You know what's dumber than Siri on iPhone? It's Siri on Apple Watch and MacOS
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Walt Mossberg Calls Siri 'Too Limited and Unreliable' to Compete in 'Coming AI Wars'
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True it's sad. Some ways their success has slowed down innovation and the "magic" of Apple is disappearing. Maybe us long time Apple users are tainted but it just doesn't feel like the same Apple anymore.
BTW, these criticisms hold for almost every aspect of Apple AI implementation. For instance, text prediction is HORRIBLE. A primitive bigram/trigram model should perform better than Apple is doing. The only area where they are really decent is picture categorisation, that one is surprisingly accurate
The one that's annoyed me a few times is, the Music app on the phone is playing music, and I ask Siri what song is playing, and she stops the music so that she can listen through the microphone to hear a song playing - NO! YOU SIRI! WHAT SONG ARE YOU PLAYING???
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I finally agree with Mossberg! Apple's systems are hovering between good and terrible when it comes to reliability. iCloud, in particular, is very troublesome if you get locked out of your account. I've had my account for 15 years, but today I've been unable to get in no matter what I try. Password resets last a mere 3 minutes, and then fail to work. Ugh... sorry, venting.. lost an entire day over this bs.
[doublepost=1476339941][/doublepost]An on-topic post...
If Apple delivered on-device voice recognition and text-to-speech, eliminating the cloud for that, it would make Siri far better! Imagine instant, real-time recognition and even prediction! Right now, the lag and unreliability makes it a gimmick, nothing more. Bring on the V-1 chip, Apple!
[doublepost=1476339941][/doublepost]An on-topic post...
If Apple delivered on-device voice recognition and text-to-speech, eliminating the cloud for that, it would make Siri far better! Imagine instant, real-time recognition and even prediction! Right now, the lag and unreliability makes it a gimmick, nothing more. Bring on the V-1 chip, Apple!
Problem is - software is _the_ game already, and it will be even more so in the future. If you'll lose it on the software side, you'll lose it all. The accuracy of Amazon's voice recognition on the FireTV got me interested in the Echo Dot. I would never consider a (potential future) competing Apple product for that. Trying to use Siri is a frustrating desaster when you have a comparison.
If Google, Amazon & Co deliver on what Apple only promises, people will eventually jump ship. Voice-based personal assistants are not mainstream yet, so Apple can still get their act together. But it's high time to do so!
Walt is right, because there are two situations that bug the crap out of me.
When it is confused and asks randomly: "Who me?" and you reply anything, it just waits for you to shout her name again or touch the button. It doesn't follow up - obviously you want to try again.
if not, and that's the second situation: "Leave me alone Siri", or "stop" or ".. anything like that" isn't going to make her go away. Siri just starts bothering you twice as much.
You can't shout 'new query', when it thinks you're still going deeper into the first one. You have to shut it all down get rid of it, close the apps involved, or whatever, and ask a stupid question like "what is 5+5" so you can jump into a more complex question again.
It's a great personal assistant, but i am so surprised the most logical simple things are just not there. Or at least not done right.
When it is confused and asks randomly: "Who me?" and you reply anything, it just waits for you to shout her name again or touch the button. It doesn't follow up - obviously you want to try again.
if not, and that's the second situation: "Leave me alone Siri", or "stop" or ".. anything like that" isn't going to make her go away. Siri just starts bothering you twice as much.
You can't shout 'new query', when it thinks you're still going deeper into the first one. You have to shut it all down get rid of it, close the apps involved, or whatever, and ask a stupid question like "what is 5+5" so you can jump into a more complex question again.
It's a great personal assistant, but i am so surprised the most logical simple things are just not there. Or at least not done right.
Nothing irritates me more than Siri dictation! I cannot believe it is almost 2017. Is dictation that bad with Google now?
On a side note, the Apple TV OS and remote Siri works much better.
On a side note, the Apple TV OS and remote Siri works much better.
Don't forget the "new" Mac Pro... it's also well suited for Mr. Ive's purse ;-) but usability down 50 percent with respect to the previous towers.
Siri is great in the car (on the 6s/7) as I can make calls, send text and change my music all without touching a button.
I'd suggest that Siri is more of a voice interface with some extras behind it rather than a proper 'AI' though, I think we are quite a way off that (in all products).
I'd suggest that Siri is more of a voice interface with some extras behind it rather than a proper 'AI' though, I think we are quite a way off that (in all products).
Asking (in Dutch) "Will it rain in Hoboken" will return the forecast for Hoboken all right, but for Hoboken, NY. Not for Hoboken, Antwerp, which is a few kilometres from where I live. Typing Hoboken in the weather app will return the Antwerp option on top, and my info has both my home and work address on this side of the Atlantic, NOT in NY. One of these small things that Siri, even respecting the privacy thing, could/should be able to figure out (I can sort of see that Siri errors on Walt's request for the weather in a place thousands of kilometres away and mixes it with something closer. Doing the opposite is more silly...)
