The only people using Shortcuts on a regular basis are power users like Federico Vittici. It’s great for power users but the average iOS user shouldn’t be expected to know or learn scripting to get the most out of Siri.
I would consider myself very nearly a power user and I can’t seem to figure out shortcuts. I’ve tried a couple times and I just can’t make sense of it. To make matters worse, all the examples seem to just be training Siri to open an app with a command you make up and do one simple thing. I just can’t figure out why it’s so hard to open an app and tap a button, but I feel like I’ve got to be missing something. Furthermore, why should I even have to tell Siri I’m at the gym? Shouldn’t “it” just know and turn on do not disturb without me having to even think about it once I set it up? And that’s another thing, limited access to settings. I couldn’t set up a shortcut to have Siri turn off vibrate when I got to work even if I wanted to take the time to figure it out, and then blab it to her every weekday when I arrived at my place of employment.
I’d love to figure out what’s so great about shortcuts, but between its (quite un-Appleesque) learning curve, and the seemingly minor time savings, I’ll be waiting until either someone illuminates me or the app/process becomes both easier to use and more useful.
Apple could split its company into 2: the current Apple with all its business and sales - and the Apple Tech, a seperate entity that focus only on tech seperate from all the stakeholders worriness about the money spent.
And to the point of the article, there is a "voice assistant that can do everything" and a "voice assistant that does only what you need effectively and efficently". Siri is obviously the later. I found myself using it more often than talking to Alexa, which was exciting at first but later just gathering dust.
It’s called an Editorial because facts are now controversial in an era where everyone thinks their opinion is valuable just because it occured to them to be right, regardless of any factual basis supporting it.
This article, as is generally the case with AI’s editorials, is short on facts and long on opinions and conclusions that resolve in favor of the author’s Apple bias. For example, statement that Shortcuts made Siri “ultra powerful” is pure unsupported hyperbole.
There is no objective metric by which Siri is better than just about every other voice assistant. Siri can’t even set a wake up alarm with 100% accuracy in a given week.
The author also discusses voice assistants as if the war has already been fought and is now over, with Apple the clear winner. Neither is correct, though it’s a position that furthers the author’s pro-Apple agenda.
Funny how you guys ignore the 99 anti-Apple crap articles/videos/ads/etc. and bash DEDs lonely articles that are the last to include facts...
I use Siri all the time. I do have a echo dot and a google mini to play around with along with a couple HomePods. Out of them all, my #1 go to device is my Apple Watch. It’s everywhere I’m at. It’s not locked into s room by a power cable. It can be outside with me. I have to say Siri works really well on it. I think a big thing with these voice assistance is home control and I’m a HomeKit house.
Google and Amazon, I paid $30 for those devices. Have never once ordered anything from them. I have a Ecobee 4 with Alexa built in and yet Siri is just easier to use with it. I play with all 3 of them and they all have their own pros and cons. The list of apps with Siri shortcut controls continue to grow. So you don’t have to even use the shortcut app. I do think it’s a fantastic feature and needs some more advertising from Apple.
Have you been to Alexa’s Skill store? There’s a lot of then, but looking at the reviews of them, they’re lucky if they can get 3 stars. A large percentage are not rated all that high. It’s a ton of crap. You would think that Alexa wold just work on my Ecobee 4 as it’s built in. Why not? But no, you have to go to Amazon and activate the skill for it. I’m also not a fan of having to ask or tell Alexa to do something and with what. Siri and even Google are smarter in this area than Alexa who plays dumb. For example, if I want to adjust the temp, with Siri I can just say "Hey Siri, or on Apple Watch, not even say that, Adjust temp to 68." It’ll do it. It knows what I’m talking about. With Alexa, I have to say something like "Alexa, tell Ecobee to set temp to 68". Again the tell it to do something and what device. It gets worse when I have to say MySmartBlinds to control those.
DED articles are the girl that cried "Wolf!", it's fun in the beginning but after a few years it gets boring and predictable.
The boy who cried wolf is a story about lying and then subsequently not being taken seriously.
The “DED articles” you malign with your mangled-nonsensical metaphor haven’t “cried wolf” about anything. Specific to Alexa and voice, they’ve set a record of being consistently correct for years while punditry were spewing grand forecasts and dire warnings about a lot of wolf-stuff that never ended up happening.
And if you want to take real action about being boring and predictable, look in the mirror. Your comments are ceaselessly, pointlessly, embittered naggy barbs that don’t add anything to the conversation.
