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Survey Finds Early Adopters of iPhone X Very Satisfied With All Features Except Siri
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Agree 100%. It's not like the media is saying Siri isn't great. It's a statistically significant number of Apple customers, polled, that are saying it. No need to get defensive and say that their opinions aren't true.
BTW, I do use Siri. I use it to send SMSes, set reminders, calendar events, and ask simple questions (e.g. multiply 27g x 17 if I'm making a pourover coffee and need to figure out how much water to use).
However, it's not very good. I only do what I know it can do without me getting frustrated at it. Siri has an artificially low failure rate because of it. I'm dumbing everything down.
Just last week, I asked Siri, "Hey Siri, send a message to [my wife]." Siri replied that it didn't understand. My Apple Watch screen went completely black for awhile (i.e. no Siri icon), so I started over. Eventually, Siri sent a message to my wife that said, "Hey Siri. Send a message to [wife's name]."
You had one job, Siri.
Finally upgraded to the X myself, after stubbornly hanging onto my 256GB 7 Plus.
I'd say I'm "satisfied" but not "highly satisfied", and that has almost nothing to do with Siri. Truth is, although all the complaints about Siri are valid -- I've never had high expectations for it, so I've never been let down. I only use it rarely, and for very specific things I know it's capable of doing with the command I'm giving it. Call me "old school", but I'm used to interacting with my devices via their touchscreen, mouse, trackpad or keyboard. I lived through that whole decade or more of voice recognition being a very limited thing, where you trained it first and it only knew 20 or 30 words. I feel strange talking to my phone, knowing it's not a real person on the other end.
My biggest complaints have to do with usability that's hampered a bit by requiring more gestures in place of a physical button. For example, just earlier today, I received a Facebook Messenger message, but when I tried to reply - the phone decided it didn't need to give me an option for the on-screen keyboard. It kept giving me choices like stickers or emojis or to toggle the camera on, but no obvious way to get my keyboard back to type a response! I don't even know HOW I got it back to normal, but it involved a lot of swiping around.
And last week, I had to hard reboot the phone because it got "stuck" in some weird state where everything was functioning - except i couldn't get the launcher with app icons on the screen. It would unlock and give me the status screen with the last so many updates about things like missed calls or messages that came in, but I couldn't run a program without asking Siri to launch it for me.
I never had these problems with my 7 Plus or any earlier iPhones, and I have to think this is all related to some of the code they had to add to deal with the lack of a real Home button and for Face ID to switch screens when it ID's you properly.
I'd say I'm "satisfied" but not "highly satisfied", and that has almost nothing to do with Siri. Truth is, although all the complaints about Siri are valid -- I've never had high expectations for it, so I've never been let down. I only use it rarely, and for very specific things I know it's capable of doing with the command I'm giving it. Call me "old school", but I'm used to interacting with my devices via their touchscreen, mouse, trackpad or keyboard. I lived through that whole decade or more of voice recognition being a very limited thing, where you trained it first and it only knew 20 or 30 words. I feel strange talking to my phone, knowing it's not a real person on the other end.
My biggest complaints have to do with usability that's hampered a bit by requiring more gestures in place of a physical button. For example, just earlier today, I received a Facebook Messenger message, but when I tried to reply - the phone decided it didn't need to give me an option for the on-screen keyboard. It kept giving me choices like stickers or emojis or to toggle the camera on, but no obvious way to get my keyboard back to type a response! I don't even know HOW I got it back to normal, but it involved a lot of swiping around.
And last week, I had to hard reboot the phone because it got "stuck" in some weird state where everything was functioning - except i couldn't get the launcher with app icons on the screen. It would unlock and give me the status screen with the last so many updates about things like missed calls or messages that came in, but I couldn't run a program without asking Siri to launch it for me.
I never had these problems with my 7 Plus or any earlier iPhones, and I have to think this is all related to some of the code they had to add to deal with the lack of a real Home button and for Face ID to switch screens when it ID's you properly.
Actually, statistics are factual accounts based on the parameters of the study. Nice quip but unfortunately inaccurate.
I bought a Google Home Mini this weekend to test its reliability in terms of returning meaningful answers to various queries. The difference between Siri and Google's "assistant" -- particularly from a voice-only interaction standpoint (not using a touchscreen) -- is staggering. As we all know, Apple has much catching up to do. It remains to be seen if the head AI guy they recently acquired from Google will be able to make meaningful improvements to Siri given the privacy "confines" that Apple has placed on Siri.
I'm not saying that Siri doesn't suck but Apple's response quoted in this article was to criticism from a mid-March article and not from the survey that the article is referencing.Agree 100%. It's not like the media is saying Siri isn't great. It's a statistically significant number of Apple customers, polled, that are saying it. No need to get defensive and say that their opinions aren't true.
