I'm not disagreeing with, this is one of a handful of missteps by apple.
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Walt Mossberg Calls Siri 'Too Limited and Unreliable' to Compete in 'Coming AI Wars'
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Dutch Siri is not even able to create reminders or appointments in a reliable way. How many times have I wanted to throw my phone out the window...
There should be a law forbidding Siri to be used in cars. Way too frustrating and dangerous.
And please:make her multilingual. I prefer English Siri but she doesn't understand my contact names or map destinations. And vice Versa, Dutch Siri doesn't understand music bands and songs.
There should be a law forbidding Siri to be used in cars. Way too frustrating and dangerous.
And please:make her multilingual. I prefer English Siri but she doesn't understand my contact names or map destinations. And vice Versa, Dutch Siri doesn't understand music bands and songs.
I'm one who basically just gave up. I use siri to unlock my front door and that's about it. I've seen friends trying to ask siri what album a song was on, over and over. I went to my Apple Music and looked it up and yelled the answer across the room to them. They asked "how's you do that?"
I find it very disappointing that my Amazon echo has made more advancements in the last 2 years than Siri has in 5. Having an Apple device that could replace Alexa would be nice to incorporate into my home network, but I don't see Apple putting in the effort to make it satisfying. I have since gone out and bought 2 Echos a Tap and a Dot. Today I will be signing up for the Echo only music subscription on Amazon.
I find it very disappointing that my Amazon echo has made more advancements in the last 2 years than Siri has in 5. Having an Apple device that could replace Alexa would be nice to incorporate into my home network, but I don't see Apple putting in the effort to make it satisfying. I have since gone out and bought 2 Echos a Tap and a Dot. Today I will be signing up for the Echo only music subscription on Amazon.
Apple needs an AI team devoted to SIRI, in a recent interview they said they didn't have a centralized group. This really surprised me. They also need to continually update SIRI - not just once a year. They seemed to have fixed her VR capabilities. I'm finding that to be very accurate now.
Will be a cold day in Hell before Gruber seriously bashes anything Apple, potentially damaging his precious insider relationships at Cupertino. (Plus, he's a dinky Yankees fan.
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I agree with Mossberg's assessment as to the state of Siri. But I also agree with Apple's prioritization of Siri as a means for hands-and eye free device control rather than as a general purpose information source. I really couldn't care less if Siri can name the 12th President. Apple still needs to improve Siri greatly in the area of device control; but it seems that is, in fact, their focus.
This should be a poll.
I find Siri pretty much frustrating & useless.
But there seemed to be a time when Siri worked well. Then there was an iOS change and it was down hill.
I find Siri pretty much frustrating & useless.
But there seemed to be a time when Siri worked well. Then there was an iOS change and it was down hill.
Siri is suffering from a broader illness affecting all of Apple: lack of focus.
Sure, but in your own example you said that the actual address you were driving to was very close to your actual location. Why would "context" necessarily interpret the command to mean that you were having difficulty finding the closer location? Why not interpret it to mean you needed directions to something further away since you did not use the exact name of the street you were already driving on?
I have also pretty much given up on Siri. After reading this story, though, I tried to set a reminder on my Watch:
- Me (to my Watch): Set a reminder to call Chris at 3 o clock
- Siri: I wasn't able to create your reminder. Sorry about that.
Then I tried on my phone:
- Me (to my iPhone): Set a reminder to call Chris at 3 o clock
- Siri "OK I'll remind you"
It so frustrating when basic functionality like this doesn't work as expected between connected devices
I briefly thought about un-pairing and re-pairing to see if that would make a difference, but my Watch and iPhone are synced correctly, and I get all my notifications & messages to my Watch correctly, so I don't necessarily want to do that as something else will invariably break. And, TBH, I'm just not enthused enough about Siri anymore to try.
I remember when Siri was first introduced and how groundbreaking it seemed at the time. Shame on you, Apple for running this great tech into the ground.
Then you definitely want to stay away from Android. I have an Android Wear watch and a Nexus 5x. Saying OK Google on the watch is horrible. Very Very unreliable and it makes Siri on the Apple Watch look brilliant.
I use it for a part time pizza delivery gig I work a couple nights a week...UGH! Siri will give me routes OVERSEAS sometimes when I even give the city/state(?!?) in the "route me..." statement...I wished I knew how to log the response/routes to submit the issues to Apple/Tim Cook/ANYONE that will listen. I can't believe that the 'AI' would not check every possibility for a street WITHIN the city stated BEFORE going outside of that area. I'm talking like as simple as 'Main street' or '4th Street NW' (Add city/state--which I found out early on after much frustration thinking it would check in my CURRENT SURROUNDINGS without adding the city/state info). YES, I agree with Walt and others that posted here--simple things like alarms, texts, and appointments: no problem. Asking questions that take a 5th grade intelligence level: good luck!
