The HomePod could actually just vocalize the response because it has internet access. All the other digital assistants do. After all this time Siri really hasn’t improved much.
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Siri Still Struggles to Answer Very Basic Questions
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Video intro -
(in a British voice):
"Introducing Ivy. A personal assistant so unhelpful, so needlessly refined, that it makes Siri look like a Mensa scholar on a triple espresso.
Meticulously crafted to misunderstand you with breathtaking precision. A revolutionary AI model that doesn’t just fail, it fails with grace. Ask Ivy for the weather and it will respond with a haiku about the transience of existence. Request directions and it will gently remind you that getting lost is part of the journey.
We're sure you'll love Ivy. Ivy will definitely grow on you."
I guess she doesn’t have the Apple TV+ subscription required to watch Prime Target.
I’m still baffled at the trend of people asking AI’s about anything. They’re not knowledgeable, they’re text generators trained on the thoughts of the internet.
You still can’t add something to your calendar and ask it to remind you 15 minutes before the event, or any time, it puts the request in the title and defaults to 1 hour before…. Or it creates a reminder… How is it this terrible at such basic things.
I tried "the current date" and got: I found that on web.... and I got the same answer for "What is the current date" But for "what date is today" I got right answer.
When I asked "the current time" answer was right, when I followed "and the current date" I got right answer as well.
As I said earlier. It is still pretrained Assistant for spacific tasks, not LLM based assistant.
I am in country that does not have native language support.
And at the end: "Siri when will you improve?" I really could not say
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Who’s speaking?
Siri launched on the iPhone 4S all the way back in 2011, and yet it still struggles to answer some of the most basic questions.
Daring Fireball's John Gruber today highlighted a recent post from a Reddit user who asked Siri what month it is, only for Siri to respond that it does not understand. This is a frustrating experience that many iPhone users are all too familiar with, as evidenced by the dozens of replies to the post that provide similar examples of Siri being useless.
Apple recently delayed the more personalized version of Siri that it previewed at WWDC last year, with the reported reason being that the new features did not work reliably enough. But, the regular Siri that we already have is frustratingly bad, so perhaps Apple should focus on fixing that core before adding new features on top.
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Article Link: Siri Still Struggles to Answer Very Basic Questions
I guess you are lucky. I just tried it with your exact wording..
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That’s a setting you can turn off…or choose not to use..:if you DO choose it, you will get a very detailed history most likely on why it is traditionally that day.
This is a little more complicated than what month it is, but it can’t give you the dew point either. Which by the way, is the best unit of measure to tell how “yucky” it feels outside. Still a pretty basic query, the stock weather app has this information.
I just asked Siri that question and the reply was "your next event is 9 o'clock. Pick up your prescription".
I'm guessing that maybe one reason Apple has a small core design team is to try to ensure that everything Apple makes works together, which might be more difficult if they had a lot of individual teams that might or might not successfully coordinate with each other. But they seem to have gotten lost in the weeds trying to make every little thing they create somehow interact with everything else, which has reduced their focus on much of the basic functionality of much of what they produce, which eventually hinders ensuring that everything Apple makes works together.
Maybe Apple should just recalibrate people's expectations by renaming Siri to "Zork"
the truth is, and for some odd reason, no company ever excel at all its product lines. Once the number of products gets higher some products quality drop and competitors do better at it. No matter how much money they have.
The problem at Apple seems fundamental to me. The CEO prioritizes profit and investor relations more than the product. He is a money guy. Jobs knew this and picked him to carry the ball. Jobs did not pick a technology guy. So the company dynamic and trajectory changed. The stock and company value is red hot. But, sometimes companies crumble that you never thought would. Compaq, Kodak, IBM etc, etc.
It will be interesting to watch Apple over the next few years. Even investors making money from them are wondering where the company is going and are getting a bit nervous, even if they don't admit to it. Right now it seems more smoke and mirrors than innovations. And I mean innovations that customers WANT. Not Apple cars, not Vision Pro, etc. Just solid hardware and operating systems that are amazing and stable, not just pipe dreams. But alas, that is a boring approach that doesn't increase stock value. So what's the answer?
