Ben Bajarin:
The key behavior usages between both assistants is not a surprise since Google is, and will always be, better than Siri at searching the web. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s data and they will do that better than anyone. Therefore their AI agent will always be the best at search. The challenge we have today with consumer sentiment around Siri is with its weakness for general Internet search. If consumers do this regularly and want to use a voice assistant for searching and general information queries, Siri is not going to beat Google. Apple’s challenge is to help consumers understand the jobs where Siri is best.
I agree with Ben with everything in this article. My problem is that I tried to use Siri to schedule appointments and do some of the life duties that it’s supposedly so good at. The problem is, it didn’t work that well, and when something doesn’t work well, I stop using it. That’s what happened with Siri for me.
The new Siri could be the most amazing assistant at managing my life that AI has ever seen, but I’ve lost so much confidence in using it, that I may never find out. Instead of fighting with Siri to get something done, I’ll just manually add an appointment or reminder myself.
My most used Siri command these days is: “Set a timer for 5 minutes.”
Siri does that really well.
I find Siri pretty good at adding quick appts in my calendar (or reminders) that I don’t want to forget. That I can refine and fine-tune later, if I want any level of sophistication in the calendar entry.
Jim, remember, a watched iPhone never boils 😉
“Siri will know about my family in ways in other digital assistants can’t.”
Siri still CANNOT GET that my wife’s name is “Fawn,” not “phone.”
And yet Siri adds appointments, sets timers and reminders and the like just fine for me.
The place where I have the most issue is voice control in the car but that’s the crappy mic on the dash. Turn it off and just talk to the phone directly and it’s fine.
Siri has a mode where you train her for things like that – See this post: https://www.imore.com/how-to-teach-siri-to-pronounce-a-name-correctly
“How much snow are we supposed to get?”
“Yes, it’s going to snow tonight”
Alternatively you could also tell Siri :
“Fawn is my wife” Then you could simply ask next time :
“Hey Siri, call my wife.”
I often use :
“Hey Siri, call mom … Home … on speaker”
So that she’ll call my mother’s home number (and not ask me which number, home or mobile) and turn on the speaker. I tried identifying my ex-wife but she insisted on assigning her as my wife.
Well, you should try it again Jim … or at least every few years as it has improved with time and it does learn and hopefully iOS 11 will learn even more. Mind you it learns a lot from my speech too as I also use dictation a lot (email, texting, notes) because I dislike typing on a full size mechanical keyboard let alone a tiny virtual glass one. I’ve been using Siri from the get go to much satisfaction and of course some frustration as well. I ‘invoke’ her for timers, alarms, reminders and appointments of course but also to initiate a call, especially in the car, what weekday a date is, quick conversions, USD to CAD, US to metric or their other unit denominations, sports scores, find out if a celebrity is dead or resolve many other types of disputes, and more.
I also really appreciate being able to summon up directions. I went to Keystone for a wedding last week and navigation was so great not just to get there from Denver and back, but also to join siblings for dinner staying a few miles away, and for some touring around the area to Vail and such. Last year visiting my brother in Cape Cod, as my ABA (Anything But Apple) Samsung toting sister-in-law was sending me off, she asked if I needed assistance to get back home just as I got settled in the driver’s seat. I simply smiled back, thanked her for her hospitality and uttered : ‘Hey Siri, take me home’. Siri promptly (well, after a slight delay) gave the first direction as I started the car and I do believe I distinctly heard an unintentional muffled “Wow” just outside the car.
The fault of this is Apple themselves. Look at a lot of the ads that Apple launched Siri with. They were search type queries, “What’s the weather outside,” “Find me a recipe for gazpacho*,” etc. You can’t complain that the expectations for Siri don’t match what Siri is good at when the expectations were made by Apple themselves.
I have a frequent specific problem where dictation (so not really “Siri,” but same speech recognition) substitutes “will” for “we’ll,” no matter how carefully I enunciate the long “e” sound. I seem to run into this a lot when I message people with phrases like “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
This and other occasional issues are frustrating, though, mainly because we’re at the point where we expect these things to work pretty well. Something of an uncanny valley between useless and perfect, I suppose.
The thing is, the people declaring Google Assistant so much superior are liars. The same liars that have been saying that Android is better for years even though iOS was ahead in pretty much aspect, every times. It took them about 7 years do get a comparable Android experience (only just now they have something decent with the Pixel).
