elijahg

Xed said:

elijahg said:

Wesley Hilliard said:

elijahg said:

gavinthain said:

Bingo_Wings said:

This is starting to look like Copland part deux from the late 90s. Steve Jobs and NextStep saved Apple then. Who will ride to the rescue this time?

What exactly needs outside Support to rescue this? This is a software company saying, we're sorry but we need a bit more time.

They've had 12 years since Siri's debut, but clearly they have done nothing at all to improve Siri in that time. So now trying to reverse that neglect and cram sky-high improvements into < 1 year has turned out to be impossible. Robby Walker is clearly responsible for this lack of improvement - he came over from the Cue acquisition back in 2013 - and seems to have sat on his hands ever since. He needs to be moved on.

 The only reason bad Siri has been fairly accepted by the world is because barely anyone uses it - Maps was a huge disaster as it's such a well-used app. But Apple got on that and totally fixed it within a couple of years. Siri has been a joke for an embarrassingly long time. And it is a joke - people defending it here saying they don't have a problem because they only ask it a couple of different, limited and specific queries are totally missing the point about a "personal assistant".

Can't really take a comment seriously when they say something like "they have done nothing" in 12 years, "barely anyone uses it." Give me a break. Siri is one of the most used assistants on the planet simply because of the number of Apple products. It might be the butt of jokes, but that's because of the same problem we've seen with AI companies over promising and under delivering. All the modern assistants are jokes because companies like Amazon and Google promised that they would change the world with a talking computer from the Jetsons. What we got was a reminders machine that can play music and turn the lights on.

Stick to what Siri can do and it works fine.

It needs work, sure. It's not perfect. None of them are. But this world view is out of touch with reality. What exactly do you want Siri to do that it doesn't do today? File your taxes?

I'm exhausted by over exaggerating drama queen nerds. Siri not working the way you want sometimes is at worst a mild inconvenience.

This is far worse than the underpromises from AI companies. A machine that you can sometimes persuade to remind you, turn lights on and play music is all we've ever had from Siri. Ask your Homepod to add "Thyme" to your shopping list. It just keeps asking "what should I add?". Ask it to add pasta bake. Ask it to add tomato sauce. 50% of the time it will say "i have added those two things". I asked it to turn off the TV. It said "which room", then listed 4 rooms of which only one has a TV in. I told it the room, it made the boo-beep noise and nothing happened. Steve promised it to be "conversational", 12 years later and it still fails at the most basic comprehension.

I know 8 or 9 people with iPhones and Apple Watches. None of them ever use Siri, because every time they ask it to do something it fails. It fails too often to be worth using unless its the only input source.

There were things it used to do that it now cannot. It regularly used to bounce the question to Wolfram Alpha, which often could answer. But that integration seems to have stopped, and along with it Siri's usefulness went down several notches. But you're right, trying to persuade Siri to do what you want by formulating the sentence in a special way is exhausting. At least Alexa has extensions which you can leverage to perform more complex tasks. HomePod can't directly run shortcuts, it needs an iPhone on the local network, so it can't do anything directly, unlike Alexa.

We're all Apple fanbois, but some of us can admit when Apple has failed, and they have failed with Siri. Apple isn't perfect, and sometimes they need criticism. And clearly, if you think "sticking to what it can do and it works fine" is a) acceptable after 12 years, and b) actually the truth, you obviously do not use it enough to judge how bad it is. In any case - if it is fine now, why is Apple revamping it with Apple Intelligence? ...and, why has the long-time Siri chief just been removed?

So you're claiming that these 8 or 9 people that you know never hit that nifty button on the steering column when CarPlay is connected to make call, send a text, or get directions? Never? Not even once?

I'm the only one of those 8 or 9 who has Carplay, so yes. Carplay is one place Siri is more reliable, because the things you ask it to do are less complex: playing music, sending texts, driving directions. Even then, the texts it sends often switch out words for something that makes no sense. With contextual understanding Siri would be able to fix that and replace the word it heard wrongly with the similarly sounding one that fits - but it doesn't.

Wesley Hilliard said:

elijahg said:

gavinthain said:

Bingo_Wings said:

This is starting to look like Copland part deux from the late 90s. Steve Jobs and NextStep saved Apple then. Who will ride to the rescue this time?

What exactly needs outside Support to rescue this? This is a software company saying, we're sorry but we need a bit more time.

