Quality assurance" -- ha! Siri is a brain-dead bozo who after years of "training" still cannot pronounce my daughter's name correctly....
Gee, what am I doing wrong? Mine works. Texts, reminders, timers, HomeKit, and some general data inquiries. If you're expecting any of these digital assistants to operate in a human manner with full contextual awareness, you'll find them all very disappointing.
While much more tactfully written that the previous poster who suggest I train myself first, you are still basically telling me, "Siri works well for me, so I don't see why Siri isn't working well for you too." My reply to that is very simple. How diverse is humanity? Are even two so-called identical twins alike in their thinking? No. As with everything, our expectations differ. But I see past the hype. We hear about self-driving cars and AI and all the while we have Siri who can't even do the most basic things. Sorry, folks, but there will be no SkyNet AI takeovers of the world in our lifetimes or even the in lifetimes of our great-grandchildren. Flawed human beings are the creators of the AI, and its flaws are more than apparent. AI should be renamed FI for Flawed Intelligence.
So why did I even comment at all in this thread? In part because of the hype the needs a pin-prick to deflate it, and in part because of all the people and money Apple has thrown at Siri to date. In light of those YEARS of development, Siri should be better than it is now. That's my opinion, certainly. But I don't think it too unrealistic. Apple could merely hire any child to talk to Siri in front of Siri engineers, and within 24 hours those engineers would have a wealth of information about how inept Siri is now when it comes to responding to even the most basic words of a child.
It's not about making Siri as intelligent as the human brain. It's about making Siri bearable to the human brain. I am happy for you folks who suffer fools gladly by enduring Siri. And while I have perhaps a few more expectations than you, those expectations really don't go too far beyond "accept my training, and don't forget it!" Pronounce my daughter's name correct FROM NOW ON, not just during your training routing Really, it's that simple.
All this talk about our private Siri conversations remaining on servers and getting listened to by Apple contractors is laughable in light of the fact I cannot train Siri even on the most basic ways, which remains true even if some of you have had success. In other words, Apple could come close to satisfying me (and no doubt many others too) if they rebuilt Siri to be much more trainable by end users. If Siri was built like that, I would spend hours if not days training Siri to be the best digital assistant it could be. That's really what I want most from Siri -- perceived intelligence that I play a role in creating for my benefit, and perhaps (if the information is shared) for the benefit of the rest of you as well. Too much to ask? I personally don't think so. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world or Siri, are the ones who do. We just need Apple to enable our crazy ideas to flow more directly into Siri. If I were suddenly put in charge of Siri development, that's what I'd do.
There is no way to anonymize a human voice if a recording is the actual person speaking. A voice has a very detailed voiceprint and can be stored in a data base the same as a fingerprint or facial recognition analysis.
All those preceding paragraphs and then your ultimate point -- a mere cut-low. Whether an intentional cut-low or premeditated, you are parroting, "Your holding it wrong." And all the while none of what your wrote seeks to make Siri any better. I also find it fascinating that whenever I comment on TECH and inanimate objects in this forum, Status Quo Worshippers cast their cut-lows at me, a fellow Apple fan. Therein lies the fundamental difference between us. While I have no issues chastising TECH, many of you folks for some reason have zero issues chastising me. Which is worse? (Hint: attacks on fellow human beings is worse than attacks on tech being rather inept.)
OK I may have over-emphasized please don’t take it personally. The point is we are not in such a desperate situation with Siri. There are a lot of Google search results about teaching Siri a pronunciation.
Contacts/Contact Card/Edit/Add Field/Phonetic First Name | Pronunciation first name | Phonetic middle name | Pronunciation middle name | Phonetic last name | Pronunciation last name | Nickname
If you have tried all of these and it still doesn’t work then you may submit a bug report to Apple.
Siri was developed in a time when we expected to place calls, text, set timers, get directions and perform basic data lookups. She has been upgraded, patched and enhanced over the years but she’s a dead end.
Apple discovered this dead end years ago, when conceptualizing an augmented reality device. They understood that this AR device would give Siri the gift of sight and require a different approach. Siri would need to know where you looked and what you could see. She would need to understand relevant details in a conversation and learn the device user’s voice perfectly. So Apple began work on a new AI based Siri backend that’s both fast and scalable. It needed to process voice, sound, video/picture, objects, groupings, decision trees, etc, with extremely low latency. They designed the Neural Engine within the iPhone to utilize machine learning for object identification and in the future, Siri transcriptions.
