Comment by elAhmo

In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures.

All chat bots suffer this flaw.

GUIs solve it.

CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.

I’m looking at you, Photos sync.

EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right (https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losi...)

Ironically this manages to break all four of Apple's famous UI principles from Bruce Tognazzini: discoverability, transparency, feedback and recovery

Yeah, it's a classic CLI v GUI blunder. If you don't know exactly what the commands are, the interface is not going to be particularly usable.

I've found I appreciate having Siri for a few things, but it's not good enough to make it something I reach for frequently. Once burned, twice shy.

Siri does have a "Ask me some things I can do" feature, but the problem is it's way too big; most of the things are things I don't care about ("Ask me for a joke", "Ask me who won the Superbowl last night"); and a lot of times even forx things I can do, its comprehension is just poor. "Hey Siri, play me Ein Klein Nachtmusik by Mozart". "OK, here's Gonna Pump Big by Diddy Q[1]". "Hey Siri, tell Paul I'm on my way". "OK, calling Mike smith".

[1] Made up title

This is just the conversational interface issue. You need the system to be able to do most of the things you would expect a human to be able to do (e.g. if you're talking to your phone, you'd expect it to be able to do most phone things). If the conversational system can only do a small subset of those, then it just becomes a game of "discover the magical incantation that will be in the set of possibilities", and becomes an exercise in frustration.

This is why LLMs are the first conversational interface to actually have a chance of working, once you give them enough tools.

I didn’t know for years that you can ask it to do things remotely over SSH.

My favorite is when you have Siri off but CarPlay on. You can be actively navigating, but say “find me the nearest X” and it’ll say “I’m sorry, I don’t know where you are”

You would think it's the opposite. "I'll tell you where the gas station is because it's preferable to you looking at a screen in your death can"

Asking “what’s the weather” in the morning gets Siri to yell at you about the phone being locked, or even “I don’t know where you are”.

It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage.

Timers and alarm clocks it is.

> voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case

You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while.

If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single function in a driving car should be controllable by voice, and so could a lot of phone and computer functions.

It's great interface when your hands are doing something else so I do see the appeal.

Just that... nobody is willing to pay much for a thing that will do some basic search, dictate a recipe, or do unit conversion, or add a thing to a list.

Alexa has this annoying habit of being non-deterministic.

> Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights.

> OK lights turn on

In the evening:

> Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights.

> I'm sorry, I don't know a device called "bedroom lights".

How is it even possible to build a computer system that behaves like this?

Alexa has gotten significantly worse with the "Alexa+" AI updates. I used to be able to say stuff like "Alexa, set the lights to 5" and it would turn the lights to 5% in the room I was currently in. Now half the time it tries to start a conversation about the number 5, or the northern lights, or other random nonsense. Absolute garbage.

Strong disagree. I would say 90% of the text I “write” on my phone is speech to text. I wouldn’t use ChatGPT nearly as much if I had to type out paragraph prompts every single time.

Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems like text to speech in the ChatGPT prompt window uses the context around it in the paragraph to fix what I’m saying so it is inordinately accurate compared to the rest of the iOS system.

the thing I find most frustrating about the music use-case is that if you ask it to play an album, then close out Siri after the confirmation bing noise, but before it finishes reading back to you the artist and album name it's about to play, then it will treat that as a cancellation and it won't play the album.

for example I say: "play comically long album title by artist on Spotify", it thinks about that for five seconds, does the bing noise, then says "playing comically long album title [special remastered edition] by artist on Spotify", and then a few seconds later starts playing the album, and if you don't wait through that whole thing it will just decide that actually you didn't want to hear the album

Telling it to find directions in CarPlay but you have to say “using Google Maps” at the end. It’s pretty good for finding directions with voice only.

It is ridiculously useless for most things though. Like I’ll ask it a question on my Apple Watch and it will do a web search and give me a bunch of useless links.

Directions when I’m in the car.

Tell me my next event when I’m driving.

Hey, my 10 HomePods are able to turn off 80% of my lights at night, 80% of the time!