No reason to be so aggressive. He actually IS right, while often interesting and sometimes correct, your articles tend to be far too wordy and one-sided. Even something called an Editorial can be balanced and focused. Just a hint from a former journalist gone app developer.
It would be great to simplify this content into memes or video to reach a broader audience.
What would you suggest would bring more “balance” or “focus” to this piece? Fewer examples of predictions that turned out false? Less evidence of the negative ROI Amazon got from developing a low value, albeit often impressive technology? I’d appreciate your feedback.
Fewer examples, yes, that would be a good start. Gather all the evidence you need to make sure your hypothesis is correct, and then choose a few to make your point in the text. You know, this is an "Editorial", not a PhD thesis. You're welcome.
Siri is ok for me. I’m not a heavy user, but she gets it right much of the time. I can do simple unit conversions, arithmetic, check the outside weather, get the football scores and schedules just by talking to my Watch. That’s convenient.
This entire article is heavy with straw-grasping. I dont think the author goes to IFA, CES, CEDIA, ISE, is an insider, or has solid overview of the industry.
In terms of scale, it's Google Assistant''s race to lose, with 1 billion GA devices as of Jan 2019 and Android at 80-85 percent of global smartphone shipments.. , Chromecast Built-in a far larger supported audio and video casting standard than AirPlay, Android TV taking over the pay TV industry as a platform (over 100 operators and counting} and so on.
However Alexa still has the lions share of smart home support, but it's rapidly equalizing between Alexa and GA. Siri and HomeKit are an afterthought in most industry conversations about the smart home. Voice has indeed become the new primary interface there and Apple is trying feverishly to get relevance back. Hence trying to push a handful of new HK products at CES, striking AirPlay 2 deals, and putting up building sized banners during CES - a show normally Apple couldn't care less about in the past.
If you think Alexa, and Echo sales, have amounted to nothing, then you're having a checkers thought process in a chess level topic. There's a lot of pro Apple bias here in the writing compromising any honest assessment.
Come back to this article in a year and see how it reads. Apple snatched up Giannandrea in order to help drastically shore up Siri, a hail Mary hire they wouldn't need if Siri was in a good position or faring well competitively. With their privacy stance, they can never leverage cloud data for personalization the way Google can - so their only card to play is to go very deep into on-device based AI and machine learning. Which I expect them to excel at. However much of the market is leveraging cloud based services. Not just intelligence.
Siri and HomePod issues are interrelated, in that they're indicative of Apple having lost the plot competitively. The pressure is on them now to change tack.
Apple's HomePod sold about 3 million units across just the second half of last year, generating more than another billion in revenue at its debut. That's equivalent to the revenues of 20 million units of Echo Dots (when they're not on sale), but HomePod is profitable. Nobody predicted that Apple would be earning more money than Amazon from "smart speakers" back at the peak of Alexa hysteria.
There is no meaningful proof from Apple on the number of HomePods sold to substantiate this 3 million number or that the half year revenue exceeded $1Billion dollars as Apple never broke out figures for it in its financials. I would even say the fact that Apple never mentioned hard numbers about units , revenue, ASP , or Profit points to how much it is a failure (which is why the linked articles suggests the need for a cheaper unit to compete with Alexa. I would be surprised it Apple passed $2 Billion in revenue for the considering the number of sales for $250 I saw in the holiday season but it's still a possibility. The author seems to like to pick and choose which "Surveys" he finds credible and which he attacks. A later survey (https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/02/05/homepod-holding-at-6-percent-of-growing-us-smartspeaker-market) indicates only 3.96 Milllion sold for the year indicating Holiday sales were mostly ineffective to move the HomePod into the mainstream beyond the initial the debut 3 million of sales to Apple loyalists.
br> But for Amazon, the idea that 5,000 people were working on a loss leader novelty feature that wasn't accomplishing anything across years of monumental investment was just plain exciting. Even more so was that fact that Amazon was also trying to hire hundreds more to work on its "Alexa engine" and "Alexa machine learning." And even more exciting was the fact that Amazon was building its own urban campus in the middle of Seattle for $4 billion, featuring giant Spheres full of plants. .. The tightly integrated nature of Siri means that even a significantly better voice competitor wouldn't be enough to gut and replace Apple's $200 billion worth of annual hardware sales. Apple's users can make use of Alexa, or Assistant or even Cortana without changing their hardware and without removing Siri functionality.
