(To my HomePod): “Hey Siri, how long does salmonella survive on surfaces?”
“I found some web results. I can show them to you if you ask again from your iPhone”
I still find it weird and inconvenient talking to a computer, so I’m not a fan of voice assistants. However, voice control can be very useful when riding a motorbike, for obvious reasons.
But most of the time when I tried it, I end up dialing a wrong contact (instead of e.g. navigating to a location) and panicking how to quickly cancel the call. There’s no confirmation before dialing. I don’t understand how can ppl use this, it’s unreliable af.
#Apple#HomeKit using #Siri sounds great, just walk around your house saying “Siri, turn on the lights" or “Siri, lower the thermostat.”
What they don't tell you is that, invariably, one device is confused, or you haven't restarted it today, or it’s jumped on the wrong network, or it can't carry out an instruction you've given it successfully a hundred times before because it's always trying to apply some fuzzy logic AI bullshit; and that will be the device that takes command and tries to process your SIri request, unsuccessfully.
I’ve started encountering the weirdest CarPlay bug. The other day I could hear voice directions from Apple Maps, but I couldn’t get the Apple Music or podcast apps to play audio.
Today during my drive, everything was fine until 10 minutes in when I used CarPlay Siri to set a reminder. After that I was back to no audio in music or podcasts.
You know, even ignoring the ethics of #AI for a moment... I truly don't understand the consumer-facing hype.
After, what, a decade of #Siri and Google Assistant and, and even now with #OpenAI and #ChatGPT, at best, you get some trivia answers, maybe an image, and #Clippy writing an email for you.
How is this interesting? How is this "The Next Big Thing"?
Having swapped our first-gen Echo for a current HomePod, it’s startling to discover how useless Siri is. With the Echo, you could ask it anything and get an answer. With the HomePod, #Siri will mostly offer to send web links to your iPhone. (Which defeats the object of, say, getting an answer to something you’re chatting about at dinner without being distracted by phones.)
My sister sent me a text message with a screenshot of my app (she drew the image) while I happened to be driving. Siri (through CarPlay) was able to generate an accurate description of the image sent and speak it to me. Siri said “an illustration of a frog in a body of water with text above and below it“.