Next generation Siri is coming and she will be closer to the assistant we need, contextual aware and mapped to the users unique speech. I think I can cut Apple some slack on old Siri, I do find her constantly helpful and over 95% accurate. Even if I don’t buy Apple’s rumored (obvious future product) AR glasses, I’m sure Siri 2.0 will be an amazing paradigm shift.
Siri was developed in a time when we expected to place calls, text, set timers, get directions and perform basic data lookups. She has been upgraded, patched and enhanced over the years but she’s a dead end.
Apple discovered this dead end years ago, when conceptualizing an augmented reality device. They understood that this AR device would give Siri the gift of sight and require a different approach. Siri would need to know where you looked and what you could see. She would need to understand relevant details in a conversation and learn the device user’s voice perfectly. So Apple began work on a new AI based Siri backend that’s both fast and scalable. It needed to process voice, sound, video/picture, objects, groupings, decision trees, etc, with extremely low latency. They designed the Neural Engine within the iPhone to utilize machine learning for object identification and in the future, Siri transcriptions.
Next generation Siri is coming and she will be closer to the assistant we need, contextual aware and mapped to the users unique speech. I think I can cut Apple some slack on old Siri, I do find her constantly helpful and over 95% accurate. Even if I don’t buy Apple’s rumored (obvious future product) AR glasses, I’m sure Siri 2.0 will be an amazing paradigm shift.
Scott Forstall was the right man to lead Siri, with his Symbolic Systems degree from Stanford (Siri was initially SRI Stanford Research Institute). The foundations of Siri were laid out correctly, what would we expect from a device as limited as the iPhone 4s? In its present state Siri is a quite mature product (emphasis on product again). That maturity doesn’t exclude obviously a Siri 2.0.
Meanwhile I couldn’t find any correlation with AR that would require the creation of a brand new Siri from scratch. Is this a hype or do you have a link or documentation at hand? I found no hint regarding that in https://machinelearning.apple.com/
All those preceding paragraphs and then your ultimate point -- a mere cut-low. Whether an intentional cut-low or premeditated, you are parroting, "Your holding it wrong." And all the while none of what your wrote seeks to make Siri any better. I also find it fascinating that whenever I comment on TECH and inanimate objects in this forum, Status Quo Worshippers cast their cut-lows at me, a fellow Apple fan. Therein lies the fundamental difference between us. While I have no issues chastising TECH, many of you folks for some reason have zero issues chastising me. Which is worse? (Hint: attacks on fellow human beings is worse than attacks on tech being rather inept.)
Hang on just a minute. You're operating quite the double-standard, here, jdw. Re-read @macplusplus' comment, and you'll find that, while the comment disagrees with your assessment of Siri and includes a suggestion that you would do well to alter your expectations of what Siri is and does, there is absolutely nothing ad hominem about that post. There is nothing in that post that makes any comment on your intelligence, appearance, or whatever. In fact, it makes no critique of you, personally, at all. It merely disagrees with your critique of Siri and suggests you try a different approach. When you make a comment to criticize Apple based on your personal experience and your personal interactions with the technology (as you did), any response to that is likely to include suggestions of how you personally might interact differently with the technology to yield a different result. Such a comment need not be an attack on you, personally, and in this case, it quite clearly was not.
You, on the other hand, suggest that those who would disagree with you are "parroting" a talking point, and that they are "Status Quo Worshippers." Both of those remarks are, in fact, ad hominem attacks on the people who disagree with you. The "parroting" remark suggests that others aren't (capable of) thinking for themselves. The "Status Quo Worshippers" remark is quite literally name-calling with the clear intent to belittle anyone who would disagree with your criticism of Apple. By using this rhetoric, you are, in fact, chastising (or more accurately, belittling) people, not tech, which is the very thing you are saying is a bad thing to do. Perhaps some introspection is in order.
Please note that even here, no one is making any ad hominem remarks about you, personally. I am suggesting you try a different approach, however.
If Apple wants to record information, so they can figure out why my homepot all of sudden thinks it heard hey Siri then attempt to listen to the conversation in the rooms and provide stupid answers I'm all for it.
It seems like anytime we have number of people having discussions and we are all near the homepod Siri for some reason thinks it hears hey Siri. I can tell you no one said anything close to hey Siri. Sometime a tv show will trigger it, Apple needs to figure out why this happens.
