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Should Apple Kill Siri and Start Over?

Yes. I only have Siri enabled so I can use CarPlay.

But I never ask her to do anything because she usually makes a grievous error.
 
Most of the time I use Siri its because I'm driving, and I have a 25% success rate getting useful information.

The other day I was driving and I knew I was near the border of Indiana and Illinois, and I simply asked "Hey Siri, what time zone am I in?" and it couldn't answer! It was all, I'm sorry I can't show you while you're driving. Don't show me - just tell me what time zone I'm in! You have my location..

I have a contact on my phone "Mom & Dad" - its the landline at their house. When I ask Siri to call "Mom & Dad" while driving, it says something to the effect that it can't call two people / setup a conference call. I don't have any contacts named "Mom" nor a contact "Dad" - why why does it think I'm trying to call two people?

My kids practice sports are a nearby park called "Lincoln Park" - but it always tries to send me to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago 300 miles away if I get directions via Siri. Why? Perhaps it should take my location as a context clue. If I open Apple Maps and type in "lincoln park" it shows the location I want, 10 miles away. Why does the same input via Siri and via Apple Maps result in such wildly different results?
 
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Every so often I’ll reset all the Siri settings and start over, sometimes that helps especially with dictation. 🙄
 
djc6 said:
Most of the time I use Siri its because I'm driving, and I have a 25% success rate getting useful information.

The other day I was driving and I knew I was near the border of Indiana and Illinois, and I simply asked "Hey Siri, what time zone am I in?" and it couldn't answer! It was all, I'm sorry I can't show you while you're driving. Don't show me - just tell me what time zone I'm in! You have my location..

I have a contact on my phone "Mom & Dad" - its the landline at their house. When I ask Siri to call "Mom & Dad" while driving, it says something to the effect that it can't call two people / setup a conference call. I don't have any contacts named "Mom" nor a contact "Dad" - why why does it think I'm trying to call two people?

My kids practice sports are a nearby park called "Lincoln Park" - but it always tries to send me to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago 300 miles away if I get directions via Siri. Why? Perhaps it should take my location as a context clue. If I open Apple Maps and type in "lincoln park" it shows the location I want, 10 miles away. Why does the same input via Siri and via Apple Maps result in such wildly different results?
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Great summary of Siri's shortcomings!
 
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I think different people want different things from Siri. I just need something that will occasionally let me control my technology by voice, convert units, and maybe translate a word or sentence into a different language and do it all on device. Siri does fine at all of that for me now— the biggest challenge seems to have been speech recognition and, for me at least, it’s now quite good.

A lot of other people seem to want a smart friend they can have a conversation with. That's a different thing and not something I'm particularly interested in. I have plenty of smart friends and some of them are much like these generative AIs in that they also make stuff up and present it with complete confidence. When I need a tool to check those facts, it won't be a generative bot, it'll be fingers on a keyboard going to primary sources.

These two visions of Siri are implemented in different ways. The conversational Siri would benefit more from cloud connections and generative approaches. The tool I want needs less of that but would call out to such capabilities when needed, such as the language translations.

So I think there's a debate about what Siri should be. I'm only one small voice in that debate. The implementations will differ depending on the path taken, with some paths leading to more radical changes in implementation than others.

Still, let's acknowledge that "kill and start over" isn't a technical discussion, it's an opportunity to vent frustration.

And I'm pretty sure the Siri name is deeply enough embedded that whatever happens behind the curtain it will continue to be called Siri.
 
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there was a website called ****thatsirisays that was golden responses from 2011, they did tone her down a lot.

We used to have fun with Siri by asking what was the meaning of life, calling you nicknames, and giving you advice on other stuff lolol. Siri shouldn’t start over, LOL people just forgot how to use her.
 
Having to speak to turn on a light is backwards in my opinion. The first time Siri shouted at me at 5:00am " Im sorry theres seems to be something wrong" I was done. Siri is a mess and so is homekit. And while Im on a rant kill Walkie Talkie too
 
Siri is a dream compared to trying to use voice commands in a Tesla.

Me: “turn off the wipers”
Car: “Turn off the wife please”
 
While Siri has never cheated on me, I do get frustrated with her ambivalent attitude at times. I would not object to couples counseling. Killing her over ineptness would be wrong.
 
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For some reason, Siri felt like it got worse from iOS 13 -> iOS 14...

and in iOS 17, the fact that it continues to listen for the next prompt makes it even worse.

Somethings gotta change.

Also, how can it not answer stuff about its own company. if you ask a question about anything Apple, it will say "Apple's website can help you with that..." Yea right...

And in tvOS 15.4, Siri on HomePod got worse. It used to read you what the sites said, but in tvOS 15.4, it just says "Ask on your iPhone 💀"
 
The worst thing Apple has ever released - "It just [doesn't] work"

And by extension, Homekit is still horrible. I have 2 Homepods and 3 minis, and not of it has ever worked effciently.
 
No, no, no. I say this as someone who uses Siri constantly all day every day. By all means rebuild it and make it better, but by no means change the name. The people here on tech sites represent a small minority of those of us out in the world who use Siri and would have a hard time trying to learn to use a different name for the occasional use they have out of it. The above poster was right, it really is about marketing. Just make it absolutely better and keep the name for the majority of users.
 
NT1440 said:
I really don’t understand the absolute fixation on Siri here.

Occasionally I ask it to call someone or set a timer. What other things do I need an “assistant” for in my daily life?

For those who compare it to things like chatGPT, are you looking for Siri to write essays for you or something?

Downvotes are easy, maybe explain what you actually want out of a “new” Siri? If I could go back to the Voice Commands prior to Siri I would 🤷‍♂️
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The problem is that ChatGPT understands natural language better than any voice assistant available, Siri included. You can ask any of them trivia questions or command them to perform something, but you have to couch your query in very specific ways to get the desired results. Siri is not that much worse than Google or Amazon, it's just that ChatGPT set the bar much higher than any of them.
 
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MacRumors said:
  • Bungling music requests (even for purchases that Siri has local access to).
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I have never had anything but trouble since Apple Music replaced the iTunes app, in asking Siri to play me a song that's stored locally that I bought or downloaded Siri *always* tries go to access Apple Music to stream it even though i don't have a subscription.

It's very obnoxious.
 
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wigby said:
The problem is that ChatGPT understands natural language better than any voice assistant available, Siri included. You can ask any of them trivia questions or command them to perform something, but you have to couch your query in very specific ways to get the desired results. Siri is not that much worse than Google or Amazon, it's just that ChatGPT set the bar much higher than any of them.
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So the use case is simple fact checking? And how does one determine whether you've gotten a fact or a hallucination back from AI's out there?

I was demo'd CoPilot by MS well over a year ago. It spat out some very impressive looking step by step instructions and screenshots on how to enable a function I was investigating for my company. Cool stuff, except when I went to follow those instructions the feature literally didn't exist.

That's just a work scenario, but I absolutely cannot fathom wanting or needing to do something like that on my phone.

So is the root of all this just that people want Siri to understand them better?
 
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