I’ve had an Apple Watch since the first version. Same for the AirPods. They’re a match made in heaven. But in all my years of use my experience has been really mixed. I take a walk twice a day. Morning walk is 4 miles, afternoon walk is 2 miles. Before I leave home, I’ll pull up a nice podcast, connect it to my AirPods Pro and hit the street. I control what I listen to with Siri. And most of the time Siri works. But enough of the time, at least enough to drive me nuts, Siri doesn’t work. And by “doesn’t work” I mean a variety of things. Maybe Siri doesn’t respond at all, like this morning. Even activating Siri directly with the crown button didn’t work. Sometimes, Siri says “working on it…” “Hmm…” “Something’s not right.” Other times Siri will tell me I don’t have that album I’m my library (which I do). Other times I’ll ask Siri to play Mac Power Users podcast and she’ll play the Beatles.
The only consistent fix I’ve found, is to unpair my watch from my iPhone, and set it back up as a new watch. This usually clears stuff up for a while, or until an update comes out. Then it’s wash, rinse and repeat.
I’m always waiting for things to get better, and they do. But the “better” comes so slowly that I’ll be a million years old before it works as expected.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, do any of you experience such stuff? And if so, what is your remedy?
I experience exactly this kind of frustration during my afternoon runs. I can’t identify a specific pattern, sometimes Siri just acts weird. I have not found a good solution. I will often pair an unpair the AirPods with my phone, and sometimes that will fix the problem. I’ve had other times when I could not get Siri to respond when using the AirPods for about a week. Then, suddenly, without any intervention on my part, Siri just starts working again.
I’ve found that I have a very low tolerance for failure when it comes to Siri voice commands. I get too frustrated by the problems (no response, “working on it”, “Hmm”, or just plain wrong response).
Thus, I’ve turned it off on all of my devices except Home Pods/minis, and about all I do now is tell it to turn off the lights. I don’t even use it to turn on the lights any more, since most of those lights are part of a Home “Scene” and I can’t seem to remember the exact syntax of that command.
That said, I do use Siri via Car Play. I use it to start phone calls and to send and dictate text messages. That works reliably — except for one person I call regularly. I only ever call their iPhone, but if I don’t specify that initially, it’s a crapshoot for which number Siri will call. I don’t have that problem for other people who have multiple numbers. Grrr.
In short, I experience what you do. My remedy? Stop using Siri voice commands.
My experiences with Siri on my watch are annoying enough that, before I leave the house for a run, I set up whatever audio I want to listen to and hit play.
My watch also likes to drop cellular for half a km or so around the 300m mark. Who knows if it’s the fault of the Watch or the cell provider, although I lean toward the Watch.
Yep. I get the podcast playing before I head out for my walk. But the walk often lasts longer than the podcast so I’m back to asking Siri for help.
My guess is that Apple knows about this. I mean, they use AirPods too. But either the fix is vastly more complicated than I think, or maybe the bad link is the cellular connection. Who knows? Makes me long for the Walkman…
So I tried disconnecting the “auto connect” feature of the AirPods. So now I pop in the AirPods Pro, fire up MPU, connect to the AirPods on my Apple watch and head out for a walk. I ask Siri the temperature and she responds. I then ask Siri to play James Taylor. She says “working on it” and then MPU podcast continues. A minute or two later I ask Siri again to play James Taylor. This time it works and I listen to JT. I then ask Siri to play the next track and she says “Working on it” …“Still Working”…“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you, can you repeat that?” So I repeat the command but no luck. For me, this is as bad as it’s ever been. My next test will be with my old AirPods. Maybe there’s something about the AirPods Pro that’s creating the issue. At the end of the day, the end user experience is way more frustrating than enjoyable.
Ok. So I guess I don’t need to beat a dead horse, but Siri hit a new low today. While walking I asked Siri to call my daughter Lindsey. She’s in my contacts and Siri has made that call a thousand times. But not this day. Instead she said “I found this on the web.” I looked at my watch and it was contact information for Senator Lindsey Graham! For me, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for Siri.
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