Things you wish Siri could do?

Software
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Continuing the discussion from Do you really need a "second brain"?:

I wish I could say, “hey Siri, my keys are on the night stand.”

Later, “hey Siri, where are my keys?”

“John, three minutes ago you said they were on the night stand.”

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Understand bilingual input properly. In German there are many English terms which Siri consistently butchers :sweat_smile:.

Same applies for a lot of other languages I guess.

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I wish Siri could reliably do all the things Apple says it can do. And I wish Siri would respond to follow up commands and/or questions. But most of all I wish Siri would respond to voice commands with verbal answers.

The other day I was listening to a podcast on my iPod Mini and said “Hey Siri, skip back 30 seconds”.

Siri responded with “Here’s what I found on the web about ‘Skip back 30 seconds’ ”.

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just wish it would do the things it’s meant to first…

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More incisive location-finding queries. E.g., would like to ask it to take me to a good cafe that has wifi and is open at least two more hours while driving. (I’d also like to be able to save a search like this in Maps.)

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Play music in my car (via Bluetooth) with a voice command without saying ‘you need to unlock your phone’. Why’s it locked? is someone in my car going to steal it?

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I just wish Siri could understand verbal input. It is literally faster to manually set a timer on my watch or phone than it is to seamlessly set the timer using Siri.

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I wish Siri would understand me… :thinking:

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So. Many. Things. Here are some examples from the last couple of days…

Hey Siri, what’s the <status> of my <Apple Device>?

  • Hey Siri, what’s the battery level of my iPhone?
  • Hey Siri, how long have I had the HomePod mini in the cabin?

Hey Siri, where is <name of person who is sharing a location with me>?

Hey Siri, when’s the next Ted Lasso going to be on?

Hey Siri, how many steps have I taken today?

Hey Siri, what’s <someone in my contacts list> address?

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Siri has gotten a little better about colloquial English. I recently discovered she understands “cut the lights off” which she didn’t used to understand.

Small consolation for all the wishes above (unless you’re in the southern US).

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my top wish is for Siri to do daily routines like Google Assistant and even better.

Other discussion on this thread

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Ah, that’s odd. We use Siri timers every day, and they work well. “Hey Siri, set a timer for five minutes.” “Hey Siri, how long on the timer?” We also occasionally set concurrent timers, one for the pasta, one for the sauce, or what have you.

Chaining commands

I really wish Siri could do this.
“Hey Siri, turn off all the lights, and turn on the sound machine.”
I could make it a scene, but just chaining commands is more natural.

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I would say that Siri correctly sets the timer 1 out of 3 or 4 times. The rest of the time, you give the complete command, then Siri responds asking how long for the timer. The processing delays just can’t keep up. It is maddening. This is after having said “Hey, Siri” 2-3 times in order to get a response in the first place. Then Siri just says “mmm-hmmm?” which is both funny and a bit rude.

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What I wish Siri could do is a combination of “what does Siri know how to do?” and “what have other developers exposed to Siri?”

Things like:

  • Hey Siri, is available on MS Teams right now? (Teams doesn’t even support “send a message with Teams” yet)
  • When is the next meeting on my Outlook calendar?
  • Where is person or device? (using Find My and reporting it, instead of just asking it to open Find My)
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Setting timers with Siri is processed on-device now. Also, you can just rattle off “Hey Siri timer ten minutes” to start it faster. I would be looking at recalibrating Siri if timers were failing more than 1% of the time, at this point.

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  • not autostart everytime someone says:
    • ssssht!
    • see this?
    • Nice weather today
    • any other normal phrase
  • actually find what I want
  • understand that “remind me to do X” actually does mean “add this to reminders” and not start playing random music
  • generally be useful instead of tech fluff
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I would love for this sequence to work:

Siri, open Music app
Siri, show albums by…
Siri scroll down
Siri play…

My car’s infotainment system has a voice interface. On any screen there’s a limited set of commands available, that roughly correspond to screen touch commands for the current screen. It’s somewhat primitive, but it lets you do nearly everything with your hands free, and it works nearly 100% of the time. Siri is worse than useless when I’m driving because it gets things wrong so often that if I try to use it, I find myself having to pay more attention to verifying and correcting (or finding that the thing that would be actually useful and should be actually simple, isn’t actually possible).

Wow! That was more ranty than I intended: Siri is very good at inspiring me to be angry :stuck_out_tongue:

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odd, never had to recalibrate Alexa or OK Google…

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Yes, I don’t know for sure what’s going on with your situation, sorry. I haven’t had to recalibrate Siri myself. It’s very good at timers.

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This. Trying to cancel navigation, I’ve had Siri do several bizarre things. Several times it claimed we weren’t navigating anywhere, as the audio was actively interrupted by the next set of directions. Multiple times it’s thought I wanted directions to someplace new. And of course there’s always the “Got it…On it…Hmmmm…something went wrong.” progression.

I get the same sort of thing, even with it on-device.

Here’s something for the list - when recalibrating Siri per Apple directions…could it maybe work? I had to flip the toggle back and forth 4-5 times (waiting a significant amount of time each time) before it decided to give me the calibration thing.