Siri is Now Actively Used on More Than Half a Billion Devices

[Mtmspa]

Siri will start to be really useful to me when I can give it multiple commands at once such as, "Hey, Siri...turn on the Family Room lights, turn off the outside lights, and add eggs to my shopping list." As it stands now, if I want to do multiple things that Siri could do, it's usually faster for me to do all those things myself because Siri can only handle one task at a time. I don't understand why Apple hasn't made this kind of thing a priority. They say Siri is great because you can talk to it naturally. Uh, no you can't. 'Naturally' is not talking about only one thing at a time. To me, 'naturally' means being able to throw multiple things at it, have it parse each of those things, and then perform the requested tasks.

You can setup a scene to do every thing but add the eggs.

 

[avanpelt]

You can setup a scene to do every thing but add the eggs.

For an “assistant” that is just over 6 years old, you’d think it would be able to parse multiple requests which utilize different apps in a single command by now.

Assistants are supposed to save people time. When I can tell Siri to do three things with a single command and it is able to do all of those things in the time it would’ve taken me to do one of those things manually, then Siri is worthy to be called an assistant.

Siri in its present form isn’t all that much smarter than the voice dialer I had on my BlackBerry in 2007. Siri can parse one simple request at a time, but my BlackBerry could do the same thing — it was just a lot more limited in terms of the resources it could pull information from.

My not-so-favorite annoyance with Siri is when I tell it to turn a light off but it thinks I asked it to turn the light on (even though the light was already on) and it says, “Ok, I turned the light on.” Really, Siri? No, you didn’t just turn the light on because the light was already on, you idiot.

If I had an assistant at my job with the intelligence of Siri, they’d be fired within the first week. Apple can boast about active Siri users all they want; but I bet Tim won’t talk about “customer sat scores” where Siri is concerned anytime soon.