Also think about how many years HomePod has been available. It’s just part of 2018.
And again, you’re attacking the idea that the article is defending Siri as the best, when that’s not even implied in the title, the lede, the article, or in the conclusion.
So 3.96 - 3.00 = 0.96 units in the second half of the year when you have the big holiday sales season. Even through bring in an extra million for foreign sales I would say HomePod is a flop. A big one. At least they dropped the price by $50. but I'm not even sure that helps. Maybe they will give them away at cost just for the Music sign ups, but they also appear to be maxing out there.
I will say this. Cook should thank Bezos for creating Alexa and the Echo because otherwise Google would solely dominate this area. At least I can usefully do voice commands around my house without resorting to Google. The danger is if Amazon every brings out a Prime phone that grabs lots of iPhone users. Don't most survey's say that Amazon is more trusted and better liked than Apple now.
Siri is dead last when it comes to usefulness (and accuracy) in voice assistants. I
Based on what?
Not according to recent accuracy/ability studies.
And if you actually read the piece, you’ll get a better understanding of why your unsubstantiated claim isn’t even relevant.
One important worrisome aspect is Siris lack of recognizing and speaking ‘names’, at least in other languages than English. Dutch street names are not recognized, nor are Dutch names of people. Also pronouncing such names is really bad. This is core functionality and absolutely essential to all other (possible) functionality. I know this is Apples problem, because my car (Peugeot 2008) can do this perfectly with its more than excellent navigation system.
The only people using Shortcuts on a regular basis are power users like Federico Vittici. It’s great for power users but the average iOS user shouldn’t be expected to know or learn scripting to get the most out of Siri.
I would consider myself very nearly a power user and I can’t seem to figure out shortcuts. I’ve tried a couple times and I just can’t make sense of it. To make matters worse, all the examples seem to just be training Siri to open an app with a command you make up and do one simple thing. I just can’t figure out why it’s so hard to open an app and tap a button, but I feel like I’ve got to be missing something. Furthermore, why should I even have to tell Siri I’m at the gym? Shouldn’t “it” just know and turn on do not disturb without me having to even think about it once I set it up? And that’s another thing, limited access to settings. I couldn’t set up a shortcut to have Siri turn off vibrate when I got to work even if I wanted to take the time to figure it out, and then blab it to her every weekday when I arrived at my place of employment.
I’d love to figure out what’s so great about shortcuts, but between its (quite un-Appleesque) learning curve, and the seemingly minor time savings, I’ll be waiting until either someone illuminates me or the app/process becomes both easier to use and more useful.
I didn't try it myself yet, but I’m afraid it is similar to ‘automator’ on the mac, very promising, but mostly useless and impossible to understand.
This entire article is heavy with straw-grasping. I dont think the author goes to IFA, CES, CEDIA, ISE, is an insider, or has solid overview of the industry.
In terms of scale, it's Google Assistant''s race to lose, with 1 billion GA devices as of Jan 2019 and Android at 80-85 percent of global smartphone shipments.. , Chromecast Built-in a far larger supported audio and video casting standard than AirPlay, Android TV taking over the pay TV industry as a platform (over 100 operators and counting} and so on.
However Alexa still has the lions share of smart home support, but it's rapidly equalizing between Alexa and GA. Siri and HomeKit are an afterthought in most industry conversations about the smart home. Voice has indeed become the new primary interface there and Apple is trying feverishly to get relevance back. Hence trying to push a handful of new HK products at CES, striking AirPlay 2 deals, and putting up building sized banners during CES - a show normally Apple couldn't care less about in the past.
If you think Alexa, and Echo sales, have amounted to nothing, then you're having a checkers thought process in a chess level topic. There's a lot of pro Apple bias here in the writing compromising any honest assessment.
Come back to this article in a year and see how it reads. Apple snatched up Giannandrea in order to help drastically shore up Siri, a hail Mary hire they wouldn't need if Siri was in a good position or faring well competitively. With their privacy stance, they can never leverage cloud data for personalization the way Google can - so their only card to play is to go very deep into on-device based AI and machine learning. Which I expect them to excel at. However much of the market is leveraging cloud based services. Not just intelligence.
Siri and HomePod issues are interrelated, in that they're indicative of Apple having lost the plot competitively. The pressure is on them now to change tack.
If you want to factually rebut anything in the article, you need to have some facts and logic.
