As a vocal critic of Siri, I can give you a number of reasons we hate it:

1. It seems to be actively getting worse. On a daily basis, I see it responding to queries nonsensically, like when i say “play (song) by (artist)” (I have Apple Music) by opening my Sirius app and putting on a random thing that isn’t even that artist. Other trivial commands are frequently just met with apologies or searching the web.

2. Over a year ago Apple conducted a flashy announcement full of promises about how Siri would not only do the things that it’s been marketed as being able to do for the last decade, but also things that no one has seen an assistant do. Many people believe that announcement was based on fantasy thinking and those people are looking more and more correct every day that Apple ships no actual improvements to Siri.

3. Apple also shipped a visual overhaul of how Siri looks, which gives the impression that work has been done, leading people to be even more disappointed when Siri continues to be a pile of trash.

4. The only competitor that makes sense to compare is Google, since no one else has access to do useful things on your device with your data. At least Google has a clear path to an LLM-based assistant, since they’ve built an LLM. It seems believable that android users will have access to a Gemini-based assistant, whereas it appears to most of us that Apple‘s internal dysfunction has rendered them unable to ship something of that caliber.

I think Siri has always been criticized, likely because it has never worked super well and it has the most eyes (or ears) on it (iPhones still have 50% market share in the US).

And now that we have ChatGPT with voice mode, Gemini Live, etc which have incredible speech recognition and reasoning comparatively, it's harder to argue that "every voice assistant is bad" still.

Is it just my rosie glasses or did siri work much better in the first couple of years and seem to decline continually since then. I actually used it a lot initially then eventually disabled it as it never worked anymore.

I've disabled Siri as much as I possibly can. I've never even tried to use it. I would do the same for any other AI assistant. I don't like that they are always listening, and I just don't like talking to computers. I find it unnatural, and I get irrationally angry when they don't understand what I want.

If I could buy a phone without an assistant I would see that as a desirable feature.

For the last three iOS major versions, Siri has been unable to execute the simple command "shuffle the playlist 'Jams'", or any variation, like "play the playlist Jams on shuffle". I am upset for that reason.