Ok...rant over...for now
Yes, I hate this so much I've just given up on Siri (turned Siri off and got about 30-45 minutes more usable time out of the battery, but after every update I give Siri another chance for about 30 days). Siri does an OK job in major cities with putting the destination local. As soon as you're not in a major metro area all bets are off.
I'd bet Siri works absolutely wonderfully in California around Apple's bases of operation (and frequently visited places by upper management) though. I think beyond keeping the 'bosses' happy they've just given up.
Like you, most of all I just wish Siri wasn't a one shot deal and could be corrected. "No Siri, try again" or "Not what I asked for" so Siri could learn. That's what AI is supposed to do over just a basic branching program (which I bet Siri actually is... Just a complicated branching system).
If Siri was running locally, I could understand a majority of the issues Siri has. But we were told that having Siri out there in the cloud would mean she could get better faster.
My guess is opening up Siri in iOS 10 (the biggest move Apple's made on Siri since Siri came out) will just allow Apple to skate even longer while Devs try to pick up the slack while trying not to run afoul of Apple's "guidelines". Then, when Apple identifies a spot where Siri is gaining traction with people through a Dev's hard work, Apple will just duplicate the functionality and claim that "we've improved Siri and now she can do this!" (like they did with night shift)
Mossberg spoke out against several things during Jobs' tenure. The difference is that Apple has a lot more issues now, mostly because it does so poorly with anything that requires complex network communication.
This "context" problem is something Google solved a long time ago. Here is a video of Google vs Siri testing questions with context.
This pisses me off too. And she should at least learn so the next time you ask for Dr. Jane Smith it pulls up the right one. I hate that they get their location/mapping info from 3rd party. Sometimes I will see the same restaurant marker on the map 2 or more times but in slightly different locations because someone on Yelp screwed up. And don't get me started on Apple Maps wanting me to make u-turns to get to a location. Yes, there is a median in the road separating the lanes, but there is a cutout for turning into the store. Call me stupid but I continue to use it. I make corrections when/where I can trying to help out.
Here's one thing Tim should do to start improving this: hire an SVP to run all of Apple's cloud services and machine learning efforts. Eddy Cue doesn't cut it here and he'd have more than enough on his plate with iTunes, Music, TV and Pay. Just because he was involved with getting the Apple store and iTunes online doesn't mean he gets cloud computing. So long as he is in charge Apple's cloud and AI offerings will never be as good as the competition.
One other thing....so long a certain percentage of users continue to use Apple's inferior services because of privacy how much incentive is there for Apple to really improve? They know these people aren't going anywhere. And Apple can hide behind this too. When Tim Cook says "and does god knows what with your photos" he's basically insinuating that google sells your photos to advertisers. Apple plays the privacy card to divert from their shortcomings and that will continue to work so long as consumers accept mediocrity assuming it's the trade off for privacy.
One other thing....so long a certain percentage of users continue to use Apple's inferior services because of privacy how much incentive is there for Apple to really improve? They know these people aren't going anywhere. And Apple can hide behind this too. When Tim Cook says "and does god knows what with your photos" he's basically insinuating that google sells your photos to advertisers. Apple plays the privacy card to divert from their shortcomings and that will continue to work so long as consumers accept mediocrity assuming it's the trade off for privacy.
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The day it happens then "Siri is disappointing" will be official.
Doesn't look like Siri has an issue with context there. The first web entry for the "does he have any children" question is correct for the context (Children of the Prime Minister of Canada). The difference appears to be what search term is used under the context…'Prime Minister of Canada' vs. the more specific 'Stephen Joseph Harper'.
I love using Siri for basic commands like "count down 4 hours" "Remind me to pick up bananas when I get back to this location". That latter, a recent one I had to do, I first worded as "when I get back to the car" and it didn't understand. I mean, iOS should know I was travelling at 40mph on a road - it should know I was in a car.
It's not a service I like. It's not what I expect a company like Apple to have out and I expected a huge update for it in iOS10. Oh well.
It's not a service I like. It's not what I expect a company like Apple to have out and I expected a huge update for it in iOS10. Oh well.
When I hear Siri, and "Echo Like Device" in the same sentence...the only echo I envision is me repeating my question
No, no it doesn't. I was using voice commands on my mac back in the powerpc days running at very low speeds. Also, loaded Dragon Dictate onto my iPhone 4 and it performed voice to text on the phone (without internet) just fine. So no, it has nothing to do with "compute."
The problem is Siri just takes everything you said and puts it in a web search and gives you a list of web pages. Google now answered the question directly.
Like if you asked what 2x2 is, Siri will give you a multiplication table, google now will say 4.
"A.I. Wars" sounds pretty cool until you remember that we're talking about the likes of Google Now and Alexa.