on Sierra's supported list would likely have not shipped with adequate RAM to run it. Once Apple has moved everything to soldered RAM, I would strongly expect the supported machines list to be rapidly truncated. probably 5 years, tops. more like 4. They're setting things up to ensure continued revenue streams in the inevitable face of an iPhone sales decline.

Hardware subscription model. Has worked for years in cellphones, now they're adopting the strategy for the computers.

 

[Fzang]

Why on earth would I ask Siri to find teeny tiny thumbnails of photos, when I have Google and an entire screen to search for them?

 

[kwikdeth]

Why on earth would I ask Siri to find teeny tiny thumbnails of photos, when I have Google and an entire screen to search for them?

the other day I was at my girlfriends' place, and she and her daughter got into a spat because we needed to leave, and the daughter was busy typing out an email on her phone, letter by letter... and she was sitting in front of the computer the whole time.

people are just lazy now. its part of the reason i have so much disdain for the personal assistant AIs and stuff. most people dont use it for its potential, they use it to be even lazier and think less than they already do. Apple knows this, that's who they cater to now - everybody on here has probably had a smartphone since they came out - they dont care about us, we're gonna buy it anyway - the only way they can reel in new customers, the few, the "proud", who arent already invested in a smartphone ecosystem, is by making them, truly, exceptionally dumbed down products. Even Phil Schiller alluded to this in his recent interview when he mentioned how they spend a year making a new file system and nobody cares. two new emoji and everybody loses their minds. these are the people Apple sells product to now, and this is where they will spend the bulk of their development resources. meanwhile the rest of us are either busy trying to get work done, or on here carping about the good old days (freely admit im one of those people myself) when we had a computer OS that didnt insult our intelligence by doing things like forcing a half-baked voice assistant onto us masquerading as a "feature", or any other number of trivialities which are supposed to improve our experience, but, mostly just get in the way.

 

[Glassed Silver]

yeah, it kind of is, actually. ever try to use any kind of voice services on iOS after turning off Siri? If you disable Siri, you lose them all. Even things like speech-to-text in a message. Siri's on-off setting is a global control for voice services on the iPhone.

Praying that the mac port does not continue that nonsense.
[doublepost=1466184579][/doublepost]

everybody's missing the point... soldered ram = less machines they have to support. Most of the 2009-2010 macs on Sierra's supported list would likely have not shipped with adequate RAM to run it. Once Apple has moved everything to soldered RAM, I would strongly expect the supported machines list to be rapidly truncated. probably 5 years, tops. more like 4. They're setting things up to ensure continued revenue streams in the inevitable face of an iPhone sales decline.

Hardware subscription model. Has worked for years in cellphones, now they're adopting the strategy for the computers.

Oh I totally know what they are up to, hence I'm criticizing them.
Have you checked my post history?
I think I can safely claim to have looked through a lot of their shady efforts in recent history.

Glassed Silver:mac

 

[Thunderhawks]

Have you asked someone else's honest opinion about your accent?
It might not be too bad to understand for a human (we are very good at filling in gaps in information) but just too much for Siri.
It is actually quite rare for Siri to misunderstand what I am saying, even though after I still have an Italian accent.

Yes and thank you for the suggestion.
I am mostly thought of as "English" or foreign by untrained American ears.
Germans however can tell right away.

 

[MoreBS]

I currently can set my phone on the counter in the kitchen and look through my pantry and say "Hey Siri, add rice to Shopping List" etc. and it just gets added. It will be nice to have it available in the computer in the kitchen.

 

[sudo1996]

i've been using BTT on laptops & desktops macs/hacks since 10.6 and, while there may have been some issues with certain releases, the developer is very active and responds to mails quite fast, don't hesitate to send him your specific issue, he'll fix it !

I don't think it's the dev's fault. It just takes energy to have something constantly running and taking input like that. BTT seems more efficient than similar programs I've tried.

 

[mamaway]

i just wish there was the "Hey Siri" option as the phone.

Well, then it would be a direct Amazon Echo competitor, and it might make Macs seem inferior, unless they add a bunch of microphones to new macs. I think they're saving their echo competitor for the Apple TV or some sort of new iOS companion product that's always home and always on.