It would be great in the car if it worked and could control the podcast/music apps I actually use. The last time I had phonecalls to make while driving, Siri's success rate was 1 out of 6.
How many AI companies has Apple acquired in the last year? 12?
And wasn't differential privacy technology just implemented?
It seems fairly obvious that Apple is seriously tooling up for the "upcoming AI wars", but they're just that: upcoming. As John Gruber just pointed out, the new Google Assistant equally fumbled a chained request.
But, surely, Apple lost time, probably for the team problems that prompted the Siri founders to leave.
And wasn't differential privacy technology just implemented?
It seems fairly obvious that Apple is seriously tooling up for the "upcoming AI wars", but they're just that: upcoming. As John Gruber just pointed out, the new Google Assistant equally fumbled a chained request.
But, surely, Apple lost time, probably for the team problems that prompted the Siri founders to leave.
I haven't used Siri since it launched years back, waste of time. Also, the first thing I did after installing macOS on my Macbook was to delete Sir's icon from the dock.
Siri screws up big time for non native english speakers, me included. I stopped using it long time ago.
Steve would have bought all the ML/AI companies way before everyone else.
I don't think it really has to do anything with SJ being gone. Besides the Apple Maps disaster there wasn't anything really to criticize. Now there is a whole pile of stuff. I'm pretty sure Apple knows they need to improve Siri. They've been buying companies to help them in this direction. Machine Learning is a pretty level playing field for the top players. Except for the possibility of one company having potentially a larger corpus, the algorithms and ANNs are pretty much equal for PAs. I really don't think there is a secret algorithm or ANN for a personal assistant that is a lot better than the other guy's.
I have two complains.
The first one is similar to what Mossberg wrote in his article, I want Siri to be able to follow a conversation and provide intelligent answers. Most of the time I get "Here's what I found for ...." and I see the results for a google search.
Second: Siri should be able to work offline for simple commands. I understand it needs to route our requests to a server if they're complex, but most of my daily interactions with Siri is like "call X", "send a message to X", "remind me to..."
Those commands really ought to work offline, sometimes you have poor connectivity and can still make a call or send an SMS but Siri is not working or is really slow so is is quicker to interact via the display. If the request is not among the default ones it is ok to go online, but most requests could be satisfied without network connectivity.
The first one is similar to what Mossberg wrote in his article, I want Siri to be able to follow a conversation and provide intelligent answers. Most of the time I get "Here's what I found for ...." and I see the results for a google search.
Second: Siri should be able to work offline for simple commands. I understand it needs to route our requests to a server if they're complex, but most of my daily interactions with Siri is like "call X", "send a message to X", "remind me to..."
Those commands really ought to work offline, sometimes you have poor connectivity and can still make a call or send an SMS but Siri is not working or is really slow so is is quicker to interact via the display. If the request is not among the default ones it is ok to go online, but most requests could be satisfied without network connectivity.
Basically Siri lowered the bar so much that even the hardest shills can't deny the obvious and hope to maintain a certain form of reliability. The acquisition of original Siri team was just a (worthless) way to remove their availabilty elsewhere.
Apple and Siri remind me an image like putting your head in the sand and hoping the storm will pass away soon.
And all of the latter public announcements on Siri's improvements and new features were... rather sad at least.
Present Siri would be awesome if only we were 6 months after its introduction and other companies were trying to introduce now their responses. Unfortunately for Apple other options are out there and very visible.
The saddest part of this is the number of years passed since first Siri's introduction and the obviously absence of tangible improvements expected in such a time lapse.
This is not their job. They're far better in other fields.
And obviously numerous acquisitions are not enough without a clear vision to follow
Apple and Siri remind me an image like putting your head in the sand and hoping the storm will pass away soon.
And all of the latter public announcements on Siri's improvements and new features were... rather sad at least.
Present Siri would be awesome if only we were 6 months after its introduction and other companies were trying to introduce now their responses. Unfortunately for Apple other options are out there and very visible.
The saddest part of this is the number of years passed since first Siri's introduction and the obviously absence of tangible improvements expected in such a time lapse.
This is not their job. They're far better in other fields.
And obviously numerous acquisitions are not enough without a clear vision to follow
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While understanding your reasoning, I still think that this is a bad example. The blu-ray thing was not having disk drives at all (DVD, Blu-ray or whatever) in their products similar Dell, HP and the rest (next to the licensing thing).
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When asking Siri "Why is Siri so dumb" it tell me "I am just trying to help".
[doublepost=1476346766][/doublepost]
That's both really funny and sad!
[doublepost=1476346766][/doublepost]
That's both really funny and sad!
Try this in Siri...
Set timer, 4, minutes.
No matter how well you phrase it or pause between words, it is unable to parse it.
EDIT: just added a 147kb file.
Set timer, 4, minutes.
No matter how well you phrase it or pause between words, it is unable to parse it.
EDIT: just added a 147kb file.
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