The actual use case of extremely precise closed web-search on specific data-points is very narrow. I mean who the fuck goes on to search something that’s not open-ended and require more exploration, what are you trying to accomplish with your singular data-point (I know the age of the president, youyou, I’m so happy).
Another thing is that in most cases it is actually more convenient to just go ahead and do it yourself, especially for search where getting the results back in the form of a dictation is very painful.
I’m sure Siri gets 10 times the use of Google Assistant, but peoples like to bash on Apple nowadays, because they are so big and successful. Back in the days it was because they were small and too expensive and too confidential, so I guess they can’t win anyway. Sales give another story though…
My biggest problem with “Siri” is that she’s not a single presence with a set level of functionality. Her capabilities vary from phone to laptop to watch. It drives me nuts every time I try to “set a timer for 15 minutes” from my mac and she can’t do it because there’s no “timer app” on the mac.
Use Jony0’s advice. If you’ve set up your family relationships in contacts, or told them to Siri directly, they’re the best way to communicate them to her. “Call my wife”, “Tell my Son I’m on my way”, “Tell my wife where I am” all work great.
Also, unlike Jim, I find Siri is great for appointments and reminders. How many of you will suddenly think of a good idea or remember something you need to do while falling asleep in bed? Happens to me all the time, then I forget what it was when I wake up. Now I just say out loud “Hey Siri….remind me when I wake up…” and my charging iPhone bedside handles it without me having to move or even fully wake. I LOVE that feature.
Siri woks just fine for the tasks it was created to do.
Siri bashing is a technique that journalists use when they want to be be lazy.
The only problem I have with Siri is voice activation in a slightly noisy environment.
scheduling appointments and setting reminders works for me more often than not – so i use it occasionally. asking for an address to navigate to has never worked for me in at least 50 tries. but i agree, “set a timer for 2 minutes” is the one command that works every time and the one i use regularly. oh, and “how’s the weather today” or “will it rain” works equally well, it’s just that ios’ weather app doesn’t.
Possibly because many would shorten that phrase to “Will be there in….” why not try “We will be…..”?
I lol’d at “Set timer for 5 minutes” because I’ve just used that about twenty times to help my kids who didn’t want thier games to timeout while they had a quick dip in the pool (so I kept their users active). I really wish I could have set a recurring timer…
My only significant problem with Siri is that she randomizes the feedback she gives you to seem more natural. Unfortunately, several of those feedback mechanisms don’t include the request.
Example:
“Hey Siri, set an alarm for 5:00am.”
Could lead to:
“Your alarm is set for 5:00am. Don’t worry, I won’t forget.”
or:
“It’s on.”
The latter being, of course, completely useless.
I use Siri for:
I dunno what everyone else is needing Siri for; if it’s something I need to look at on my phone, I just… use my phone. I use Siri primarily for things that don’t actually require screen interactions (pulling up driving directions obviously requires some screen time, but I could still do that with my phone face-down and get home via spoken directions and/or my Watch notifications).
I Use Siri fine for directions, sending messages to people, and several other things. I could probably use it more, but I usually use it in the car, and sometimes my little car is just too noisy for it to pick up very well. That isn’t really Siri’s fault.
If I had one complaint, it would be my iPad and iPhone both answering to Hey Siri when I have them nearby. I’d like to direct it to one or the other a little more. Although, it is kind of funny to hear a muffled Siri answering me from the pocket in the back of the car seat every now and then. 🙂
My big problem with Siri is on the voice recognition end. If I use it to dictate anything other than a short text message or reminder description it’ll inevitably screw up at least one word. My other big problem, and this has been a bug since at least iOS 9 (across multiple iPhones that I’ve owned), is that I’ll ask Siri to call someone and it looks like it’s making the call but the phone hangs and the call is never placed. Then I have to grab it and find the contact myself.
Interestingly enough I have better voice dictation results when I do it through the Apple Watch instead of invoking Siri on the iPhone. Maybe because I hold the watch closer to my mouth when using Siri than when I use Siri on the phone?
Apple should provide willing users with some mechanism of reporting when Siri gets a word wrong allowing the user to kick the audio and translation back to Apple in the same way you can send them a voicemail message that it didn’t translate to text correctly.
That happens to me too. I’ve trained myself to just say “we will” to avoid that.