Are we over-criticizing Siri?

[jen]

My 7 yr old always says, “Siri stinks” and that’s mostly from when we’re driving and I ask Siri to play sounds and… it’s nearly always wrong the first time. I mean weirdly wrong and I actually am trying to speak very clearly AND it’s songs that we play constantly.

We have an Alexa in the kitchen and even when we try to ask cooking questions or whatnot - Alexa always understands us better and gives better answers. I would LOVE it if I could just use Siri across everything, but between never getting the song correct and also routing me to places in other states when driving… I can’t trust it.

Also, I get “hmm, just a moment” way too often.

[WayneG]

@webwalrus

I’m not sure that the contents of all one’s Internet activity are necessarily available via other sources

You’re right. I can’t know for certain what information is collected by my our ISPs. I do know, as a former network admin, I could see everything everyone in our company was doing online, identified by user. So I’ve always assumed that, in my case, Comcast and AT&T have tracking tools light years ahead of what I used.

[webwalrus]

Yup. Somebody could work around that with a VPN though if they were so inclined - and the ubiquity of SSL means that sites are exposed, but URLs and data are encrypted. So the amount of data they have is probably less than it could be.

[anon54919170]

@webwalrus

Apple does send all Siri data off-device though already, and some of it actually gets reviewed by humans. So it’s not as private as some people would like to think.

You have to ability to toggle it off during setup and in the settings app.

@webwalrus

The question to me is whether it would be required to have this data “off device”. I mean…can’t Siri just (for example) learn from me, on my device? Or come up with some sort of super-encrypted iCloud sync where only I can access the data?

Cache? Neural engine (which not all Apple products have)?

Out of curiosity, how is Cortana?

[webwalrus]

@anon54919170

You have to ability to toggle it off during setup and in the settings app.

Right, but my point is that the “bad” Siri is still “bad” despite at least some data going off-device.

@anon54919170

Cache? Neural engine (which not all Apple products have)?

You don’t need an elaborate cache or a neural engine to make Siri much, much better. Quite honestly, on-device dictation on the iPhone already supports everything that would be needed to make Siri both more reliable and much better.

Like timers. “Set a 15 minute timer” can be transcribed, by the iPhone, instantly using built-in voice-to-text. But Siri times out.

Or even just request queueing. If it can’t reach the Internet for whatever reason, just store the request somewhere. Or say “hey, I can’t connect right now - should I add this as soon as I’m able?”

And of course this assumes that they fix the problem where Siri just completely drops requests on the floor.

These are all relatively easy things that don’t require fancy caching or a neural engine.

@anon54919170

Out of curiosity, how is Cortana?

I don’t know, but Cortana isn’t being marketed as my always-there digital assistant for my whole home.

[webwalrus]

Let me put it this way…

You have a self-driving car. It’s an average car. Not great, but not horrible. It’s called the Amazon Car. It sends your entire travel itinerary to Amazon, Google, and the government. So the privacy is horrible, but it gets you to your destination very reliably. The couple times it’s off, it’s because the address is legitimately hard to find. You’re always in the right neighborhood.

Now you see an Apple Car. It’s also self-driving. It’s shiner. The engine isn’t as noisy. It has better sound. The seats are more comfortable. It fits in your garage a little better. And the best thing? They don’t send your travel itinerary to anybody.

SOLD!

There’s just one problem…

Every morning when you go out to the garage to drive to work, there’s a 1 in 50 chance that it won’t start. Not a major hassle, only 1 in 50 days - about once every two months. But when it won’t start, you have to go back in the house, wait 5 minutes, and try again. Sometimes you have to reboot your car.

But 1 in 10 times, after you put in your destination, it takes you somewhere else. Sometimes somewhere else that’s not even close to where you wanted to go. When you get there, it proudly announces that you’ve arrived. The screen in your car had transcribed the address you gave it, and that’s correct - but the car thinks that “Burger King on 80th Street in Atlanta, GA” means “McDonald’s on Edwards Avenue in Tulsa, OK”.

And occasionally, when you’re in traffic, it just decides that it doesn’t know what to do and shuts off.

You talk to other Apple Car owners, and their cars have been doing this as well - for the past 9 years. Given that Apple Car is also at least twice the price of Amazon Car, are you happy with your purchase? Can you recommend it to friends? Would you buy another Apple Car?

That’s where Siri is at.

[ACautionaryTale]

And also the car doesn’t have a manual transmission option

[Lars]

@ACautionaryTale

…doesn’t have a manual transmission option

Then…I am not buying it!