Why do you gentlemen ASSUME I am so inept to have written what I did WITHOUT having properly trained Siri to pronounce my daughter's name correctly? I did train Siri correctly, and during the training Siri pronounced the name correctly, but then later Siri went back to the old, incorrect pronunciation. In other words, Siri is as brain-dead as I wrote in my opening post in that Siri FORGOT the training completely. And that, my friends, is only a part of why I detest the ineptness of Siri. There is so little that Siri is good at, it makes me sick. It's not like Siri came out yesterday either. Apple has had Siri in their hands for YEARS. YEARS. Why then defend Siri as if it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. It isn't. And like I said, I say this as an Apple fan with a heavy heart. Siri is far worse that MobileMe ever was. Again, imagine the tongue-trashing Apple engineers would get over Siri if Mr. Jobs was still alive. Had those engineers gotten that much needed kick in the fanny from Cook, Siri would likely be closing in on the Starship enterprise computer's intelligence. Siriously!
Don't praise the status quo. Setting our sights higher than what we have now is the heart of innovation. Strive to be better than your best, and you might surprise yourself at how well you can achieve that goal.
You haven't figured out that criticizing anything about Apple will unleash a fury here.
I opened up System Preferences but couldn't see a Dictation I asked Siri but after getting suggestions for 'vacation', 'articulation', 'mutilation' and 'aggravation' I asked DuckDuckGo (refer to dot point 4 below).
On the Mac
In the Apple menu, select System Preferences
Click Siri
Disable Enable Ask Siri
Back in System Preferences, click Keyboard > Dictation
I opened up System Preferences but couldn't see a Dictation I asked Siri but after getting suggestions for 'vacation', 'articulation', 'mutilation' and 'aggravation' I asked DuckDuckGo (refer to dot point 4 below).
On the Mac
In the Apple menu, select System Preferences
Click Siri
Disable Enable Ask Siri
Back in System Preferences, click Keyboard > Dictation
Turn Dictation off
Solid point, I'm not sure how this got changed in the text. Fixed!
Sadly, I have to agree with the commenters stating Siri is hopelessly stupid: - there’s the option to ask Siri to remind about a mail, web page, ... for months when asking Siri to remind me about this, I got a reminder titled “this”. I gave up, and now it magically works again. Exact same request. - I ask to send a message with some content (in one request) to my partner. Siri composes a message to myself that starts with the name of my partner. - I ask directions to a supermarket and she sends me across the ocean. - creating appointments is frustrating because I always end up with events titled “appointment”. Weirdly enough results may vary over time, even with the same commands. - ...
I have Siri in Dutch, maybe she’s less clever in other languages than English but she’s a weird frustrating mess. Also, nobody I know ever uses her.
Quality assurance" -- ha! Siri is a brain-dead bozo who after years of "training" still cannot pronounce my daughter's name correctly....
Gee, what am I doing wrong? Mine works. Texts, reminders, timers, HomeKit, and some general data inquiries. If you're expecting any of these digital assistants to operate in a human manner with full contextual awareness, you'll find them all very disappointing.
While much more tactfully written that the previous poster who suggest I train myself first, you are still basically telling me, "Siri works well for me, so I don't see why Siri isn't working well for you too." My reply to that is very simple. How diverse is humanity? Are even two so-called identical twins alike in their thinking? No. As with everything, our expectations differ. But I see past the hype. We hear about self-driving cars and AI and all the while we have Siri who can't even do the most basic things. Sorry, folks, but there will be no SkyNet AI takeovers of the world in our lifetimes or even the in lifetimes of our great-grandchildren. Flawed human beings are the creators of the AI, and its flaws are more than apparent. AI should be renamed FI for Flawed Intelligence.
So why did I even comment at all in this thread? In part because of the hype the needs a pin-prick to deflate it, and in part because of all the people and money Apple has thrown at Siri to date. In light of those YEARS of development, Siri should be better than it is now. That's my opinion, certainly. But I don't think it too unrealistic. Apple could merely hire any child to talk to Siri in front of Siri engineers, and within 24 hours those engineers would have a wealth of information about how inept Siri is now when it comes to responding to even the most basic words of a child.
