Comment by drewg123 2 days ago
Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote:
When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am..
And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream.
Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.
Especially when it happens at night.
But I'll not preted Google is any better. Last I used it would have call "CTO of the company I worked for" or "Send message to random friend-of-a-friend that I once helped" as suggested actions in the middle of the night. (Maybe it has improved now? I used to be comically bad, as was other large tech companies: https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails)
We need to separate three separate issues. I work with call centers and I always need to discuss all three
1. Voice to text transcriptions
2. Text to understanding
3. Adding capabilities where it can do something with #2.
The voice to text that Siri uses seems to be worse than when you are dictating using voice to text from the keyboard.
The latter gets close to 100% with my southern native English accent and does okay when I’m trying to speak Spanish. Siri messes up with English a lot more and it’s a lost cause when I try to speak Spanish.
Counter anecdote: I also have a British accent, and while I find Siri as shit as everyone else in this thread the dictation built into the iOS keyboard very rarely has a problem with my accent. I'm fairly close to Received Pronunciation, which I'd guess is one of the easier British accents for Siri to understand.
(I do often get frustrated with dictation quirks that don't have anything to do with my accent, like it choosing the obviously wrong option when their are multiple words that sound the same, especially its insistence on assuming I'm saying the name of a contact rather than the common noun that sounds the same.)
When they switched to "ML" (this was way before ChatGPT ate the world) Siri's speech to text went to absolute shit.
I suspect they had a very carefully hand-crafted model before, and replaced it with an ML model "that will fix itself over time" - and it never did.
It's always shocked me how dogshit Siri is. I run into this one every day:
"Siri, play some music"
"Sorry you will need to unlock your phone to do that"
"Siri, play some music"
<music starts playing>
I wish I could speak my unlock code so I didn't have to, you know, take my eyes off the road in order to play music or change my GPS destination or something like that.
I'm not saying that way to solve a problem, but I refuse to believe that it has to be as bad as it is. The worst part is that it's still better than the alternative of leaving the iOS ecosystem.
Apple is just so bizarre in general. I would say "nowadays" but I think they have always been like this. It took them how many decades to add a unit converter to the iPhone? And after all that time, they buried it in a menu in the Calculator app?
I know there is an infinite list of reasons Siri sucks but one that really irks me is now Siri can be integrated with ChatGPT. You can also change settings so it will automatically query ChatGPT without asking…
Yet Siri will still tell you about a web results on your phone… but sometimes same question asked? Will check ChatGPT and give you an actual answer (15% hit rate?).
ARG!!!!
hey war criminal talk is reserved for before midnight only!
"here are some pictures of pot pot"
There was a time when Siri would confirm before making a phone call. But now it will call anyone, including people I've literally never called (and rarely text), without confirmation. This seems like a bad outcome that is very easy to fix.