If GA is so popular and widespread, why is everyone with any money buying iPhones instead of buying Google Pixel, or any one of the many cheap androids? Apple has majority installed base in the US and Japan, and 20.9% even in China--effectively tied with Huawei and Oppo (according to Morgan Stanley). That's counting the whole country, not just the affluent urban areas where most of Apples users are. That "80-80% of shipments" being Android is less meaningful when you consider that most of the phones sold in China and India (to 2 billion people) are not using Google anything, they're AOSP devices. So they can't run GA. And outside of China, the largest Android maker is Samsung, which is competing with GA with its own Bixby. So rather than "being GA's race to lose," Google is just spending a lot of money offering a nice service that it can't monetize very effectively, while making nothing from hardware sales. The relevance of Chromecast and Android TV sounds like you are the one "grasping at straws." Is that because everyone is clamoring for GA voice, or because its free software? Think about that a bit.
Now please explain how Alexa has accomplished anything by giving away Echos across four years. Lets' see your chess level logic.
And while we have to wait for another year to "come back in an year," we can already go back 1, 2, and 3 years and see what has happened, how little Alexa has accomplished vs what was promised--that's the point of the article that blew over your head.
The fact that you can allude to "issues" (which you didn't even lay out) isn't necessarily a problem. Microsoft had all sorts of issues in the 90s while it was making virtually all of the money in PCs. Apple is currently making massive revenues and profits in every category it touches. Again, what does Google or Amazon have to show for their massive investments in voice, given that their voice services haven't managed accomplish any commercial goals?
So 3.96 - 3.00 = 0.96 units in the second half of the year when you have the big holiday sales season. Even through bring in an extra million for foreign sales I would say HomePod is a flop. A big one. At least they dropped the price by $50. but I'm not even sure that helps. Maybe they will give them away at cost just for the Music sign ups, but they also appear to be maxing out there.
I will say this. Cook should thank Bezos for creating Alexa and the Echo because otherwise Google would solely dominate this area. At least I can usefully do voice commands around my house without resorting to Google. The danger is if Amazon every brings out a Prime phone that grabs lots of iPhone users. Don't most survey's say that Amazon is more trusted and better liked than Apple now.
You are having trouble with those numbers
Also, what makes you think "Google would solely dominate" internet microphones if Amazon hadn't given it an idea to copy? Google can't sell phones, tablets, netbooks, TV boxes, watches or anything else. It's making a big zero in hardware despite a decade of trying. Amazon spent a half decade on its "prime phone" and lost tons of money. The company gives away its tablets and Echos. If Amazon thought it had some shot in converting iOS users to Amazon phone buyers, why hasn't it tried anything from 2014-2019? Apple's brought in another $200 billion in hw profits since Fire Phone fizzled out at launch.
This entire article is heavy with straw-grasping. I dont think the author goes to IFA, CES, CEDIA, ISE, is an insider, or has solid overview of the industry.
In terms of scale, it's Google Assistant''s race to lose, with 1 billion GA devices as of Jan 2019 and Android at 80-85 percent of global smartphone shipments.. , Chromecast Built-in a far larger supported audio and video casting standard than AirPlay, Android TV taking over the pay TV industry as a platform (over 100 operators and counting} and so on.
However Alexa still has the lions share of smart home support, but it's rapidly equalizing between Alexa and GA. Siri and HomeKit are an afterthought in most industry conversations about the smart home. Voice has indeed become the new primary interface there and Apple is trying feverishly to get relevance back. Hence trying to push a handful of new HK products at CES, striking AirPlay 2 deals, and putting up building sized banners during CES - a show normally Apple couldn't care less about in the past.
If you think Alexa, and Echo sales, have amounted to nothing, then you're having a checkers thought process in a chess level topic. There's a lot of pro Apple bias here in the writing compromising any honest assessment.
Come back to this article in a year and see how it reads. Apple snatched up Giannandrea in order to help drastically shore up Siri, a hail Mary hire they wouldn't need if Siri was in a good position or faring well competitively. With their privacy stance, they can never leverage cloud data for personalization the way Google can - so their only card to play is to go very deep into on-device based AI and machine learning. Which I expect them to excel at. However much of the market is leveraging cloud based services. Not just intelligence.
Siri and HomePod issues are interrelated, in that they're indicative of Apple having lost the plot competitively. The pressure is on them now to change tack.
If you want to factually rebut anything in the article, you need to have some facts and logic.