It's not about making Siri as intelligent as the human brain. It's about making Siri bearable to the human brain. I am happy for you folks who suffer fools gladly by enduring Siri. And while I have perhaps a few more expectations than you, those expectations really don't go too far beyond "accept my training, and don't forget it!" Pronounce my daughter's name correct FROM NOW ON, not just during your training routing Really, it's that simple.
All this talk about our private Siri conversations remaining on servers and getting listened to by Apple contractors is laughable in light of the fact I cannot train Siri even on the most basic ways, which remains true even if some of you have had success. In other words, Apple could come close to satisfying me (and no doubt many others too) if they rebuilt Siri to be much more trainable by end users. If Siri was built like that, I would spend hours if not days training Siri to be the best digital assistant it could be. That's really what I want most from Siri -- perceived intelligence that I play a role in creating for my benefit, and perhaps (if the information is shared) for the benefit of the rest of you as well. Too much to ask? I personally don't think so. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world or Siri, are the ones who do. We just need Apple to enable our crazy ideas to flow more directly into Siri. If I were suddenly put in charge of Siri development, that's what I'd do.
Preach it brother! I'm not the only one that is flabbergasted by how awful Siri is. For something that has been "refined" for over 8 years now, it is barely any less inelegant than the day it was born with the iPhone 4S. In my usage, Siri is an exercise in frustration, and I'm afraid that if Apple's QA recorded any of my voice, it has been filled with words chastising and berating the software for how terrible it is.
No need to defend it. In my experience Siri is inferior to its competition. The software lacks basic comprehension of the English language, and will rearrange spoken words in a sentence into something that is completely unintelligible and grammatically incorrect. I've literally watched it change the words as I'm speaking into complete nonsense. Like so many others, I've resorted to using it to set alarms and call contacts. Everything else is a crapshoot.
When "Siri" was first mentioned prior to release, I was terribly excited about the potential market advantages Apple had over its competitors having previously implemented "Speech" and "Dictation" in Mac OS's 7/8 & 9 Control Panel services some several years earlier. At that point in time Windows had no Speech management features built in to Windows and I thought Apple, with an industry lead of just over half a decade in Speech/Dictation, was going to finally deliver a benchmark OS vocal interface with considerably improved speech recognition and greater depth and expanse of "Finder" and "Application" services. What a shock when I got around to discovering Siri's abilities were actually no better and arguably inferior to "Speech" and "Dictation" controls launched years earlier. The hours I put into teaching Siri my personal syntax and adding text spellings for the countless words and Application names Siri insisted on pronouncing incorrectly were soul destroying. Since Apple's re-launch of "Siri"-"Speech" consumers have seen Amazon, Google and Microsoft jump straight from their respective start positions to overlap Apple's place by some 4 laps ahead in the race. I do not see any way Apple is going to make sufficient headway to usurp Alexa, Cortana, Microsoft Speech Recognition", "Google G Suite" for nutters happy selling their non-existent souls to a mythical Behemoth familiar called "Google Chrome". Then we have the Independent Developer apps like Dragon, Brains Pro and other feature rich and truly accurate Text to Speech or Speech to Text apps. I will remain optimistic about Apple's future plans for Speech and AI Home controller Tech and Apps. I won't hold my breath though.
Comments
While much more tactfully written that the previous poster who suggest I train myself first, you are still basically telling me, "Siri works well for me, so I don't see why Siri isn't working well for you too." My reply to that is very simple. How diverse is humanity? Are even two so-called identical twins alike in their thinking? No. As with everything, our expectations differ. But I see past the hype. We hear about self-driving cars and AI and all the while we have Siri who can't even do the most basic things. Sorry, folks, but there will be no SkyNet AI takeovers of the world in our lifetimes or even the in lifetimes of our great-grandchildren. Flawed human beings are the creators of the AI, and its flaws are more than apparent. AI should be renamed FI for Flawed Intelligence.
So why did I even comment at all in this thread? In part because of the hype the needs a pin-prick to deflate it, and in part because of all the people and money Apple has thrown at Siri to date. In light of those YEARS of development, Siri should be better than it is now. That's my opinion, certainly. But I don't think it too unrealistic. Apple could merely hire any child to talk to Siri in front of Siri engineers, and within 24 hours those engineers would have a wealth of information about how inept Siri is now when it comes to responding to even the most basic words of a child.
It's not about making Siri as intelligent as the human brain. It's about making Siri bearable to the human brain. I am happy for you folks who suffer fools gladly by enduring Siri. And while I have perhaps a few more expectations than you, those expectations really don't go too far beyond "accept my training, and don't forget it!" Pronounce my daughter's name correct FROM NOW ON, not just during your training routing Really, it's that simple.
