Siri needs to be useful, period.

When my phone is sitting on my countertop and I say "hey siri, add eggs to my shopping list" I expect it to add eggs to my shopping list, as it has done so for years, instead of saying "you'll need to unlock your iPhone first."

When I'm driving my car merging onto the highway and I see furniture on the ramp, and I say "hey siri, call the local non emergency police department number" so that I can report it, I expect it to say something like "I have the [city name] non-emergency phone number, want me to call now?" Instead of it saying "calling the New Jersey police department" which is halfway across the continent from me, and then giving me no way to hang up the phone hands free forcing me to grab my phone from the console and quickly try to hang it up while I'm driving at highway speeds.

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post-it an hour ago | parent | next [-]

- When I'm driving and I say "Hey Siri, navigate to Walmart" I expect it to begin navigating and not show me a button which I must press to begin navigating.

- When an alarm is going off on my phone and I say "Hey Siri, turn off the alarm," my laptop or HomePod should not answer to say there is no alarm.

- When I say "Hey Siri, add eggs to my grocery list," my HomePod should not think for 20 seconds and then tell me to check my connection, despite both it and my phone being on very strong wifi.

- When I say "Hey Siri, add eggs to my shopping list," it should add them to my "Groceries" list and not tell me there is no list named "shopping."

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el_benhameen an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, the “new” Siri described in this article is not the Siri I’ve been interacting with. Basic speech to text is still flawed; I have to enunciate slowly and clearly with no background noise or it will make absurd mistakes that would be obvious if the context of the prompt and the phone were considered. Adding a reminder to a list is now slower and more error prone than with the old Siri, like you said. I have to sit and delicately hold the phone or watch to avoid disturbing it while it thinks, lest it decide that I’ve moved on and give up on its task. I tried to push it a little by asking for the title of the last podcast episode I listened to; it started talking about a podcast I’d never heard of nor even pulled up on the phone before garbling the second half of its sentence and then going silent.

	▲	ghm2180 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I suspect it's regressed because they actually don't have good e2e evals comparing the two experiences to test the regression and UX. Like the simplest evals you want is just a shit ton of STTs across human speech accounting for dialects, accents etc and then figuring out how the distribution of errors has moved or increased on the axis you care about. That they likely have. But then you have to integrate that into the product to capture the entire funnel of errors, which I suspect is the part they don't have. The stacks are not "vertically integrated" to test quickly.
	▲	rolosa an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Dictation being so terrible is truly wild to me and I don't understand it. On my M5 MBA literally any of the vibe coded local dictation apps that come up (and there are like, hundreds of them!) are better than the built in macOS dictation. They are much faster and the AI text cleanup is so much better than whatever the Apple foundation models are doing.

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wl 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Another example from yesterday: I’m using CarPlay. A text message notification pops up. I ask Siri to read the message. Siri says there are no recent messages. More notifications pop up. Siri still has no idea.

This used to work just fine.

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mpweiher an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Instead of it saying "calling the New Jersey police department" which is halfway across the continent

Yeah, that's Apple's generally broken maps search. It regularly and consistently just brings up the wildest things from the farthest reaches of the Universe (well, usually restricted to Planet Earth, barely), when I am clearly looking for something local.