They've had 12 years since Siri's debut, but clearly they have done nothing at all to improve Siri in that time. So now trying to reverse that neglect and cram sky-high improvements into < 1 year has turned out to be impossible. Robby Walker is clearly responsible for this lack of improvement - he came over from the Cue acquisition back in 2013 - and seems to have sat on his hands ever since. He needs to be moved on.

 The only reason bad Siri has been fairly accepted by the world is because barely anyone uses it - Maps was a huge disaster as it's such a well-used app. But Apple got on that and totally fixed it within a couple of years. Siri has been a joke for an embarrassingly long time. And it is a joke - people defending it here saying they don't have a problem because they only ask it a couple of different, limited and specific queries are totally missing the point about a "personal assistant".

Can't really take a comment seriously when they say something like "they have done nothing" in 12 years, "barely anyone uses it." Give me a break. Siri is one of the most used assistants on the planet simply because of the number of Apple products. It might be the butt of jokes, but that's because of the same problem we've seen with AI companies over promising and under delivering. All the modern assistants are jokes because companies like Amazon and Google promised that they would change the world with a talking computer from the Jetsons. What we got was a reminders machine that can play music and turn the lights on.

Stick to what Siri can do and it works fine.

It needs work, sure. It's not perfect. None of them are. But this world view is out of touch with reality. What exactly do you want Siri to do that it doesn't do today? File your taxes?

I'm exhausted by over exaggerating drama queen nerds. Siri not working the way you want sometimes is at worst a mild inconvenience.

This is far worse than the underpromises from AI companies. A machine that you can sometimes persuade to remind you, turn lights on and play music is all we've ever had from Siri. Ask your Homepod to add "Thyme" to your shopping list. It just keeps asking "what should I add?". Ask it to add pasta bake. Ask it to add tomato sauce. 50% of the time it will say "i have added those two things". I asked it to turn off the TV. It said "which room", then listed 4 rooms of which only one has a TV in. I told it the room, it made the boo-beep noise and nothing happened. Steve promised it to be "conversational", 12 years later and it still fails at the most basic comprehension.

I know 8 or 9 people with iPhones and Apple Watches. None of them ever use Siri, because every time they ask it to do something it fails. It fails too often to be worth using unless its the only input source.

There were things it used to do that it now cannot. It regularly used to bounce the question to Wolfram Alpha, which often could answer. But that integration seems to have stopped, and along with it Siri's usefulness went down several notches. But you're right, trying to persuade Siri to do what you want by formulating the sentence in a special way is exhausting. At least Alexa has extensions which you can leverage to perform more complex tasks. HomePod can't directly run shortcuts, it needs an iPhone on the local network, so it can't do anything directly, unlike Alexa.

We're all Apple fanbois, but some of us can admit when Apple has failed, and they have failed with Siri. Apple isn't perfect, and sometimes they need criticism. And clearly, if you think "sticking to what it can do and it works fine" is a) acceptable after 12 years, and b) actually the truth, you obviously do not use it enough to judge how bad it is. In any case - if it is fine now, why is Apple revamping it with Apple Intelligence? ...and, why has the long-time Siri chief just been removed?

gavinthain said:

Bingo_Wings said:

This is starting to look like Copland part deux from the late 90s. Steve Jobs and NextStep saved Apple then. Who will ride to the rescue this time?

What exactly needs outside Support to rescue this? This is a software company saying, we're sorry but we need a bit more time.

They've had 12 years since Siri's debut, but clearly they have done nothing at all to improve Siri in that time. So now trying to reverse that neglect and cram sky-high improvements into < 1 year has turned out to be impossible. Robby Walker is clearly responsible for this lack of improvement - he came over from the Cue acquisition back in 2013 - and seems to have sat on his hands ever since. He needs to be moved on.

 The only reason bad Siri has been fairly accepted by the world is because barely anyone uses it - Maps was a huge disaster as it's such a well-used app. But Apple got on that and totally fixed it within a couple of years. Siri has been a joke for an embarrassingly long time. And it is a joke - people defending it here saying they don't have a problem because they only ask it a couple of different, limited and specific queries are totally missing the point about a "personal assistant".

Clarus said:

citpeks said:

Apple is secure now, but it's not the same hungry, risk taking company it was.

I strongly disagree with this. Apple has done several things in the past few years that are in the same category of “the industry thinks that’s a dumb risky overpriced idea, the next Apple failure” that turn out to be the opposite.

Apple Watch
AirPods
Apple Silicon Macs

None of those things were really risks. If they failed, the R&D write off would be barely a blip on their profits. If the iPhone failed, it would have been a disaster considering the vast R&D spend on it and Apple's relatively small size then.