If GA is so popular and widespread, why is everyone with any money buying iPhones instead of buying Google Pixel, or any one of the many cheap androids? Apple has majority installed base in the US and Japan, and 20.9% even in China--effectively tied with Huawei and Oppo (according to Morgan Stanley). That's counting the whole country, not just the affluent urban areas where most of Apples users are. That "80-80% of shipments" being Android is less meaningful when you consider that most of the phones sold in China and India (to 2 billion people) are not using Google anything, they're AOSP devices. So they can't run GA. And outside of China, the largest Android maker is Samsung, which is competing with GA with its own Bixby. So rather than "being GA's race to lose," Google is just spending a lot of money offering a nice service that it can't monetize very effectively, while making nothing from hardware sales. The relevance of Chromecast and Android TV sounds like you are the one "grasping at straws." Is that because everyone is clamoring for GA voice, or because its free software? Think about that a bit.
Now please explain how Alexa has accomplished anything by giving away Echos across four years. Lets' see your chess level logic.
And while we have to wait for another year to "come back in an year," we can already go back 1, 2, and 3 years and see what has happened, how little Alexa has accomplished vs what was promised--that's the point of the article that blew over your head.
The fact that you can allude to "issues" (which you didn't even lay out) isn't necessarily a problem. Microsoft had all sorts of issues in the 90s while it was making virtually all of the money in PCs. Apple is currently making massive revenues and profits in every category it touches. Again, what does Google or Amazon have to show for their massive investments in voice, given that their voice services haven't managed accomplish any commercial goals?
Apple makes more money, therefore Siri is a better voice assistant than Alexa. Great logic, great facts /s
Seriously, I have zero idea what the problem is with people who claim Siri (not an acronym, Jdw) can’t understand them, but I suspect they get a lot of humans that don’t understand them either. Like any other assistant, you do have to use certain keywords to maximize your success, like saying “remind me” if you want to set a reminder rather than a calendar date, or “I have a/set a [meeting, appointment, date]” if you want it to be in Calendar, etc.
I use Siri all the time for all kinds of things, and don’t generally have an issue. Certainly, it occasionally refers me to a webpage rather than directly answering, but not on any of my 20+ usually daily commands, which might include “tell my wife I’m running late” or “send an email to [name]; I’ll be happy to meet with you on Tuesday 10AM” or “open [website or app]” or “remind me to pick up dinner stuff when I leave here” or “what movies are playing near me,” “what song is this” and so forth. Those all work flawlessly, as does dictation.
Siri may not be better than other assistants, but it doesn’t spy on me, either — and it does 95 percent of what I want it to do.
The article isn’t making the case that Siri “shouldn’t be better.” It’s outlining failed expectations of voice services. And comparing the outcomes of different, parallel efforts to develop and deliver valuable voice services... It’s called an Editorial because facts are now controversial in an era where everyone thinks their opinion is valuable just because it occurred to them to be right, regardless of any factual basis supporting it.
Thank you for your "Corrections," but even those remarks don't correct SIRI's most fundamental flaws.
Until Apple makes SIRI much smarter than now, any and all articles that closely resemble that topic are mostly irrelevant. Such "editorials" merely direct our attention toward SIRI and make us reflect on its deficiencies.
P.S. I corrected your misspelling of "occurred" in the above quote, which something I'm sure you can appreciate. :-)
Like any other assistant, you do have to use certain keywords to maximize your success...
I use Siri all the time for all kinds of things, and don’t generally have an issue...
But I like Apple because it's not like other tech companies, and in like manner I want SIRI to be better so those "certain keywords" are no longer necessary to "maximize your success." And just because you don't have issues does not automatically mean others do not. SIRIously!
While I am I the Shortcut Beta program, and extensively experiment with its capabilities (and Workflow before it), I don't think the vast majority of Apple iPhone users have ever bothered with it or know it exists. It's a great supplement to Siri, and fantastic for automation gurus, but it doesn't excuse Siri being so far behind in general voice capabilities from Alexa. And I don't mean Skills that integrate with ever other electronic device in your house via a special phrase, just simple basic stuff:
Me: "What time will it be in 9 hours" Siri: "The time is 10am" Alexa: "In 9 hours will be April 14th at 7pm"
There are just so many basic questions I've asked Siri that she simply cannot understand, that 90% of the time I just use Alexa instead. There is also a consistency issue across Siri appliances. Siri on my phone/watch != Siri on my MacBook Pro != Siri on HomePod. Absolutely no reason why Siri on a MacBook Pro connected to the internet couldn't do everything Siri from the Phone/Watch can.