All this talk about our private Siri conversations remaining on servers and getting listened to by Apple contractors is laughable in light of the fact I cannot train Siri even on the most basic ways, which remains true even if some of you have had success. In other words, Apple could come close to satisfying me (and no doubt many others too) if they rebuilt Siri to be much more trainable by end users. If Siri was built like that, I would spend hours if not days training Siri to be the best digital assistant it could be. That's really what I want most from Siri -- perceived intelligence that I play a role in creating for my benefit, and perhaps (if the information is shared) for the benefit of the rest of you as well. Too much to ask? I personally don't think so. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world or Siri, are the ones who do. We just need Apple to enable our crazy ideas to flow more directly into Siri. If I were suddenly put in charge of Siri development, that's what I'd do.
Settings/General/Accessibility/ Speech/Pronunciations/Add (+)
Contacts/Contact Card/Edit/Add Field/Phonetic First Name | Pronunciation first name | Phonetic middle name | Pronunciation middle name | Phonetic last name | Pronunciation last name | Nickname
If you have tried all of these and it still doesn’t work then you may submit a bug report to Apple.
She has been upgraded, patched and enhanced over the years but she’s a dead end.
Apple discovered this dead end years ago, when conceptualizing an augmented reality device. They understood that this AR device would give Siri the gift of sight and require a different approach. Siri would need to know where you looked and what you could see. She would need to understand relevant details in a conversation and learn the device user’s voice perfectly.
So Apple began work on a new AI based Siri backend that’s both fast and scalable. It needed to process voice, sound, video/picture, objects, groupings, decision trees, etc, with extremely low latency. They designed the Neural Engine within the iPhone to utilize machine learning for object identification and in the future, Siri transcriptions.
Next generation Siri is coming and she will be closer to the assistant we need, contextual aware and mapped to the users unique speech.
I think I can cut Apple some slack on old Siri, I do find her constantly helpful and over 95% accurate. Even if I don’t buy Apple’s rumored (obvious future product) AR glasses, I’m sure Siri 2.0 will be an amazing paradigm shift.
Meanwhile I couldn’t find any correlation with AR that would require the creation of a brand new Siri from scratch. Is this a hype or do you have a link or documentation at hand? I found no hint regarding that in https://machinelearning.apple.com/
By the way, interesting read to get an idea of the huge science behind detecting just those two words: “Hey Siri”:
https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html
You, on the other hand, suggest that those who would disagree with you are "parroting" a talking point, and that they are "Status Quo Worshippers." Both of those remarks are, in fact, ad hominem attacks on the people who disagree with you. The "parroting" remark suggests that others aren't (capable of) thinking for themselves. The "Status Quo Worshippers" remark is quite literally name-calling with the clear intent to belittle anyone who would disagree with your criticism of Apple. By using this rhetoric, you are, in fact, chastising (or more accurately, belittling) people, not tech, which is the very thing you are saying is a bad thing to do. Perhaps some introspection is in order.
Please note that even here, no one is making any ad hominem remarks about you, personally. I am suggesting you try a different approach, however.
I opened up System Preferences but couldn't see a Dictation
On the Mac
- there’s the option to ask Siri to remind about a mail, web page, ... for months when asking Siri to remind me about this, I got a reminder titled “this”. I gave up, and now it magically works again. Exact same request.
- I ask to send a message with some content (in one request) to my partner. Siri composes a message to myself that starts with the name of my partner.
- I ask directions to a supermarket and she sends me across the ocean.
- creating appointments is frustrating because I always end up with events titled “appointment”. Weirdly enough results may vary over time, even with the same commands.
- ...
I have Siri in Dutch, maybe she’s less clever in other languages than English but she’s a weird frustrating mess. Also, nobody I know ever uses her.
No need to defend it. In my experience Siri is inferior to its competition. The software lacks basic comprehension of the English language, and will rearrange spoken words in a sentence into something that is completely unintelligible and grammatically incorrect. I've literally watched it change the words as I'm speaking into complete nonsense. Like so many others, I've resorted to using it to set alarms and call contacts. Everything else is a crapshoot.
I will remain optimistic about Apple's future plans for Speech and AI Home controller Tech and Apps. I won't hold my breath though.