[leo]

@anon54919170

Are we over-criticizing Siri?

No.

We are approaching almost a decade of having Siri, which was released in 2011.
Simultaneous multi-lingual autocorrect has been around since iOS10 and therefore since 2016.
Besides Siri taking too long to compute your queries and find the results on the web or locally, it is still not possible to use Siri in an at least bilingual context. It starts with street names, store types or other POIs, news/pop culture, or other local references in search queries and ends with simple things like setting a timer and forgetting to “language context switch” to English before making the query so you end up doing it in your mother tongue.

A lot of people nowadays that live in non-English speaking countries are confronted with English all day long on the web and in their job. A lot of them will set their device’s UI language to English because it is the lowest common denominator and unifies things. English is the language you’ll find the most tutorials in for software (Matlab, Photoshop …) in and almost every documentation for a programming language or their libraries is also in English, it is also widely used in academia, but still for everyday input we all default to our mother tongue.

Switching Siri to all English makes it hardly usable with any locale-specific input.

[anon54919170]

@webwalrus

I don’t know, but Cortana isn’t being marketed as my always-there digital assistant for my whole home.

Sigh… I miss those days.

Cortana for Windows Phone 8.1 hands-on

[webwalrus]

Although of course the difference is that if Microsoft had stayed in that market, they would’ve been iterating and improving this whole time.

Apple still struggles with tasks that a very average programmer, given one thing - the ability to have the phone answer to “Hey (program name)”, and just send it the transcribed text - would be able to do with a trivial amount of effort.

[anon85228692]

Siri sucks, period. It sucks on my watch where it can’t add reminders to lists correctly named. It sucks on my HomePods where it can’t find the music I have in my library. It sucks on my Mac where it takes forever to do anything. It sucks on my phone where it can’t ever add things to third party apps because the app has not been called with the exact nonsensical accent it expects in French.

I’ve given up on it completely except for asking for the weather and controlling a few HomeKit devices (and even then it fails one times out of three). I pilot everything the old way (including remote controlling my HomePods through my phone). It has reached the point where having Siri come up in Apple presentations makes me angry: it can’t even do basic things, stop adding features on such a rotten foundation. It’s a disgrace.

[Ajay]

Yup, Siri is pretty bad and I gave up on it ages ago. Ever so often I give it a shot, only to find it to be far behind Alexa. I’ve been a happy Alexa user and increasingly depend on it for things such as alarms, timers etc. I find using the alarm on my Echo Dot far more helpful than on the iPhone as I don’t have to fiddle with and have to look at a screen first thing in the morning. I’m hard pressed to find instances in which Alexa misunderstands me or is unable to respond to queries.

[Bmosbacker]

@tjluoma

From all of their comments, Siri is slower, less accurate, and worse at answering questions and queries.

Conclusion: No, we aren’t over-criticizing Siri

Sadly, that is my experience exactly. My experience with my Alexa devices is much better.

[anon54919170]

@webwalrus

Although of course the difference is that if Microsoft had stayed in that market, they would’ve been iterating and improving this whole time.

With any substantial gains though?

Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are ahead of the game. Data collection makes a big difference.

Samsung Bixby and Microsoft Cortana are sort of just sitting in a corner doing nothing.

[ACautionaryTale]

@anon54919170

Data collection makes a big difference

In this space, data collection is everything. Neural Engines on device give you very little without massive quantities of data, something that Apple hasn’t wanted to get into yet.

[anon54919170]

@ACautionaryTale

something that Apple hasn’t wanted to get into yet.

Nor will they ever do that…

Apple is practically in bed with privacy. If they want to redeem Siri, they need to completely destroy her and rebuild from scratch (with an actual decent foundation this time).

[ACautionaryTale]

@anon54919170

with an actual decent foundation

Massive data gathering is the only currently known way to make Siri kinds of things work in any way that doesn’t involve swearing on the part of the user. Apple’s refusal to do this is why Siri is terrible. I’m okay with that

[anon54919170]

@ACautionaryTale

Apple’s refusal to do this is why Siri is terrible.

What should they do to improve Siri then?

[ACautionaryTale]

That’s an interesting question and I’m not sure what the answer is. If Apple wants to get into the actually-effective, truly-intelligent assistant game then they have to try to reconcile that with their privacy stance. Otherwise they either have to rebrand Siri as something far more limited, or accept that Siri will continue to be the punch line of jokes.