Funny, ’cause I just asked Siri “What time will it be nine hours from now” and it answered correctly. Including the key “now”—which is both proper context and grammar—seems like a no-brainer to me. But I’m also not a lazy @ss user that smashes the mouse up and down on the desk and then whines about how it doesn’t work. Maybe that’s the difference.
While intuitiveness is a worthy goal, most things in life require you to find out, or figure out, what works. Stop being lazy, people.
I can see why you got out of grinding out bland, corporate crap if you can’t recognize long form journalism from an author with a particular style, nor the canard that is “objective balance”. Just a hint from a writer and linguist that still works in those fields.
i was actually impressed when siri shortcuts came out. i’ve only managed to make one voice command script though and i wish apple would remind me and market the awesomeness of the feature.
Comments
I would consider myself very nearly a power user and I can’t seem to figure out shortcuts. I’ve tried a couple times and I just can’t make sense of it. To make matters worse, all the examples seem to just be training Siri to open an app with a command you make up and do one simple thing. I just can’t figure out why it’s so hard to open an app and tap a button, but I feel like I’ve got to be missing something. Furthermore, why should I even have to tell Siri I’m at the gym? Shouldn’t “it” just know and turn on do not disturb without me having to even think about it once I set it up? And that’s another thing, limited access to settings. I couldn’t set up a shortcut to have Siri turn off vibrate when I got to work even if I wanted to take the time to figure it out, and then blab it to her every weekday when I arrived at my place of employment.
I’d love to figure out what’s so great about shortcuts, but between its (quite un-Appleesque) learning curve, and the seemingly minor time savings, I’ll be waiting until either someone illuminates me or the app/process becomes both easier to use and more useful.
And to the point of the article, there is a "voice assistant that can do everything" and a "voice assistant that does only what you need effectively and efficently". Siri is obviously the later. I found myself using it more often than talking to Alexa, which was exciting at first but later just gathering dust.
Funny how you guys ignore the 99 anti-Apple crap articles/videos/ads/etc. and bash DEDs lonely articles that are the last to include facts...
Google and Amazon, I paid $30 for those devices. Have never once ordered anything from them. I have a Ecobee 4 with Alexa built in and yet Siri is just easier to use with it. I play with all 3 of them and they all have their own pros and cons. The list of apps with Siri shortcut controls continue to grow. So you don’t have to even use the shortcut app. I do think it’s a fantastic feature and needs some more advertising from Apple.
Have you been to Alexa’s Skill store? There’s a lot of then, but looking at the reviews of them, they’re lucky if they can get 3 stars. A large percentage are not rated all that high. It’s a ton of crap. You would think that Alexa wold just work on my Ecobee 4 as it’s built in. Why not? But no, you have to go to Amazon and activate the skill for it. I’m also not a fan of having to ask or tell Alexa to do something and with what. Siri and even Google are smarter in this area than Alexa who plays dumb. For example, if I want to adjust the temp, with Siri I can just say "Hey Siri, or on Apple Watch, not even say that, Adjust temp to 68." It’ll do it. It knows what I’m talking about. With Alexa, I have to say something like "Alexa, tell Ecobee to set temp to 68". Again the tell it to do something and what device. It gets worse when I have to say MySmartBlinds to control those.
You're welcome.
In terms of scale, it's Google Assistant''s race to lose, with 1 billion GA devices as of Jan 2019 and Android at 80-85 percent of global smartphone shipments.. , Chromecast Built-in a far larger supported audio and video casting standard than AirPlay, Android TV taking over the pay TV industry as a platform (over 100 operators and counting} and so on.
However Alexa still has the lions share of smart home support, but it's rapidly equalizing between Alexa and GA. Siri and HomeKit are an afterthought in most industry conversations about the smart home. Voice has indeed become the new primary interface there and Apple is trying feverishly to get relevance back. Hence trying to push a handful of new HK products at CES, striking AirPlay 2 deals, and putting up building sized banners during CES - a show normally Apple couldn't care less about in the past.
If you think Alexa, and Echo sales, have amounted to nothing, then you're having a checkers thought process in a chess level topic. There's a lot of pro Apple bias here in the writing compromising any honest assessment.