BTW, I do use Siri. I use it to send SMSes, set reminders, calendar events, and ask simple questions (e.g. multiply 27g x 17 if I'm making a pourover coffee and need to figure out how much water to use).
However, it's not very good. I only do what I know it can do without me getting frustrated at it. Siri has an artificially low failure rate because of it. I'm dumbing everything down.
Just last week, I asked Siri, "Hey Siri, send a message to [my wife]." Siri replied that it didn't understand. My Apple Watch screen went completely black for awhile (i.e. no Siri icon), so I started over. Eventually, Siri sent a message to my wife that said, "Hey Siri. Send a message to [wife's name]."
You had one job, Siri.
Siri is almost completely worthless. I enjoy Siri's "personality" much more than Google's and Amazon's AI's "personalities" but functionally, Siri, is a complete disaster compared to other options.
The iPhone X is great but yeah, Siri is garbage and so is the comment Apple made about Siri. It's such an obvious denial of the reality that everyone outside of Apple is aware of.
I use it for the thing that Siri does perfectly (navigation, alarm, time, call, message, music, simple facts). When I need to ask for something really random and don't want a web search response then I'll use Alex / Google.
And it appears they were partially correct.
iPhone manufacturing suppliers have confirmed that the iPhone X has hugely undersold compared to the numbers forecast and agreed with Apple, hence why Apple now focuses their conversation on the profitability of iPhone versus the number of units sold.
In addition, there are also many rumours of well specced, fullscreen new iPhones being available at a much cheaper price when the new models are launched later this year.
Is your whole day wasted repeating yourself different ways so it will understand what you want? I normally get ticked off and just scream to my Echo device in the other room which nails it 99% of the time.
You’re so right about this. Apple used to be the one leading in interface design. I wonder what is going on behind the screens at Apple. Because everyone seems to leapfrog Apple these days in every category they once dominated or were leading.
Education = lost to chromebooks and Microsoft
Siri = lost to google now and Alexa
iTunes = not lost but Spotify managed to leapfrog
Maps = a joke (in the Netherlands) compared to google maps; what happened with flyovers? Google has in the meantime managed to make flyovers from the whole Netherlands in better resolution than Apple’s three city flyovers and offers offloading maps and cycling maps.
Macs = same old designs and already outdated processors and graphic cards... and some have 5400 rpm hard drives
MacBooks and MacBook Pro = used to dominate the satisfaction list but are now ranked number 7
FCP = lost together with the MacPro to HP and Adobe
iCloud = really stagnant development
MacOS = really stagnant development
iOS = really stagnant development and getting further behind in user friendliness and functions on android
Apple really needs to put those billions to work. If they had done this 6 years ago we wouldn’t be in such awkward position as we are now.
We would have had the latest hardware, software and probably innovations that made us proud again of being an Apple user. That’s was the reason I was willing to pay more because you knew you did have the best.
That’s definitely true, focus on the accuracy and features of Siri rather than adding a few jokes that even cause offence to the term, “Dad Joke“.
Nope, I don't have to repeat myself. Once in awhile in the car, it may miss a word, but otherwise, I have the same number of failers with Siri as I do with the Echo.
I think they’re using privacy as an excuse it’s so far behind. But time will tell...
Siri can be extremely frustrating to use. Agree major over-haul needed. Glad to see this showing up in real consumer reports. If Apple ignores this it will only become a growing nag. Us message boards have given Apple plenty of fair warning, now the average Joes are complaining too.
My feelings exactly. I don’t know why Siri fell behind so far so fast but as a personal assistant it’s a very distant third.
People may say it’s Apple’s unwillingness to invade privacy but they need to do better than what Siri is currently capable of doing right now. I’m sure that there are questions you can ask Alexa or Google Home that would confuse them but you don’t have to try very hard to find a Siri question where you get a response of “I’m sorry, I don’t Understand.”
There may be some limitations on how well Siri can perform if Apple wants to maintain a high level of security, but it shouldn’t be as dramatic as the difference between Siri and Amazon or Google voice systems.
Cost is the only thing on there is for many an issue. Yellow true tone you just switch off.
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Only for basic tasks as thats all you can really do. I use my homepod with hey siri daily but don't use it often on my phone or ipad at all. Gets the odd usage on my watch though.
Well said, this is one of the main reasons why it is more difficult to develop Siri versus the other voice recognition platforms.
It’s created in the way that all voice information is anonymised to maintain user privacy and I am all for that.
Everyone compares Siri to the service on the Amazon Echo, but Amazon records your every interaction with an Echo which is available through the Amazon Alexa app for playback.
Go check out the voice history section if you have never tried this before and you will find all the recordings of the commands given to the unit by you or anyone else who has used it.
That said, difficulty is not an excuse for Apple to continually improve Siri, especially given that they are so cash rich.
With 4 out of 5 unhappy in this survey, it is definitely an area Apple needs to focus on much more effectively than they have done of late.