PassingBy

elijahg said:

I used to love my HP, but I have gradually fallen out of love with it over Siri. The sound quality is great, but thats about it. Siri is plain terrible, and seems to be getting worse, at least versus Alexa/Google Home. I thought when Apple introduced a new speaker with its main UI being Siri, they'd prioritise making Siri less crap. But apparently not. For anything other than the most basic of music playing commands, it either:

• Misunderstands what I say (though that is reasonably rare now, maybe 10% of the time, was 30%)
• Misinterprets what I mean (30% of the time)
• Misses the "Hey Siri" keywords (10% of the time)
• Siri activates on the wrong device (30% of the time)
• Doesn't work because of a "network issue" when everything else is fine (was never, now 20%)
• Fails to find my phone on the network despite it being on the network and working fine - this usually happens when adding reminders, despite it having access to the reminders via iCloud (was never, now 30% of the time)
• Answers "I can't do that/find the answer to that on HomePod" (most questions that are not related to iOS itself. I'm always surprised when it answers correctly)

Which adds up to mean it doesn't work often enough that if my phone is in the same or next room, it takes less time to go and get it and use Siri on my phone directly, or just use the UI. There are non-Siri related issues too, both of mine seem to have lost their auto gain settings, because when using Facetime Audio people complain they can't hear me. Also the audio stream regularly stops for a bit and we lose each other for 5-10 seconds. No such issue with my phone on the same network. Oh and the activation light being on the top is dumb, because you don't know if Siri has activated unless the HP is lower than you are. This is all really unfortunate, because it has really soured my view of the HP which is potentially a great device.