It will be interesting to watch Apple over the next few years. Even investors making money from them are wondering where the company is going and are getting a bit nervous, even if they don't admit to it. Right now it seems more smoke and mirrors than innovations. And I mean innovations that customers WANT. Not Apple cars, not Vision Pro, etc. Just solid hardware and operating systems that are amazing and stable, not just pipe dreams. But alas, that is a boring approach that doesn't increase stock value. So what's the answer?
Years ago, I asked Siri for directions to a particular Italian restaurant (by name) that was about 5 miles away (I knew were it was, I just wanted optimal routing), and Siri cheerfully started recommending restaurants in Italy (over 6,000 miles away).
More recently, I had been gaming, off and on, with a friend in Luxembourg. I'd ask Siri what time it was in Luxembourg, and she'd answer "It's (time) in Ehrenberg, Arizona". I'd try again, very carefully enunciating "Luxembourg", and get "Ehrenberg, Arizona" again. Finally, I looked up the capital and asked for the time in "Luxembourg City, Luxembourg", and Siri would give me the right time. But if I ask for the time in "France", Siri will cheerfully answer with the time in "Paris, France" - ask for "England", and get the time in "London, England" - ask for "Germany" and get the time in "Berlin, Germany". But it couldn't look up Luxembourg, and insisted on defaulting to the United States.
It really gives the feeling that the current iteration of Siri is built on thousands and thousands of special-case rules - like they had put all the "big" countries into the hopper with a rule saying "if they name a country, use the capital of that country", but they hadn't bothered with the smaller ones.
(I've also found that if I give her simple multiply / divide math problems with decimal numbers, she cheerfully drops off the fractional part of the number unless I literally shout "POINT!" in the middle of the number - leading to her cheerfully giving utterly useless answers like "572 divided by 1 is 572" - uh, gee, thanks.)
I'd argue that he is (or was) even more a production pipeline management guy, not (directly) a money guy - he got attention for managing the production pipeline so that all the necessary parts and subassemblies got to the factories, and got through the factories, and got packaged and shipped worldwide, to keep up with global demand without having vast warehouses full of unsold phones. In 2023 (grabbing a top hit from a quick search), apparently they sold 231 million phones - that's well over 600,000 phones every day, all year long, meaning they're also having to make more than 600k phones every day. It's a really vast manufacturing process. Tim made that possible, and profitable, and Apple continues to ship great hardware every year - the iPhones are solid phones, and the hardware improves every year (not as much as we'd like but it does improve).
And those phones are shipping with in-house designed custom processors, and now they're moving into their own designs for modems and wifi and such. They're dominating in good hardware at high volume. They're continuing to hit every year on the thing that Tim was hired to get right.
But that's not software. iOS and macOS are nice, but they could be better. They got completely (and inexplicably) blindsided on incorporating AI features into the OS. And it feels a whole lot like the marketing department won an argument and got them to commit to showing a product demo with a bunch of new features, where the code to make it all work was still on a drawing board somewhere - it wasn't demo versions of the alpha software running in carefully controlled conditions, it was the graphics equivalent of a powerpoint presentation, sold as being in the works, with the hope that the developers could write it all from scratch and make it work before the time they'd promised to ship it ("no worries, my term paper isn't due until 9am, I'll just pull an all-nighter and write it now"). And they missed big time, and it has blown up in their faces - one of Jobs' rules was "under-promise and over-deliver", and they blew that, and it has hurt their reputation now.
There's so much of the time it feels like Apple is running on perhaps half or a third of the number of developers they should have, and they keep having to move people off one project (that should have permanent staff) to go fight fires on another project. They mostly kinda sorta keep this from showing, externally, but this time that didn't work, and it looks bad. They've got practically unlimited resources, they need to figure out how get things done on time - if it takes more people, or whatever, well, spend the money, and get it done.
Kind of funny that my iPhone 12 on iOS 15’s Siri is better than the “latest and greatest”
My Siri has lost the ability to do currency conversion? I’m sure she could do this before?? Can other peoples?
Siri told me that it is 27,68€. Hope, that helps.My Siri has lost the ability to do currency conversion? I’m sure she could do this before?? Can other peoples?
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Siri works great for me on iPhone 12 Pro and the latest iOS version. The only problem I have encountered: If asked with Siri to play songs from the Swedish band Movits!, Spotify plays always "I like to move it" from the animated picture Madagascar.