Ideally, this companion product would tell all other devices that had Hey Siri enabled to stop listening for Hey Siri somehow. Or there would be some wake word customization/voice training.

 

[jedifaka]

I wish they had integrated it in with Spotlight. It's getting really cluttered up there in the menu bar, and I'm not sure the conceptual division between using Spotlight and Siri, as they can both search your computer and the web.

That'd be very Cortana-esque.

 

[kwikdeth]

Oh I totally know what they are up to, hence I'm criticizing them.
Have you checked my post history?
I think I can safely claim to have looked through a lot of their shady efforts in recent history.

Glassed Silver:mac

My bad.

 

[ArmCortexA8]

Big whoop so what - I would never use it and don't use Siri as I have no use for it. I find it quicker to do things directly instead of talking to a device.

 

[janitor3]

I never use Siri on my phone, so I'll not be using it on my Mac.

 

[hagar]

I wish they had integrated it in with Spotlight. It's getting really cluttered up there in the menu bar, and I'm not sure the conceptual division between using Spotlight and Siri, as they can both search your computer and the web.

You're right. But as Spotlight is an an important features that exists for decades, I don't think they wanted to integrate it with Siri yet as it doesn't have the best reputation. There would be a cry-out that Spotlight is broken in Sierra and all kinds of incorrect statements that your mac searches are now sent to Apple's servers... So I think they will keep on improving Siri and depending on that evolution and user feedback, they will work on integration in the next iterations.

 

[Sill]

Anyone know if Siri on Sierra is always listening like on my iPhone 6S where I just say, "Hey Siri..."?

If I'm typing and need an image, I'd like to be able to just call out, "Hey Siri, do a web search for a picture of the Sierra Mountains."

I don't know about Siri, but if your Mac has a mic you can bet it's always listening.
On my machine I found that I have to keep my Dictation prefs open as well as the Audio Midi control, full time, just to keep a handle on mic behavior.
Changing to a different control panel and then back to Dictation will automatically turn on the mic. Clicking it on and off again will do nothing- I have to go to Audio Midi and turn off the master volume for the mic input.
When I get around to opening this machine up to install an SSD I'm going to pull out the entire mic assembly. I'm hoping the iMac will work normally afterwards.
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There would be a cry-out that Spotlight is broken in Sierra and all kinds of incorrect statements that your mac searches are now sent to Apple's servers...

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Apple explicitly stated that local machine searches ARE sent to Apple, unless you specifically disable it in privacy.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204014

 

[navaira]

Socketed memory has historically brought any number of tradeoffs with it. Increased potential points of failure, higher device failure rates, greater limits on packaging possibilities, cost of materials increases, etc etc etc...

I can't believe people still say that. I've worked in IT for 15 years, both as a freelancer and in a company with over 130 employees, put together so many PCs I lost count and I have NEVER encountered a RAM failure even though it wasn't soldered. As for 'cost of materials' one would think that buying a laptop for €1449 should cover the 'cost of materials'. But I guess the glue they use to cover everything and make it non-upgradeable is expensive.

 

[Sill]

I can't believe people still say that. I've worked in IT for 15 years, both as a freelancer and in a company with over 130 employees, put together so many PCs I lost count and I have NEVER encountered a RAM failure even though it wasn't soldered.

You've had excellent luck then.

At the time of the big earthquake that destroyed one of the major SRAM/DRAM fabs back in the 90s, I was a component broker. I sourced firmware and memory for builders as well as my own fledgling white box operation. I encountered dozens of failed DIMMs back then. In fact I'd say that RAM failure rivaled HD failure in frequency, though a failed chip rarely caused anywhere near the catastrophe of a failed drive.

 

[navaira]

Wait – are we talking about failure as in "I stuck it in and it didn't work" or "after two years it suddenly died" though?

 

[Sill]

Wait – are we talking about failure as in "I stuck it in and it didn't work" or "after two years it suddenly died" though?

Mostly the first, though in some cases I'd observed a failure after a few weeks or months. This was with chips from a wide variety of sources.
YMMV, as the saying goes.