Come back to this article in a year and see how it reads. Apple snatched up Giannandrea in order to help drastically shore up Siri, a hail Mary hire they wouldn't need if Siri was in a good position or faring well competitively. With their privacy stance, they can never leverage cloud data for personalization the way Google can - so their only card to play is to go very deep into on-device based AI and machine learning. Which I expect them to excel at. However much of the market is leveraging cloud based services. Not just intelligence.
Siri and HomePod issues are interrelated, in that they're indicative of Apple having lost the plot competitively. The pressure is on them now to change tack.
I will say this. Cook should thank Bezos for creating Alexa and the Echo because otherwise Google would solely dominate this area. At least I can usefully do voice commands around my house without resorting to Google. The danger is if Amazon every brings out a Prime phone that grabs lots of iPhone users. Don't most survey's say that Amazon is more trusted and better liked than Apple now.
Dutch street names are not recognized, nor are Dutch names of people.
Also pronouncing such names is really bad.
This is core functionality and absolutely essential to all other (possible) functionality.
I know this is Apples problem, because my car (Peugeot 2008) can do this perfectly with its more than excellent navigation system.
If GA is so popular and widespread, why is everyone with any money buying iPhones instead of buying Google Pixel, or any one of the many cheap androids? Apple has majority installed base in the US and Japan, and 20.9% even in China--effectively tied with Huawei and Oppo (according to Morgan Stanley). That's counting the whole country, not just the affluent urban areas where most of Apples users are. That "80-80% of shipments" being Android is less meaningful when you consider that most of the phones sold in China and India (to 2 billion people) are not using Google anything, they're AOSP devices. So they can't run GA. And outside of China, the largest Android maker is Samsung, which is competing with GA with its own Bixby. So rather than "being GA's race to lose," Google is just spending a lot of money offering a nice service that it can't monetize very effectively, while making nothing from hardware sales. The relevance of Chromecast and Android TV sounds like you are the one "grasping at straws." Is that because everyone is clamoring for GA voice, or because its free software? Think about that a bit.
Now please explain how Alexa has accomplished anything by giving away Echos across four years. Lets' see your chess level logic.
And while we have to wait for another year to "come back in an year," we can already go back 1, 2, and 3 years and see what has happened, how little Alexa has accomplished vs what was promised--that's the point of the article that blew over your head.
The fact that you can allude to "issues" (which you didn't even lay out) isn't necessarily a problem. Microsoft had all sorts of issues in the 90s while it was making virtually all of the money in PCs. Apple is currently making massive revenues and profits in every category it touches. Again, what does Google or Amazon have to show for their massive investments in voice, given that their voice services haven't managed accomplish any commercial goals?
You are having trouble with those numbers
Also, what makes you think "Google would solely dominate" internet microphones if Amazon hadn't given it an idea to copy? Google can't sell phones, tablets, netbooks, TV boxes, watches or anything else. It's making a big zero in hardware despite a decade of trying. Amazon spent a half decade on its "prime phone" and lost tons of money. The company gives away its tablets and Echos. If Amazon thought it had some shot in converting iOS users to Amazon phone buyers, why hasn't it tried anything from 2014-2019? Apple's brought in another $200 billion in hw profits since Fire Phone fizzled out at launch.
I use Siri all the time for all kinds of things, and don’t generally have an issue. Certainly, it occasionally refers me to a webpage rather than directly answering, but not on any of my 20+ usually daily commands, which might include “tell my wife I’m running late” or “send an email to [name]; I’ll be happy to meet with you on Tuesday 10AM” or “open [website or app]” or “remind me to pick up dinner stuff when I leave here” or “what movies are playing near me,” “what song is this” and so forth. Those all work flawlessly, as does dictation.
Siri may not be better than other assistants, but it doesn’t spy on me, either — and it does 95 percent of what I want it to do.
Until Apple makes SIRI much smarter than now, any and all articles that closely resemble that topic are mostly irrelevant. Such "editorials" merely direct our attention toward SIRI and make us reflect on its deficiencies.
P.S. I corrected your misspelling of "occurred" in the above quote, which something I'm sure you can appreciate. :-)
But I like Apple because it's not like other tech companies, and in like manner I want SIRI to be better so those "certain keywords" are no longer necessary to "maximize your success." And just because you don't have issues does not automatically mean others do not. SIRIously!
While intuitiveness is a worthy goal, most things in life require you to find out, or figure out, what works. Stop being lazy, people.