My original HomePod has recently regressed in its ability to play songs. It can no longer play one song after another without glitching and repeating a little bit of the previous song. It boggles my mind.

Until LLMs came along, there wasn’t much you could do to improve Siri’s underlying technology. You could throw a thousand monkeys at to add more phrases it could match on and improve the interface to let you know what you could do. But that’s about it.

Siri has changed once it its (her?) lifetime.

When they introduced "machine learning" it started working much worse - things that used to work 99% of the time (if you knew the incantation) now randomly fail in inexplicable ways.

And now it never gets my kids' names right. If I'm doing voice-to-text I will actually see it flash the correct spelling, and then replace it with some random phrase.

> I'm not ever going to talk to my phone

Maybe you won't, but there's still value in being able to use it hands free. "Hey Siri, call (name) on speaker" is something I regularly ask it to do while I'm driving.

I remembered a third one:

3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play <song/artists>", it asks me for access to Pandora (which I do have on my phone). I don't want to play it on Pandora. I have the song! I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to change this, and neither the youtube video I found searching nor this reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/y18ioq/changing_the_de...) seems to work.

Amusingly (?) the reddit people have the opposite problem. They want to use a 3rd party music app but can't get their phones to stop preferring Apple-provided apps.

I can sometimes get this to work by saying "Play <song/artist> on Apple Music", but even that is not reliable.

I have experienced some similar issues. I think some of it related to the "locked" state of the device. Siri needs context data to answer, particularly the mom or some destination questions. Specifically for contacts or recent places data. This context isn't remotely stored, but provided by the device to Siri each time. I think when the phone is locked it doesn't have access to the data (reading or writing). When I mean "Siri", I mean both the on device and remote parts of it.

I think this also interacts with countries and states that have (possibly misguided) strict laws forbidding the "touching" of phones "while driving". My experiences suggest that using Siri when driving and the device is locked, it just gives up - I sort of see the start of it working then, bam, it stops. If I retry, I suspect that I've somehow "looked" at the phone in frustration, it saw my attention and unlocked. I now wonder if where I have placed the device is making a difference.

It does seem to work much better (when driving) if the device is already unlocked.

I also see odd things when using Shortcuts for navigation. If I've previously asked for walking directions and then speak the shortcut while driving it won't give directions until I switch to the "car" icon in maps. I think it might be trying to calculate the 15Km walking directions, but it doesn't complete before I tell it, frustrated, to stop.

When Siri doesn't work it is usually the times when I need it to. This is definitely a multiplier in disastisfaction.

I back this, it used to work very well for me. Timers, music, etc. Now it's like I'm trying to ask a toddler.

I would love to know why Siri has clearly deteriorated. I assume it’s opaquely failing due to server infrastructure not keeping up. Thought device-side was supposed to help with that. That’s another thing I’d like to understand — what are the moving parts to Siri?

Hey I tried to use Siri to call my mom ~half a week ago and it said it didn't know who my mother was. I did find it weird since although I don't use Siri much, I was almost certain I've had success with that exact same request before, and haven't changed my contacts recently.

Interesting that you've also had that problem.

Yeah I've been having this with directions for a while too. It generally takes on the second try but a good 30% of the time I'm getting the same acknowledgement it's getting directions and then just silently failing.

The competition has suffered too. The companies seem to have collectively written the category off.

Oh the things they could have done with Google Now. I want to know the story behind it's death if any insiders are lurking around.

Ugh Google Now on my Pixel 3 was the last time I felt a genuine "wow" factor with tech. Everything since then has been between eye-rolling, uninteresting, or just worse.

Does anyone have an actual technical theory of how it’s possible for commands that used to work , say a month ago, to just stop working?

What is it about Siri’s architecture that causes “Set bedroom light to 30%”, a command that worked for years, to randomly stops working on a random Tuesday with no OS update or home change?

I mean, what on earth are they doing on the back end…?

Apple seems weird about that and I'm not sure why, maybe accuracy or creepiness factor?

A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.